Building A DIY NAS On A Budget - TrueNAS Scale 

After buliding several NASs and home servers in my time, here's a few additional points to consider. 1. Reduce power draw as much as possible, especially if you're planning to leave it on 24/7. Get a low power motherboard/CPU, preferably a mobile chip if you can. 38w power at idle is low for a desktop but pretty high for a NAS or laptop. With the current energy prices in the UK right now 38W 24/7 would cost me £113 to run a 38W NAS for a whole year. With a mobile chip, especially a modern ones, you could easily half and in my case 1/4 this. The alternative is to tweak TrueNAS to use Wake on LAN. You'll need to make sure your motherboard/NIC has that capability. That way it's shut down until you needs it. Get bigger, fewer drives. Again for power usage reasons. The less hardware used, the less power it takes up. Go for 5400rpm drive if performance isn't an issue as they use less power too. Fewer sticks of RAM. One 16GB stick is better than 2x8GB if power reduction is the aim. 2. It's actually harder than you think to source the perfect case for a home built NAS. Home built NASs are nearly always too big. You've got two choices. Get a hulking 10y old+ old tower for pennies or spend several hundreds on a dedicated NAS case. Cheap cases suitable for NASs are practically non-existant. 3. A homebuilt NAS is WAAAYYY easier to fix than a bought NAS if it goes wrong. Busted Synology or QNAP and you're looking at weeks to get it fixed/replaced and there's the chance, if it's and older model they don't have the parts any more. Personal experience of having several TB of data held hostage by a NAS company because their repair/replace policy was so inadequate/expensive. Use bog standard parts/disks and things can usually be put back together quckly and with less chance of a part literally not being avaliable anymore. 4. Decide early if what you want is just disk storage or something more flexible. It might just easier to just set a machine as a general purpose server. If the hardware available to you can cope with being used as a render station or for video format conversion or something, then why limit it to just serving files? 5. Avoid 'Green' drives. Get NAS specific ones if you can. I've never had much longevity with 'Green' drives. These types are not meant to be run 24/7 and wear out/fail a lot faster than drives designed for NASs. 'Black' drives or those for meant for desktops are generally okay but they're the same price as NAS drives and don't have the cache/power features of NAS drives. Of course any drive will do on a budget, but if you have the option, always pick a NAS drive first (or try to at least avoid the green ones).

It's completely fair to exclude the cost of storage when comparing a DIY NAS to an off-the-shelf one. The off-the-shelf models don't come with drives, after all.

As someone who bought a "off the shelf NAS", having it fail HURTS. You can restore the data, but you have to use the exact same hardware. Some newer products allow for drive pools to be transfered to other systems, but TrueNAS doesn't seem to care about the hardware, and you seem to be able to import your data forward, no matter how old your setup was.

I built a NAS back in 2014 - it had an i3 4170 CPU, 16GB RAM and a HighPoint DataCentre 7280 PCIe HBAwith 8 MiniSAS ports (max 32 SATA drives) - I loaded it up with 24 x 1.5 TB 2.5" Seagate hard drives and the whole thing under load used about 150W (These days of course I'd just use a couple of 3.5" 12-18TB drives instead) - performance was outstanding for the time, saturating a full gigabit NIC easily and doing local transfers between the drives around 160-180 MB/s. Thanks for the video and the memories!

the big problem with using old hardware for this purpose is power consumption. older cpu architectures consume a lot more energy to do something trivial. but I'm a fan of the idea of repurposing old hardware instead of discarding and buying new

The main advantage of separating the hardware from the OS is you don’t need to worry about the manufacturer losing interest in providing patches and updates for a ready made version (that uses their own proprietary software) A classic is a couple of WD my-cloud models I had with perfectly good drives but WD decided to drop support. Ubuntu Server setup with a Samba config also makes a good NAS (although not as feature rich as true nas)

I love how you sourced old hardware to do this. Kudos for helping to reduce eWaste!

The benefit of this over RAID is that RAID controllers can be proprietary and the encoding change not only between board versions, also firmware versions - which can make it a big problem getting access to the data. With iSCSI you would want some UPS protection. iSCSI risks data corruption on abrupt power loss.

