Budget Storage Server 2022! | 84TB NAS

what's going on guys my name is matt and around a year ago i made a video on a budget storage server i built to house video files now while i was happy with the end product there were a number of flaws and areas where it could improve so in today's video i'm going to be sharing with you my budget storage server version 2.0 which comes in at about 250 dollars for the base system plus the cost of drives it is more cpu horsepower double the ram more room for expansion and the overall cost is just a little bit higher than version 1.0 so why do i need a dedicated storage server well i have a problem i shoot a ton of high bitrate 4k footage and like to save pretty much everything i shoot in case i need to use that footage in future videos before storage server version 1.0 i would just fill up a bunch of random external drives which was a pretty awful solution and made it pretty difficult to find old footage quickly now for a number of months version 1.0 worked great for archiving my old footage but in late 2022 i moved to a new place where i don't have a dedicated networking closet area while in most cases version 1.0 was quiet if the system was under load the fans would ramp up and get obnoxiously loud now i could have just transplanted all those parts into a more normal case and called it a day but there were enough other flaws with this system that i decided to start from scratch and build it better while still on a budget going for an off-the-shelf nas that supports as many drives as my diy solution would cost somewhere between one to two thousand dollars before drives now many tech youtubers have built quote unquote budget storage servers touting they cost only fifteen hundred dollars and then proceed to pull out ten plus thousand dollars worth of drives provided free from the likes of seagate or western digital but the point of the last build and this one is to put together an 80 plus terabyte server all in including drives for that 1500 price point now i did go a little over budget this time by around 100 bucks but i think the end result was well worth it just know i was very careful with component selection and made sure i spent the budget on what i felt provided the best value at the current time to prove this point i was actually in talks with seagate on possibly helping out with the build but they could only send out their crazy expensive 18 terabyte drives and because those weren't anywhere near the dollar per terabyte target i was trying to hit i begrudgingly declined their offer with the experience of building and configuring the last server and with my new goal of improving it in every way i could i started to part out my new system now version 1.0 used a pre-built chenbro nr12000 server that was insanely cheap offering pretty much everything other than ram and drives for around 130 dollars it was very plug and play but the form factor and hardware had a lot of limitations so for this build i went a more custom route opting to pick out each component individually now this did cause more work in terms of setup and configuring it but the end result was well worth it in my opinion not only this but version 2.0 offers the ability to expand in the future well beyond what version 1.0 was capable of the first purchase i ended up making was for the cpu and motherboard after looking at a bunch of different options i ended up pulling the trigger on this combo that came out of an old hp z420 workstation i only paid a little over 60 dollars for it and the value i got is great the cpu included in this bundle is an intel xeon e5 1620 which is pretty old at this point but still great for this use case this is a 4 core 8 thread cpu that i'm going to use to get up and running but will eventually upgrade to an 8 or 12 core cpu as you can grab eight core compatible chips for literally less than ten dollars with that being said this quad core should work fine for now and if i feel the need to upgrade it will be a pretty simple swap it's nice having this cpu upgrade path as version 1.0 maxed out at 4 cores while the cpu is pretty good the motherboard was the thing i was really interested in it has 8 dimm slots tons of pci expansion slots which is great in case i want to do something like upgrade to 10 gigabit networking or add an lsi card for more drive support with that being said the big thing that drew me to this board was the 10 yes 10 sata ports only two or six gigabit per second but because most of what i'm plugging in is gonna be regular old hard drives sound of three gigabit per second will be plenty fast the back panel i o is decent but for this use case it basically doesn't matter at all just note it only is gigabit ethernet built-in but again i can upgrade that in the future also you can see this didn't come with an i o shield which is a bit annoying but not the end of the world the one main drawback of this board is the fact it uses an 18 pin atx power connector versus the standard 24 pin one while this is disappointing luckily all i have to do is buy a 10 adapter cable that would make it usable with a standard power supply other than the weird power connector everything else was standard atx meaning i could put it in pretty much any atx case all in all for around 70 dollars including the necessary adapter i think the cpu motherboard combo was the perfect fit for getting this build up and running now one other advantage of building on an older workstation platform like this is the fact i can use super cheap ddr3 ecc memory after a little looking i managed to snag a 4x8 gigabyte kit of registered ecc ddr3 ram for only 40 not only is this large quantity of ram great but the fact it is error correcting makes it perfect for server applications like this one believe it or not 32 gigabytes may not end up being an optimal amount but even if this is the case upgrading to 64 gigabytes would just require popping in one more 4x8 gigabyte