Update: budget(200-600), the reason for the build is I found cheap 4tb drives for almost $10/Terabyte. So I want to use as much of them as I can

I am trying to build my final NAS build as a beginner.

I have a 6x4tb dell server, but it’s not enough.

I am currently trying to build the final boss of my nasses. 4x16tb with truenas with raid

I am unsure of what parts to buy as I am a complete beginner.

I found a case that can hold all 14 drives.

I need a motherboard, CPU, ram, PSU

I am on a budget, kind of.

What motherboard do you recommend? Pulled from a workstations with CPU and ram? A server board? Normal consumer with normal consumer CPU? Motherboard should have some pcie slots for 2 sata cards and one 2.5 GB card.

What CPU to run all these drives?

What ram and how much? 16? 32? Ecc, non ecc? Ddr4? Ddr3?

Power supply: 850w or more?

All parts should be able to support the 16 drives with headroom…

I would appreciate any help on this build, I want to build this as soon as possible.

Thanks

  • Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafeEnglish
    2·
    1 hour ago

    Others have mentioned power - you may want to do some math on drive cost vs power consumption. There’ll be a drive size point that is worth the cost because you’ll use fewer drives which consume less power than more drives.

    Having built a number of systems, I’m a LOT more conscious of power draw today for things that will run 24/7. Like my ancient NAS draws about 15 watts at idle with 5 drives (It will spin down drives).

    More drives will always mean more power, so maybe fewer but larger drives makes sense. You may pay more up front, but monthly power costs never go away.

    Also, I’ve built a 10 drive n NAS like this (because I had the drives and the case, mono and ram). It can produce a lot if heat while doing anything, and it was a significant power hog - like 200w when running. And it really didn’t idle very well (I’ve run it with UnRaid, TruNAS and Proxmox).

  • Flipper@feddit.orgEnglish
    86·
    6 hours ago

    You say you are on a budget. Yet you talk about 128 Gigs of ram.

    Maybe you should clarify what your budget is.

    • JGrffn@lemmy.worldEnglish
      31·
      5 hours ago

      I also went with 16 drives, but they were 20TB each. OP, if you don’t already have those 4tb drives, reconsider the amount and sizes. 4tb can’t be the price sweet spot for HDDs…

      • Humanius@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        4 hours ago

        It would seem that the sweet spot for HDDs is as high as 16 to 24 TB at the moment (at least here in the Netherlands).
        You can get a 24TB Seagate Barracuda for €479,- right now, which comes out to about €20 / TB.

        If you specifically want a NAS drive though the best “bang for the buck” appears to be a 28TB Seagate IronWolf Pro for €688,- coming out to about €25 / TB.

        Edit: Personally I run 8TB drives in my server, which are currently €209,- (€26 / TB) for a regular Seagate Barracuda, and €289 (€36 / TB) for a Seagate IronWolf Pro. Funnily enough 4TB drives would actually be better for NAS drives at €132,90 (€33 / TB) for a WD Red Plus.

      • Gork@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        5·
        5 hours ago

        If I ever got a lucky Amazon mistake where I order one 4 TB drive but a box of 16 comes in, I would set up a full *arr stack.

        Probably won’t be that lucky though.

    • frongt@lemmy.zipEnglish
      3·
      4 hours ago

      I would seek the best price per terabyte while still allowing redundancy.

      • hesh@quokk.auEnglish
        1·
        4 hours ago

        True, but I would factor in some kind of negative to cost/longevity from increasing number of drives. Even if 16x4 is a bit cheaper than 4x16 today, will it die faster?

        • frongt@lemmy.zipEnglish
          2·
          3 hours ago

          At these scales, I don’t think it’s measurable, if statistically significant at all.

          In any case, you should always be ready to replace a drive that fails. I buy used because they’re significantly cheaper (or at least they used to be) and I’ve never had any major failures.

          • Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafeEnglish
            1·
            2 hours ago

            And while more drives means more failure opportunity, it also means when a failed drive is replaced, it’s likely of a different manufacture period.

