Hi,

Since r/NAS is not available and the [email protected] could not provide that much help I am here again to ask stuff ;D.

My 10years old NAS quited work and I am looking for my opportunities. And since I am tinkering with my raspi and am generally interested in selfhosting stuff like jellyfin, joplin e.g. I decided to take the step to build my own Nas instead of buying another Synology device.

I would like to provide my needs but since I am not sure about it it is only a try… Moreover I cannot say where the journey will take me to^^

What I know:

  • 4 sata slots so I can use my actual drives and have the option to upgrade
  • Transcoding with jellyfin would be nice
  • having my own cloud storage is a long term aim
  • joplin server
  • maybe some terraria dedicated server could be cool also
  • low power usage and low noise are two criteria i would consider important since the energy prices only know one direction where I life
  • x64 architecture to use debian server or TrueNas Scale (I need to dive deeper into TrueNas before deciding)

My former favorite is this fanless board:
MITAC PD11EHI-J6413 MINI-ITX
Con:

  • I realised that the second M.2 slot does not supports M key SSDs but I planned to run the OS on an NVME… and since there is no PCIe the singel M.2 slot with M Key support is the only way to upgrade to 4 sata slots.

My actual favorite (but more expensive) choice seems to be:
MITAC PD10EHI-N6415
Con:

  • price (not so much of problem)

ECC compatibility feels unnecessary.

Is there anything that I have forgotten? Any better choices from european vendors? Ordering from america is not an option because it would take forever to arrive and the process to get it from the zoll is time consuming and would put taxes on top.

Thanks in advance 😊

  • Monkey With A ShellEnglish
    2•1 year ago

    It seems FreeNAS/TrueNAS has a lot of plugins available to do many things onboard. For my part though I like to keep storage separate from compute since it gives me more direct control over the frontend services. To that end my go to is https://xigmanas.com/xnaswp/ which was actually Freenas before a split several years ago, they kept the original design of being more a dedicated NAS system (with a few minor builtns for a basic webserver/torrent service, etc) but it’s more a embedded ‘just serve the drives’ type system. Then putting another box, virtual host/docker box, whatever you like and mounting the drives from there lets you build things up and just dump the backing data to the NAS. Lets you get away with a relatively low power box to just serve up the storage and save the compute power for the heavy working apps.

    As for hardware, if it’s just serving drives I’ve gotten away with as little as an old 1.3Ghz with 4GB mini-itx board in the past, though that was only with a couple drives, but I’m sure there are boards that can have a lot more attachments to it. Feasibly even a USB hub with a handful of external drives plugged into a RaspberryPi or similar could do the job. If you’re concerned with data redundancy though having a RAID is a plus, so something like this would be good.

    https://www.newegg.com/mediasonic-hfr2-su3s2/p/N82E16816322004