kit to cool this cpu i just grabbed this basic gammaxx 400 cooler that i got for around 15 bucks it's got a pretty standard tower cooler design with 120 millimeter fan it's cheap and it gets the job done to power this system i went with an evga 650 bq this is a decent quality 80 plus bronze rated unit that i think was only 45 dollars at the time of purchasing it has all the necessary cables fit the budget and is of decent quality for its budget price the final component purchase other than drives was the case and this is an area where i struggled a lot in my search i needed a case that supported a ton of drives which just isn't something modern cases do after a ton of searching i found a listing for a fractal design to find r4 for a ludicrous price of a hundred dollars locally after i talked with the guy and explained what i was gonna use it for he ended up settling for sixty dollars which is still kind of expensive for how old this case is he said it was a little dusty but had all the drive sleds and panels and that's what i cared about unfortunately once i got my hands on it i found it was more than just a little dusty so i figured the best thing to do would just be performing the pc cleaning jutsu [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] in all seriousness this was really dirty just look at this fan filter i immediately washed these out off camera everything else i just gave a good once over with some paper towels and all-purpose cleaner yes i know i could have hosed the whole thing down but i didn't really care about getting it in pristine condition i just wanted to bring it to an acceptable level with that done now let's talk about drives last time i chucked a bunch of eight terabyte seagate drives and ended up with 80 terabytes of smr storage which isn't awful for my use case but cmr is really what you want for a server application like this one if you don't know you can buy external drives many times with a lower price tag than their standalone counterpart the big trade-off is a shorter warranty but it's up to you to decide if the cost savings is worth it after a bunch of price analysis i set my sights on 14 terabyte external drives and over the course of a month or so bought up six 14 terabyte wd element drives at an average cost of 215 dollars a piece or around 1300 total that's pretty good for 84 terabytes of raw capacity and once they were in it was time to crack them open and see what i got opening these wd element drives is actually pretty simple it takes some force but all you have to do is slide the two pieces of the outer shell away from each other then with a little wiggling the two halves will separate you pop out the drive and the four rubber bumpers will just fall away as they're just pressure fit in then you can unscrew one screw here and another here which will allow you to pull away the usb adapter pcb and boom you have a freshly shucked drive this is a lot quicker than opening the seagate external drives and took like 10 minutes tops to do all of them i pulled out drives with model number wd-140e dgc after a bit of research i believe these are white label versions of wd's 14 terabyte red plush drives which is awesome as those go for 270 or more meaning that me waiting for deals on external drives save me about 50 per drive or 300 total which is a pretty significant savings in my opinion these are 7 200 rpm drives rated for nest use making them perfect for my storage server also these are cmr drives which are suited much better for storage servers like the one i'm building something to note is some wd drives that have been shucked won't be recognized by your system two of my six drives did this but the fix is simple you can either like me use a molex to sata adapter or you can cover up pin three on the sata power header with a little piece of tape preferably capped on tape basically you're cutting contact with that third pin which is 3.3 volts and is completely unnecessary both ways work fine and i think a lot of people would recommend going for the tape method over using the adapter but i had one lying around so that's what i did wd does this to discourage people from shucking external drives and using them internally which is pretty anti-consumer in my opinion i'll explain the file system and redundancy later but compared to the 8 terabyte seagate smr drives i was using these are miles better in my opinion and should work much better for this server for the os i picked up two hundred twenty gigabyte a data ssds for redundant boot drives these were about twenty dollars a piece and are considered very good quality drives for the price with all the parts in hand and the case cleaned up i was ready to start building the system everything went pretty smoothly and the pc luckily booted right up some random things to mention is that the fan headers on the motherboard have an extra pin and an odd connector design but a normal one will slip right into place like this also when installing all the drives i could only use two screws per sled as the holes just didn't line up to install more with that being said they're pretty secure and i'm confident in their safety i just have the ssds hanging loose which is where they'll stay for now other random things used in the build include some of these thin sata cables and random pc screws i already had lying around i also temporarily installed this gt430 as a video out which will be used for the initial setup of this server with the hardware side of things done i was ready to move on to the software side of things for version 1.0 i used unraid which was the best option for that configuration with that being said now that i have cmr drives and more ram i'm going to go with what i wanted to use originally for version 1.0 which is truenas and unraid is great for an archival based storage server but trunas in general is better suited for a server being used more actively and will give me the ability