Honestly once explained it's fairly intuitive. Thank you for breaking it down so nicely for us newbies! Can't wait to play with the full version

I set up a NAS using this same case. It is big, but it holds a lot of hard drives. I removed the DVD drive and filled every bay with hard drives. I use an SSD as the boot drive. I use a motherboard with plenty of SSD connectors, running with an old Intel Xeon processor. I decided to use OpenMediaVault as the OS, as I found it easy to set up and it works well for using the NAS as storage and a media server. And for anyone wondering about backups, this is my second NAS. My first one is an actual NAS unit, and both contain the same data.

I have two of that exact case. They're great for a generic file server. Good air flow, lots of 3.5 inch drive bays. Overall, a good little box you can stick in a corner.

Congrats on your new baby!! I totally enjoy seeing what you can put tougher and use on a budget. Well Done :)

Just built a NAS with redundancy a few weeks ago out of some old PC parts! Super awesome and fun project, Feels nice to have a NAS now also. FreeNAS is pretty awesome and cool to play around with, especially if you are studying IT, I'd recommend a project like this 🔥

I really appreciate the real world performance tests, a lot of similar videos leave that out!

This video popped up in my suggested list and I'm so glad it did. I'm building a NAS out of unused computer gear I already own plus some new drives. The idea of adding a high-speed network card for a dedicated connection to an editing machine is golden. I'm borrowing that for sure. Cheers! 👍

Really nice to see this video, as I recently started a similar build with TrueNAS SCALE. Of course, I managed to pull it off with almost no cost by using stuff that I've scrounged over the years. I also like the fact that you're pointing out other RU-vid videos, like the one Craft Computing did on iSCSI.

Inspired. Just wrapped up building a TrueNAS system using an Intel Core i5-3570S 3.10GHz in an old ASUS MOBO, 16GB DD3, a new 128GB SSD for the OS, a single 6TB HDD, and twin Seagate 3TB drives in RAID. I am new to TrueNAS, but have had commercial NAS units for a decade. I had a LOT of old data to transfer. I am keeping anything I cannot replace (like home movies and photos) in RAID, and anything I can download again in the 6TB single drive. I am running a GB network, with CAT6 cable and 10/100/1000 Ethernet connections at all points. It runs zippy and has no problem streaming 4K video to multiple smart TV's / PCs. I have four users in my house, and we can all draw off the NAS at once no problem. Great use of a bunch of old stuff. Besides the 128GB SSD, I didn't buy anything else new.

This is the video I've been waiting for, I love that u used truenas scale, thanks man this video helped a lot

Great video and thanks for including power consumption. It depends on where you live of course but unfortunately here in the UK using old hardware like this has become quite expensive. A year of running this on idle would cost about 150 USD in the UK.

Bro I love your channel, your content just keeps on getting better and better. Good Luck!

There was an old video called "Turn an old laptop into a NAS - Synology". It actually utilized sinology's OS. I did this and utilized the usb 3.0's with multi drive docks. Gives me lots of storage, expandability and portability. Plus being a laptop really low power consumption.

Nice video. They have recently come out with some NAS chassis so that people can build their own NAS (with a mini-ITX and SFX power supply). They are really compact.

Nice details on the iSCSI setup, very informative, thanks.

I have that same antek case from a pc build I did 2011, I found this video because I’m looking to build a NAS as well. Will definitely use this case. Cool video, greatly appreciate it.

This can't be real... The video recommendation came the exact day i needed. Thank you!

Me gusto el video, muy claro y detallado en cuanto al hardware, yo tenia pensado usar un motherboard con 2 puertos sata y comprar un adaptador igual PCIEx1 a 4 sata pero termine comprando comprando una mother con 4 puertos sata. No habia pensado el puerto ethernet, asi que ahora voy a evaluar ese punto. Excelente!!!!! Muchas gracias!

Just found your channel tonight. Glad to see more content like this on RU-vid. Subbing right off the batt. I need to build a new NAS because my old one is failing or failed.

I knew to buy used, but you reminded me how used you can get :) This was the video i needed to complete my build Thanks!!!

It would be cool to see the iSCSI for videos on a SSD in the server, with your 2.5Gbps network. The speeds you were getting look to be limited by the speed of the HDDs. I see just a little lower than that over SMB with a 1Gbps network. Cool video, and nice find on the case! I've been looking for something local, but so far have not.

