First Time building my own NAS 

Those cheap SATA controllers can get really hot. I have a few lying around that produce read errors when overheated and ZFS wrongly assumes the problem is with the disks and kicks them out of the array. An easy solution is to use thermal adhesive to glue a heatsink on them. With disks this big, I would have gone with RAIDZ2 instead of RAIDZ. Rebuilds can take a long time and put allot of stress on disks, there's a good chance another disk fails during the rebuild. And on a last note: Label your drive trays with the serial numbers. You'll thank yourself later...

Can't never over appreciate such Thermal Kitty episodes.

For the PCIe SATA card, if you won't be switching to an HBA as others have suggested, look up which controller it's running, and make sure it's all native ports and not SATA multipliers. Those (and overheating) are the main sources of issues on them.

I am a simple man. I enjoy tech content, I enjoy cats.

Fun video, man. It's cool to see a total pro like yourself trying something new and making a "beginner builds NAS" video.

As others have noted: you should switch out the sata controller to a proper LSI HBA in IT mode. However, if you plan on using all eight bays in the future, you will have to mind the limited space between the pcie slot and drive bay nr 3 from the top. Also, this case run very hot when fully populated with drives. There are 3D print stl files available to direct the side fan airflow over the discs helps a ton! If it isn't allready obvious, I am running the same case in my NAS (24/7) for the last 6 years with 11 drives. The hardest part is cable management. Hit me up if you need pointers, or recommendations on parts

I am also searching for a replacement of my old WD NAS so it was very nice to see you do this build. That Silverstone case was perfect for looks cooling and function. Now I need one of those too. Thanks for the great content, kitty included. DAS All

Be careful of those consumer grade sata cards. which i understand that you got the sata card for free, Truenas doesnt like them too much. Youre milage may vary, but i lost a pool by using these type of sata cards. Might be wiser to look at enterprise grade HBA. A Used HBA LSI-9300 doesnt cost too much and if youre using Harddrive, LSI-9200-8i.

The hard drives are the components under most heat pressure there, so I'd change the airflow inside the case to have intake through the drives and out take in the back.

Those Asrock Rack boards are fantastic for home servers - I ended up getting the C246 WSI which has an i3 9100T 25W part, which supports EEC (although UDIMM, which are more of a pain to get hold of) and luckily had 8 SATA sports (4 physical, 4 via OcuLink). I went with a 2U short depth rack mount case to go into my network cabinet, and so I removed the required 12V pins from the 24 PIN ATX, reterminated them into a 4pin molex connector and only ran those, which saved a heap of space for the 24 pin cable and the included adapter.

"25 TB of data, that's not too much" Spoken like a true datahoarder :)

Thanks for highlighting that Silverstone case, I'm planning my own NAS build and was struggling to find a decent case but this checks all the boxes.

Synology stuff is nice, I've been using one of their routers I picked up cheap and it's been the most stable trouble free thing I've ever owned. For DIY NAS there's some older LSI cards that are getting CHEAP these days that do 6GB SAS and 12GB SAS and can do SATA as well if you want to roll with new cheap drives. I picked one up that'll do 4 drives on it's single port and has 2x100GB of eMLC flash onboard for cache. It's almost 10 years old, costs 1/100th of it's original price, and Windows picked it up immediately and the BIOS setup shows 100% health on the flash cache. Too cool! I might pickup a card with more ports that's lacking the eMLC cache since I don't really need that it just looked fun to play with.

4:45 That's a big chonky cat! (beautiful)

Nice video. I'd have made a few different choices but that's the beauty of home building. Everyone can build to their own specs. Note on your performance test: When you wrote 16GB and were surprised about the speed of the HDDs, your HDDs were actually idle. All 16GB went strait to memory cache. TrueNAS will use all remaining memory to cache data before writing to disk. So the true performance of your HDDs will not be apparent until you exceed the memory of your NAS.

The hot Swap part depends on how you configure the BIOS/UEFI. I had to get a cracked one for my N54L to get HotSwap because the standard one was locked down and hid that option from me.