to do stuff like edit videos directly off of it and do tons of other server related things like host game servers for my friends and myself also unlike unraid trunas is free and open source i'm not at all an expert at the server stuff and i'm very much just scratching the surface of all this i will briefly go over the setup process but for a detailed explanation i'll link the craft computing tutorial down below that i followed for a lot of the setup process to get things going i need to create a bootable flash drive containing the true nas installation files i grabbed the iso from the trunast website and used balina etcher to create the bootable drive next i took this to the newly built server plugged it in and turned it on i still have to figure out how to bypass the screen saying certain things aren't plugged in so for now i have to hit f1 anytime the system is powered on which is annoying but not the end of the world booting into the trunas installer i noticed a number of my drives weren't being detected which led me down multiple hours of troubleshooting the main problem was the scu sata ports weren't enabled these are the four white ones right here to fix this i had to go into the bios and under storage options change the sata mode to raid plus ahci and under advanced i needed to switch mass storage options to legacy with this done i booted back into the true nas installer i selected install slash upgrade selected the two ssds as the boot drive hit ok created a password and then i wasn't sure which to select to boot to i initially selected boot via bios which was incorrect and had to redo this procedure and select boot from uefi so if you're building a server with the same board make sure to select boot via uefi i'm not using a cache drive out of the gate so i selected to create a swap then i just let it install and was prompted to restart the system once booted up and into trueness all i had to do was grab the ip address listed at the bottom with that done i no longer needed to directly interface with the server and could do the rest for my pc now i don't need to keep a gpu in there but i'll probably keep the little gt430 in there for now because i don't have any other use for it and if i need display out in the future from the server then it'll be quick and easy to use moving back to my main pc i just typed in the server ip logged in with username root and the password i set the first thing i did was set a static ip for the server and once that was set and tested i could move on to configuring my storage array to make a storage pool i gave the pool a name and hit suggest layout to see what trunas would suggest i was happy to see it suggested what i plan to do originally which is have all six drives in a raid z2 configuration meaning i get the rock capacity of four drives but can sustain up to two drive failures and not lose any data now raid isn't backup and anything truly irreplaceable is backed up in a separate external drive and in the cloud with that being said unless something physically happens to the server like it being stolen or run through a tornado then the likelihood of me losing data from this array is very very low i could have went with one parity drive for an extra 13 inch terabytes of capacity but the chances of data loss in that scenario are much higher with the layout set i just hit create and in seconds it created the pool i then created a basic share called storage with that done i made a user account for myself and followed craft computing's guide on adjusting permissions with the shell commands with that done i just went into the file explorer on my pc selected map network drive picked a drive letter input the file path then input my credentials and boom i now have a drive with over 50 terabytes of storage that i was ready to start filling up because this is over a gigabit connection read and write speeds are going to max out at around 90 megabytes per second but i think i will install a 10 gigabyte nic in this machine that will connect directly to a 10 gigabit nic in my pc which will enable me to edit off of it directly if you want to see an update video in the future where i add more ram upgrade the cpu add ssd cache and add 10 gigabit networking to this server then let me know in the comment section below again the server is just housing files right now but with the ability to have a high core count cpu and 64 gigs of ram it means there's a ton of stuff i can try and play around with on this machine and that's honestly a big reason why i want this route as i have a ton of raw compute power to try out different things one other random thing yes i know in a lot of this footage it shows that trunas is only reporting 24 gigabytes of ram but resetting the sticks fixed this problem and now it's reporting the full 32 gigabytes all in all i'm pretty happy with this build obviously there are a ton of ways you could have spent this budget so if there's different parts you would have went with then let me know in the comments below so yeah guys i think it's time to wrap this video up i hope you guys enjoyed this video it was pretty expensive and a lot of work so giving this a like and subscribing to the channel would be greatly appreciated oh and as always this is matt from tech by matt signing out

Channel: Tech By Matt

Views: 1,076,504

Keywords: network attached storage, home server, nas, storage, server, trunas, unraid, budget server, cheap server, storage server, budget storage server, cheap storage server, budget nas, chepa nas, diy storage server, diy nas, diy, diy budget storage server, diy budget nas, techbymatt, tech by matt, linus, linus tech tips, linustechtips, ltt, 84tb, raid, zfs, level1techs, lga, intel, amd, seagate, wd, western digital, red, wd red, white label, external drives, shuck, hdd, hard drive, ssd, ecc, 10gig

Id: DpJViwtct5g

Length: 15min 33sec (933 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 08 2022