Hi man just wanted to let you know I just found your channel and I'm a huge fan just a few videos in. Your content is extremely interesting and helpful. Your voice and articulation make your videos some of the most easily digestible and pleasant watches of any tech youtuber. Quickest sub of my life. Keep up the great work and P.S. Good luck with the kid!

Wow. thanks for this video. It answered two questions concerned me so long. One is how connect directly between pc and nas without router and the second is how to use iscis controller!

I have that same antec 300 case. Still running my primary pc on it! Solid old workhorse.

I have done similar. Have an i5 3470 machine, 16gb ram, similar sata card etc and 7 drives. Works great and pulls around 36w idle. Far far cheaper than dedicated. I opted Win 10 Pro, have a linux VM on it with pi-hole and also Jellyfin. So allows it to run various roles :) Yep, might pull more than a dedicated at idle but 36w not going to break the bank :)

This is actually a good case, I bought the newer Antec p10c case thinking that it can accommodate 6 drives and a dvd drive, but found out that the psu cable expect drives to align in close proximity. The p10c case put drive racks in unconventional fashion behind the board and next to the psu, making it impossible to connect them even with two sata power cables. The only solution is to connect all the drives first than stash them somewhere inside the chassis without the mounting/racks.

Hey great DIY Im now been researching nas and came across this video, makes sense! I have several of these parts already an already built pc thats been sitting on the bench old but very viable for an inexpensive nas.. Thanks for opening my eyes!!

thank you i needed a nas but didn't know i have a old core 2 duo an 2 2 terabyte hard drives this helped a lot thank you and keep up the good work

Excellent video, specially the power consumption. I assembled an offsite backup server with an old i5, and it consumes a LOT of energy, even idle. I would very much like for the system storage to be a mirror (even USB, maybe internal?!). Congrats.

Love the concept of this video, great selection of budget parts make for a really interesting build. I just really wish every budget server build video didn't immediate devolve into "Thanks to sponsor for sending all the hard drives free of charge." Great deal for the channel, but really doesn't help anyone else.

3:23 I totally love these two PCIe x1 expansion card, they are so much useful

The most detailed guide for building DIY NAS yet i could find

Great video man, also understood the usage of the mobo for the video although a slightly better one would have helped a lot even though you mention it in the video a board with 4/6 sata 3 ports would have been very useful.

I have to look at a budget NAS for my work storage. I did see a video on a Pi recently but I feel that a ‘proper’ mobo might serve me better. Also, sticking 16GB of RAM in it should improve things considerably. Thank you.

Great video, very captivating storytelling!

THANK YOU MY BROTHER FROM ANOTHER COUNTRY AND ANOTHER FAMILY!!!

Excellent video. I guess that you can improve the iSCSI performance if you disable flow control and increase the MTU size.

This is very efficient even though it's not that good of a server, but you still got a working server!

I've been running TrueNAS Core on a 1U SuperMicro box for over a year, booting the OS off a USB stick. No issues at all. It runs 24/7 as my backup repository.

Congrats on the new baby!

Great video - the motherboard is your most limiting factor here, but I completely get why you’re using it. Something more modern, capable of handling more RAM and providing higher bandwidth PCI-E would be huge helps. A board that supports NVMe would be really nice in this situation. Another thing to consider, if you’re going to use this case long term, is using the 5.25” bays. There are manufacturers out there that have kits to allow use of up to 4x 2.5” drives in a 5.25” bay. Unless you plan on using the optical drive, it looks like you could put up to 12x 2.5” drives in there. Using SSDs would really be a nice option for your video editing use case and could help reduce some of the noise/heat generated by mechanical drives.

Personally I'd go with truenas core over scale due to its maturity, but that preference aside this is a nice practical home build.

The Antec 300 is such a solid little case. I’m putting my old 300 back together to migrate my NAS off its current Skylake-SP platform, and it’s a nice no-frills chassis. Relatively compact, solidly built, with a decent capacity of both fans and drives.