Just a note, you want to wire a 5 bay to use 5 even if the goal is to have 4 - replacing drive is correctly done without removing the old one first. That said soemtimes you do not have the option.

I've mostly moved to mini itx over the years and 12vo boards would be a godsend for working in those smaller cases. But you have to put a lot of faith in board manufacturers not to cheap out.

Great video and love your cat being in the frame. Every PC channel should have a resident / co-presenting cat!

I have two of these cases with 8 drives in each. One is a simple JBOD connected to the other. I created cardboard inserts to make sure that the 2 side fans are forced to cool the HDD, as they can get quite hot in this case without an air guide.

Only having it on occasionally, you'll want to make sure it's able to complete data scrubbing cycles ~once a month, especially with drives that size. Great vidya!

Happy to see some server-content, always fun for some reason. DS380 has a problem with high temp on the hdd. So i would recommend that you create/add/print a fan shroud that will force the intake fans to blow through the hdd cage, otherwise the air will just blow past them without providing any cooling. There are plenty of designs and guides if you google.

the rackmount cases from Sliger have been making a home NAS very tempting for a while

That was me a few years back. A few learning, I'd like to share: HBAs work better. TureNAS does not allow for adding more disks to a pool (at least I have not figured it out), so max-out your pool size when creating it.

Thanks for putting your videos out there for us. Some say its not “perfect”, I dont care. Still enjoyable to watch. Like explainations you give.

For 4-5 HDD You could use a Jonsbo NAS cases that are much more compact and nicer

I built myself a NAS a few weeks ago after thinking about it and putting it off for a couple of years and it is wonderful, I really wish I had done it sooner!

Nice video, a nice addition would be to add a used parts list and price inidications.

WOW that looked really simple to setup... GOOD JOB!!! And the fact that you get about 250-300MB/s (you said GB/s btw lol) that's faster than what I get copying files from my HDD to my Gen4x4 nvme SSD lol - AWESOME WORK!

For those simple requirements (e.g. no VMs, Dockers, iScsi, etc. ), I would take out-of-the-box solution any day of the week. It is cheaper, easier to support down the line, way more power efficient, same reliability and more compact....

I have this case for my nas. I found that under a lot of load the fan setup isnt great and drives got quite warm. My solution was to take two old fan frames and use them as ducts on both intakes and with some foam on the back of the fans they seal up against the drive bays much better. If i was going to do it now I'm sure a 3d printer and some planning could get a nicer solution, but mine has been running for 10 years or so now without any problems.

A friend and I have recently been working on VERY similar NAS projects, using Asrock Rack's X570D4I-2T, an AM4 equivalent to what you bought, paired with the Ryzen 5 Pro 5650GE 6-core 35W part. It also has two OCuLink 4i ports, so can run 8 drives without add-in cards

3:29 Hope to see more SilverStone brand placement, they were a bit shy on advertisements but they make good products!

I rebuilt my little 2 system homelab with a completely overkill Epyc system for the PCIE slots and BMC as well (full ATX board in a Fractal Define R5 though). So nice having a relatively modern board with recent IPMI that I don't need an old version of Java to access. As others have mentioned the SATA card might be a problem, but iirc occulink > sata cables are pretty inexpensive if you do run into problems or of course you could just grab an LSI HBA flashed to IT mode off ebay. Even with cables they can be had pretty cheap. That transfer speed was actually pretty slow, if you were going from > to 10G even without tweaking anything you should be seeing higher speeds unless the system you were transferring from was reading from a couple spinning disks.

Very cool case!

The IPMI port is usually bridged to the 10G ports, so you can still access the remote management portal.

Roman! Scale is so much more than a NAS. It is really a basic hypervisor with built in apps and docker capabilities run by kubernetes. Increase your RAM to that 64 gigs and run a Jellyfin sever or PI hole or even a VPN sever/client. I've been learning it for the past year or so and I'm just a normal Gamer. It has been really awesome learning it and the Debian Linux behind it. Plus there is an amazingly supportive community behind it as well as IX systems having a basic open source policy for development of the apps and containers on it.