            I have a 5-drive NAS that I’ve been upgrading single drives every 6 months. This has the benefit of slowly increasing capacity while also ensuring drives are of different ages so less likely to fail simultaneously. (Now I’m waiting for prices to come back down, dammit).

  • vane@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    5 hours ago

    It’s better to buy 4x 16-20TB drives and expand storage instead of buying 16 4TB drives. Also 16 3.5 inch HDD drives draw around 200W of power alone.

  • blitzen@lemmy.caEnglish
    9·
    6 hours ago

    Honestly, I bet it would be cheaper to replace a few or even all of the 4 TB drives in your current set up with larger drives.

  • farcaller@fstab.shEnglish
    71·
    5 hours ago

    You really want the ECC ram and the motherboard/cpu combo that supports it.

  • atzanteol@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    101·
    6 hours ago

    You’re talking a lot of storage - it might be worth investing in some low-end server hardware. A Dell tower or something, maybe one off eBay if you’re looking to cut costs.

    I picked up a PowerEdge T110II a long time ago and it’s been… flawless. Just a simple server with a 4x4TB RAID5. No hardware problems (aside from occasional disk failures over the years), easy to manage. It costs a bit more - but server hardware is often just more reliable and for a NAS that’s job #1. This server just runs.

    I just upgraded the memory in it to 32GB for ~$100USD. Before that it had 8GB. I needed more for restic doing backups. I probably could have gotten away with 16GB but I figured I’d max it out for that price.

  • KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    6·
    5 hours ago

    Honestly, you might want to look into proper server hardware. There are many out there that support dozens of drives, assuming you’re willing to go with a blade. Even if you explicitly want a tower, server hardware is where you’re going to get the best support.

    You’ll most likely also want to increase the size of your drives. Assuming you’re being smart and utilizing RAID, you’re going to be losing a bunch of that storage.

  • empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    2·
    4 hours ago

    ABSOLUTELY ECC memory, 32gb or higher if you can afford it these days as TrueNAS does benefit from a decent cache space, especially with so many drives to spread data slices across.

    Realistically unless you expect multiple concurrent users, any 4 core or higher CPU from 2015-on will be plenty of power to manage the array. No need for dedicated server hardware unless the price is right

    I have a Dell PowerEdge t3 SOHO/small business server tower that I gutted and turned into a 5x8tb config. It only has a middling 4 core Xeon 1225v5 and I never get above 50% CPU usage when maxing the drives out. More CPU is needed if you’re doing filesystem compression or need multiple concurrent users.

    • Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafeEnglish
      1·
      2 hours ago

      I’ve never run into issues running desktop hardware without ECC as servers - since the 90’s.

      I just don’t think the extra cost is worthwhile - I’m not running systems/services that will have catastrophic failures without ECC (or have weird bitflips that would corrupt some transaction).

  • Humanius@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    4 hours ago

    There is no real clarification what that budget is, so I will assume that the budget is tight.
    My advise is assuming that you are looking for the best bang for the buck.

    The case looks like a good option, assuming that those are 3.5 inch bays.
    It should give you plenty of space for expansion in the future if you want to do that

    RAM prices are pretty nuts right now, so I would definitely not go balls to the wall with 128 GB of RAM.
    16 GB of RAM should be more than plenty for a NAS server. Maybe you can even get away with 8GB?
    I’m using 16 GB of DDR3 RAM in my own NAS server (which is also running Jellyfin and Nextcloud) and it’s running fine.

    Speaking of DDR3… Have you considered buying your CPU, motherboard and RAM second hand?
    From what I hear the prices of DDR3 RAM are not nearly as elevated as those of DDR4 and DDR5 RAM, and DDR3 is plenty sufficient for a simple NAS.

    Be sure not to skimp on the power supply. Most consumer power supplies are not built for running a NAS worth’s of HDDs.
    I’m running a Corsair RM550x in my server, which is capable of supplying 130W on the 5V rail.

    Good luck with your server build!

  • Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyzBEnglish
    2·
    1 hour ago

    Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

    Fewer Letters More Letters
    NAS Network-Attached Storage
    PSU Power Supply Unit
    RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage
    ZFS Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity

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