The algorithm sent this my way, I guess past searches of NAS hardware. Glad it did. I have a more powerful tower than you featured here sitting idle that I was considering selling. So the only thing I would need to buy to test this solution would be a SATA card if I needed more ports than on the mobo. Worse case, I lose

Wow your channel is really growing. Good job 👍. Kinda curious how many times has this motherboard, or any of the others, been put into and removed from builds for videos. I think I've only seen three mother boards on this channel 🤔. Any way, potential ideas... Custom home surveillance system, DVD/CD ripper/burner system with possible multiple bays, weather station reporting to a smart mirror, smart home hub/controller. Um you've already done a nas, steam library, Plex server, did you do pi hole? Custom router, although that takes a bit more research to prep for. Well there are some things I can think of. As always keep up the great work and don't stress yourself.

Great work! How are you liking TrueNAS SCALE? :) We've been watching the growth of your channel and we're very impressed, can't wait to see you grow further!

I did a similar build back in 2017 using FreeNas. At that time Tiger was hawking a low end HP server with a 4 core 3.2Ghz i3 and 4GB of ram, the MB had 6ea sat ports and a 250w power supply and is a mini tower, I installed 16GB additional ram, ZFS needs RAM. I used 2ea 16GB usb thumb drives for a mirrored boot disk and bought 6ea 3GB WD drives into it and connecting everything. I installed Freenas onto the thumb drives and set up the drives with ZFS. It's been running for over 5 years and it has been trouble free over that time. I'm not using this for anything other than storage so I went with 5400 drives because they are more reliable. I measured the input power and is under 100w so although the power supply seems small it's worked fine, the exhaust air is only warm so it's pretty efficient. The only time the server is ever down is if we have a power outage, All I have to do is turn the machine fack on and it comes back fine. I check the server log every month or two to make sure all is well. It's like the Eveready bunny - it just keeps running and running

Haha! I also have that same case! I stripped it and installed some more modern components in it.

Nice find on the Antec case. Still a great base design from the old 900 from 20 years ago 2 issues here are the mainboard and sata controller. Would have been better to get an older HBA for the same (or less) money - HBA's are very well covered and discussed in the TrueNAS community forums - and then shopped a mainboard to suite rather than accepting multiple bottlenecks

I'd advise getting a motherboard with ECC memory support since ZFS on Truenas is memory dependent for the checksuming aka bit rot protection of data. More than 8GB of ram would be good too since Truenas uses ram for a read and write cache.

Good on you for giving it a go. Enjoyed the video. Thank you

Very well put together video!

4:25 _USB sticks are no longer recommended.._ Good to know.

Wait! HDDs take 4 screws? I thought it was illegal to use more than the 2 facing you. Also, I learned some stuff as always. Thanks for making this.

Congrats on the baby man!

I like it! I chose Unraid for my build because I couldn't afford all the disks I needed up front and would need to add them to the pool one at a time, and I'm quite happy. I'm quite impressed at the low wattage your machine uses, mine was built to replace a couple of desktops so it as a i9 in it haha.

So it cost $600+ dollars total, its always the drives the cost the money. For a extra $150, you could of got a 4 bay synology NAS which is faster and smaller, just my 2 cents.

Sounds like a perfect use case for my old PC.

Nice video. It’s nice to see such beginner friendly videos.

Having 2 extra SATA ports... NASA refers to "room to grow" as "Baby Fat". You made me giggle and had to share! Thanks for the awesome content!

This makes for a good "test Nas" to give you some more time to start building out something bigger.

On the network side, you could create a network bridge in TrueNAS. That essentially acts like a software switch, meaning that both interfaces will have the same IP address. Then your editing PC can access the NAS through the 2.5G port, but also still be able to access the rest of the network as the NAS will forward it. Then you don't have two IP addresses to worry about!

One word sets the standard for NAS power: "Plex". For multiple-4K hardware-accelerated video transcoding, you are going to want an Nvidia GPU.

Thanks for the help ❤

Awesome Build bro. Your heat and air circulation also better than branded NAS.

Nice video! I did about the same thing with a 12-drive 4U rack mounted case, and run it through ProxMox. I can virtualize my NAS along with a lot of other services and then have a backup configuration to a completely separate machine in case my hardware fails. Not just a drive. Drives are surprisingly resiliant, it's the motherboard and RAM I'm always wary of. But, the best NAS is one that can save data when you need it, the best backup is the data you can access after your NAS fails. So no matter what you do for storage, ALWAYS have a backup, and RAID is NOT a backup!!!! Cheers!