7:06 cat tax ❤

Welcome to the NAS world, Roman!. The 10G ethernet ports are the best selling point of this board. However, Some would just be happy with 2.5G ethernet. In my case, I have a X4 Card housing 4 port 2.5G . I am running Xpengnology DSM 7.1 on a 12core/24thread Xeon with 64GB RAM under ProxMos. If you use DSM 7, you can automatically backup main NAS to second NAS without hassle. That is the benefit plus all the other apps you can house on it including Surveillance Station!.

13:36 - "and with a speed of 250 - 300 gigabyte"😵‍💫

Interesting video. 👍 Not saure if you mention this is in the video but I’d like to know how much power the system consumes on idle and under working load. Thanks!

Came for the build, stayed for the cat ❤

Hey man really nice build, do you know what power consumption is load and idle?

You should always have your operating system on a ZFS mirror. The best way to do this is with two good USB 3 drives. FreeNAS does very little; it doesn't need an SSD, let alone a fast one, to work; all the work is done on the storage drives. If you don't feel comfortable using USB drives, at least put in a second cheap SSD. A common way commercial solutions do it when they don't want the OS outside is to use internal USB ports or SATA DOM sticks (which are basically USB drives over SATA).

My nas setup is a raspberry pi 400 running OMV with two 500GB SSDs, one being a backup of the other. Has been running with no hiccups for like 500 days. Consumes a miniscule amount of power, i measured it but cant recall exactly.

I was also looking into building my own NAS myself but my old motherboard and cpu is dead so gotta look it some time later

You'll want to replace that SATA card with a proper HBA in IT mode for long term reliability as others have stated. You also might want to address the cooling issues this case has as others have suggested so you're not cooking your hard drives causing premature failure. Also with the wonky memory management in TrueNAS scale you'll only have 16GB of the 32GB available for ARC which may end up causing some performance issues if you are editing directly off the NAS so you may want to up that to 64GB. Memory is cheap so best to do it now while it's cost effective. There's a lot of good information and helpful/knowledgeable people available on the TrueNAS forums to point you in the right direction if you need help with anything. Nice job on the video, thanks for sharing your build.

I have that case. It’s an actual nightmare to deal with. I hope you are able to keep the general heat under control and you never have to do maintenance on the thing.

interesting, I have a very similar setup, same case, only I went with the EPYC3251D4I-2T I was wondering how to attach a fan to it, been running it fanless for a while Did you just run those zip ties under the heatsink and tighten it? Is it required to remove the heatsink to mount it that way? I was also thinking about trying 3d printed mounts I found in some forum, and trying to attach one of the low-profile noctua NH-L12S there, but worry that it'll not clear the drive cage then...

Get a ups!!! Also tip is mark date of install. For battery health life span . Also stagger offline back up to. Incase you get lock out due to ransom ware.

id recommend doing a deprecation of old videos where you put rlly old videos on your hdd nas and keep newer videos on ssd nas it so you can free up space on your ssd nas

One thing i've liked to do recently is, instead of SSD servers, is get HDDs and optane(which works with AMD when used by NAS OSes) I have a 160TB RAW 112TB usable HDD NAS, i have 4 of the 118GB Optane drives that i use as read and write cache, but i also have 2 of the 960GB 905P drives for special metadata(i plan to reverse this in the future, 4x960GB for read/write with 3x118GB for special metadata) The specialmetadata drives REALLY speed up the sense of snappiness.

Silverstone make good, but in some things very outdated cases. For such a build I would reccomend Jonsbo N2 (White!), which is more elegant, well thought-out and made from aluminium. If you need all 8 HDD - then Jonsbo N3.