Used to run a FreeNAS server back in the day, was OK, was a frankenstein like yours, taught me a bunch but for the reliability \ support of Docker etc I ended up going Synology.

Thanks for nice explanation.

Lovely cable management.

The mint condition Antec 300 in my closet is trying to tell me something! Great video thank you! I searched diy budget NAS

Omg finally RU-vid recommended to me some golden quality channel. I'm glad to meet you sir :D

lesgoo another vid from Hardware!!

Hey nice video, thanks for making it to a nas, try to use a sata dom for (os) storage reliability. All the things you mentioned are quite accurate, keep up the videos. :)

It is satisfying seeing the green PCB.

years ago I used to think having a hard drive with a few hundred MB was more then enough data storage capacity, as I don't store photos, music or video. But I looked up my external hard drive where I store mostly documents, pdf's webpages from various tech and business related topics. It's 180 GB and growing. If you backing up data locally I recommend you have at least 2 storage devices (in case of failure), I have seen more then my share of failed drives (including NAS, USB external drives and other storage media). Also research different backup/restore software (one that you can schedule to do backups on a regular basis. In addition to backing up data, I recommend cloning the hard drive on your computer (so if it fails, you do a restore of the entire operating system, programs, configurations, data).

Dude love the intro graphic and great build

very cool show your content I'm from Brazil and I've already become your follower, thanks for the content 🤜🤛

LOL, I have this same case from a build I did back in 2009 (i5 4590) and was thinking about turning it into a NAS. Its been sitting in the garage for a while and I don't want to toss it. Thanks for the info!

Great upload!

That Antec 300 case was my first back in 2009(ish).

That looks sweet to me! Been thinking of setting up my own NAS lately. i already old hardware laying around. i just need to get another case and power supply. also drives of course lol

FreeNAS (before it became TrueNAS) used to recommend just using a USB Drive to install the OS. Over succeeding iterations, they rescinded that and now recommend using a hard drive or SSD. Unaware of this change, my setup formerly used 2x Samsung Fit USB drives (mirrored) for boot and both failed! I swapped it with a Sandisk Ultra Fit and it also failed after a couple of months. I now use a spare WD Red to run TrueNAS.

I built my own nas/server and configured it all from scratch using Ubuntu LTS. With 3 desktop computers at my place, it definitely runs the show around here. Saves me hours of time regularly. It has starter images of all three desktops and has a lan cache which shaves off a ton of time when something goes wrong with one. Also file and media server duties, home assistant, ad block for the network, and I can boot and install windows and various Linux flavors over the network. ZFS on Linux and Snapshots shine to. It’s a fair bit of work in the terminal but you’ll save more time in the long run than what you put into it.

Such budget, cool!

Nice cable management 😎

This is also a great idea if you need to also use the server for something else. I'm running plex, qbittorrent, adguard home and a full web server on mine. I've had a real NAS before, but it seemed like wasted space for just storage, si I've converted my old PC into one.

I built a NAS with a Raspberry Pi, a 1TB HDD microcenter was giving away for free, and a enclosure I got for cheap…reminded me of this project here, NASs are very useful, they punch high above their perceived weight

You have some interesting ideas for projects, that I would probably would not be able to come up with. Also it is nice now that it is possible to find some decent deals on computer parts. Like for example, I found a GTX 1060 6gb for only 150€. I will just use this graphics card as an upgrade to my current pc that I got from the dumpster, which is pretty powerful already, but it is the gt 530 that is holding me back from having a smooth gaming experience. Nice videos :). Congrats for 30k...

I have that case, have had it for fifteen years, and it is a great case. It needs a new motherboard, processor, and RAM, but it's still a great case :-)

no way bro! i actually needed this video cuz i had a useless laptop that has a broken screen now i can finally make my own NAS

Back in the Freenas 9 days running off a USB drive was recommended as they ran most of the OS in ram and very little was written to the drive. Now from Freenas10 up to Truenas13 it uses a lot more writes with the usb so it will chew through that USB in a few months. Even with your redundancy set up there will still die and you WILL be replacing drives on the regular

the sequel to the budget nas video