For the PSU I would recommend using the redundant atx PSU "FSP Twins "

Nice, i had the same issue needed a backup of my backup i.e if you don’t have a backup of your backup, you don’t have a backup. Used the same case, i5 intel cpu a sata port extension to give 5 mor ports installed/migrated true nas nvme from old hardware and walla. Extra storage for backup nas…

great case been using one for along time now only downside is if u have an m.2 on the back of the motherboard there is no air flow ( i made a vent for mine and that solved that problem)

DerCat as tech support

I have a lot of data also. My objective is to economically back up my NAS. I backup my data directly to sata drives in a usb removable drive device where i can just plug in the drives easily. Each project can then be saved to disk, the disks stored off site. There in no additional hardware required complicated duplication of nas hardware waste of energy or having to fix more hardware. The external disks are the equivalent of tapes only more practical and longer lasting. That being said I didn't learn any new technology or get any new cool hardware to play with but what was the objective of the exercise backup data in a simple way because when the shit hits the fan I don't want to think just act. Cheers and thanks .

The motherboard was overkill, but it looks used, so I am not sure about the real cost :)

Is the fan in the rear intake or out? If it is in as well, you could just have ducted from there onto the CPU Heat Sink right?

Very cute kitten. Thanks!

TrueNAS Scale - excellent choice

Heh, just filled up my NAS too. Ordered a pair of used enterprise 4TB drives to hold me over until I build a new box. Currently running Unraid but want to move to ProxMox and TrueNAS. My old AMD FX-8150 will finally be retired for good once I build that box.

Are you going to move this to one of your factories after sync'ing all the data? If you could setup to sync nightly you'd have great backup. Worst case if you could bring it back once a week or two and perform a sync for changes and take it back you'd still be in good position if anything happened to your primary data.

Just what I'm looking for😊

you could add a SSD as a cache vdev on your pool and boost those transfer speeds. but as it is it's pretty good.

can you list the component parts in the description? it makes easier to find it and taking advantage from your experience. Thanks.

I have the same exact board, and I struggled to attach a fan for the cpu :) I also added a big fan with straps :) I am using Truenas with ZFS and disk encryption. Nice mb choice ! I am using only 3 disks in raid1 configuration. Yes 3 disks for raid one, no typo here !

Cool setup and vid, I would have liked to see you install truenas to a usb drive and then use the pcie drive as a cache or md cache tho

Nicely done Roman ... Linus ain't got nut'n on you!! One suggestion though ... More Cat Time, plz.

My only recommendations would be buying a proper HBA that is flashed to IT mode and buy more smaller capacity drives for the same capacity. Additionally make sure you have a few spare hard drives on hand for when your drives die. You buy smaller capacity dives so if a drive dies in your pool the time it takes to rebuild the data is less since the capacity is smaller. (Writing data at 250MB/s to five 4TB drives will be faster than writing to two 10TB drives in the event of a drive failure.) Wendell from Level1Techs has taught me a ton and I want to make sure I pass on what I’ve learned to others so they don’t make the same mistakes as me. (I bought four 12TB drives for fun and then I learned how long it took to build my RAID 5 array: 1000 minutes, if I went with more smaller drives it would have been done substantially faster.)

I built a simple NAS/server that’s still running today. I was trying NAS OS at first, but revert back to Linux build as I find those NAS OS annoying to manage. Basically containerized service acts like a separated machine whereas I have to hook them to ZeroTier separately ( and the limit of that network is 25…). My server is an old gen 4 core i7 build with a Chia-era case (remember those crypto craze on storage drive ??). The drives are 7 4TB drive in madden RAID6 configuration (2 parity drives).

Cat is HUGE!

I bet your sand/snow castles/forts as a kid were gigantic with a few extra moats and stuff like that ..... "gonna turn it on for only a few days a year and leave it alone" he says, puts a 512 gb ssd in as the boot drive... brother !

G'day Shiek, Makita & Roman, My storage is in a CoolerMaster N300 Case, it supports 1x 2.5 SSD, 8x 3.5" HDD & 2x ODD, OS is on 128GB SSD & using 3x 6TB & 5x 4TB HDDs as a back up for archiving old Home videos I have Edited for Family & Friends. I am just using W10 as the Mob had an Activated Key while hardware is i3-3220 + ASRock Z77Professional Fatal1ty (10 Sata Ports) + 8GB DDR3-1300 which were just bits & pieces leftover when doing upgrades over the years so thought I give them something to do rather than buying new parts or a NAS as they still work fine.

Taking a long time to use an ISO from the KVM console is an asrock rack thing with that Aspeed BMC

Curious, What was your choice on the SATA controller?

I like orange cats. I've had two. One was named 'Orange', the other one was 'Big Orange'.

How did you get your hands on that board? The only one i could find was over $500

do you have a link to the mobo and case ? also no kitty pats ?

For anyone raid 5ing, I got some advice from bad experience. When the HD Drives get towards end of life, they tend to give SMART errors all at similar times. When you get the first SMART error, replace the faulty drive immediately with a new one. Reconstruction of data takes a looooong time, more than a day (possibly a few). The anxiety of waiting to reconstruct your data makes it feel like it takes much longer. Then you should assume that all drives are lost and change the rest of the drives one by one. Doing that work can take more than a week (please use a UPS) and you should pray no catastrophic failures happen in that duration. The problem with modern HDD's is that the read/write speeds are too low for their capacity. The real demo might be a dry run of how much a reconstruction scenario would take before any real data is placed in this system when/if the push comes to the shove. Raid 10 reconstructs faster, because there are less XOR operations. You could withstand to more drive losses, losing just 14 TB. The real shocker for me in this video is that , I knew Germans hybridized wolfs with dogs but hybridizing a cat with a tiger was a blasphemy man!

Danke!

wanted to do a nas-ish thing here, got my eyes ona b550m-vc, has 8 SATA, 2x m2-all of these work at the same time- and usual PCIe expansion slots of b550, coupled with a cheap 2nd hand ryzen on an old office case, need it mostly for redundancy, and alls in a box

Seemed a little NAS-icissistic ;D

what a beautiful and lovely ginger cat

What is the model number of the ASRock mothoerboard? I can't find it in their website, thanks!

How did the fins on the embedded CPU get bent?

I didn't even know a 4 core Epyc CPU existed as they're usually monsters with the core counts, Seems very odd. Are they basically defective larger core CPUs that have just had the defective cores disabled and sold to the Embedded market?

Its great you went for the ipmi, you could script remote activation of the nas for backup then shutdown. Interesting you went for the Toshiba drives based on price a few months ago i update mine with the 18Tbs the price point has already moved on!

Cat. I came for tech, I stayed for cat.

yea w/e happen to the 12vo thing that was heavily pushed a couple of years back for the consumer market?

Really curious why you didn't use the oculink port for more sata ports? It would have been much more efficient to setup that way and cabling would have been much cleaner

More CAT! Hell yeah!

General wisdom with raids for a while is to keep 2 redundant drivers at least. Simply because the chances of a failure while rebuilding are pretty large. That being said an effective backup strategy is more important. If the nas is a total loss all relevant data should still be at two different physical locations ideally.

Id love to know how long it would take to rebuild one of those drives after a failure, I know that people prefer to use more smaller capacity drives because it has less time where you would be in a position that a drive failure may result in data loss

Just something to be aware of, nand loses its data over extended power outages. Even though you'll only be firing it up to use once every few months, probably good to boot it up once a month for a scrub to keep the nand cells fresh too.

No digital video outs? I've still got a CRT but some LCDs don't have VGA inputs anymore..

How do you set up all the drives to run in raid

I saw the title -> Instant like :)

For my NAS, I went to a much cheaper but still extremely effective route: Asrock X570D4U mainboard (still with IPMI but takes standard AM4 processors!) with Ryzen 5700X (no GPU needed due to IPMI), Broadcom SAS 9300-8i adapter in HBA mode (software RAID5), 8x serial ATA SSDs and finally a used Dell SFP28 25GBps capable network card.