Building A DIY NAS On A Budget - TrueNAS Scale

[Music] a nas or network attached storage can be incredibly helpful to have in your home but can also wreak havoc on your bank account if you're on a tight budget i love to work with older budget hardware so naturally i set out to build my own nas using almost entirely used components and true nas scale will it perform well and if so will it be any cheaper than just buying something off of a store shelf well let's find out [Music] so why am i even building this nas in the first place really it's because i need one i have a small two-bay synology that i use for some personal stuff but i really need a good place to store all of the footage and content for this channel and i'd like it to also be fast enough that i could even edit off of it over the network i also thought it would just be a lot of fun to see what i could build with deals i found on facebook marketplace ebay and so on so let's go ahead and take a look at what i managed to get first up we have the case now this might not look like something you would expect from a nas one of the benefits of a dedicated nas from someone like synology or asus store is that they are typically really compact this old antec case i found on facebook for 20 bucks is the opposite of compact but i really wanted to find a case with a lot of drive bays and there aren't a lot of affordable options for smaller or newer cases that fit that description so this antac should be perfect for this video and also have plenty of room for upgrades and more drives down the road it also came with four fans however only three of them actually worked and we're only going to keep two of them but i'll talk about that later the motherboard in this case is probably pretty familiar if you've watched some of my other videos as this is the hp motherboard that i was able to fix thanks to the help from you guys this motherboard originally came from an hp 200 g1 desktop and features a four core intel j29 cpu clocked at 2.41 gigahertz which is unfortunately soldered to the motherboard but should still give us really good power efficiency and relatively good performance for its age we also have eight gigabytes of ddr3l memory which unfortunately is the maximum capacity that the cpu can work with i got the motherboard cpu combo as well as the ram for around 50 to power everything we're just using this gigabyte 650 watt power supply that i picked up used for 30 dollars and please don't comment that this psu is going to explode it isn't one of the models from the gamer's nexus video and we're going to be way below the point of hitting any over current protection or anything like that anyway because the motherboard only has two sata 2.0 ports we'll be adding in this pcie to sata card that i picked up used for 27 dollars i could have picked up a cheaper card with only two ports but i'd like to have a little bit more flexibility with four unfortunately the pcie slots on our motherboard are limited to pcie 2.0 by one so there probably isn't enough bandwidth to run all four drives but we should be fine with up to three i also got a pcie to 2.5 gigabit nick for 15 dollars so that we won't be limited by our network connection i don't have a multi gigabit switch so we'll still be using the one gigabit port for our network and then have a direct connection to my editing pc using the two and a half gigabit nic now what about storage well i probably would have looked into getting some used enterprise drives for this build to keep costs down but the folks over at aces store were incredibly generous and sent over four seagate iron woof four terabyte drives as well as their drive store for nas that i'll be taking a look at here soon i'm actually going to compare that nas to the one we built here in this video which i think is going to be a lot of fun so make sure to get subscribed the last thing we need is a boot drive and i kind of messed up here i'm going to blame it on lack of sleep thanks to our newborn child but i got things mixed up while also working on my previous unraid video with unraid it's 100 recommended to use a single usb stick as the boot drive which is what i filmed when making this video however truenas which is the os we'll be using does not recommend doing that so for the sake of keeping this video simple and on a budget i'm still going to use a single usb drive to run trunas but i wouldn't recommend that for you and i'd recommend either installing it on a small ssd or using two usb sticks and a mirrored configuration for a bit of redundancy with all of our parts ready to go i think we can start putting this all together the only component in this build that really needs to be cleaned up is the case so i went ahead and removed all the fans including this broken one on the back as well as the 140 millimeter fan on top that i'm probably not going to use because it seems a little bit cheap you can also start to see how dirty this case really is especially when i get this front panel off with the case mostly pulled apart i went ahead and took it outside and used an air compressor and a brush to go ahead and get all the dust off then i followed that up with a rag and some ice purple alcohol to go ahead and really get it cleaned up [Music] i could have done a better job cleaning this up but i think it's fine and i was really excited to go ahead and get all the components put together with the case cleaned up we can go ahead and put in our motherboard and i o shield but these little black rubber pieces that were in the original pc kind of got in the way so i had to rip those off with those removed the motherboard could go ahead and slide into place and i could go ahead and put the rest of the screws in after that we could go ahead and drop in our 650 watt power supply and normally i would put four screws here but the last screw was sort of the wrong size and so i ended up only doing three but it shouldn't be an issue next was our pcie to sata card which is also really easy to install you just pop it into the pcie slot and then screw in the little retaining screw then we could do the exact same thing with our two and a half gigabit network card next came the hard drives for these i just went ahead and slid them into some of the open bays and put the two screws in on my side and then went ahead and followed up with the screws on the other side before finally coming back to the original side to make sure they were nice and snug even though i've done quite a few of these videos i still managed to get in the way of a lot of the cable management but for the most part i just went ahead and ran the power cables to the motherboard as well as to all of our hard drives and then tried to hide a lot of the extra power cables in the back and bottom of the case [Music] after that i went ahead and ran all of these sata cables from our hard drives to our motherboard as well as our pcie card and after a little bit of cable tie magic our nas is pretty much done and i don't think it looks half bad [Music] with the hardware all finished it was time to install truenas scale now i'm not going to explain how to install and set up truenas scale in depth in this video because i pretty much covered that in a recent video you can take a look at here if you're interested after getting trunanz installed on our flash drive i logged into the web ui and created a pool called hard drive haven and put all four of our drives into a data v dev which i set up in raid z which means we can lose one hard drive and replace it without losing any data then i created a data set within that pool called haven share and set the share type to smb [Music] before setting up smb though i made a user called haven and let truenas create a haven group for that user as well then i could head over to the shares tab and add our haven share as an smb share as well as start the smb service finally i added the haven group to the access control list of our file system so that we could actually access the share with our haven user login after getting smb up and running i went ahead and went to the data protection tab just to make sure that the scrub tasks were scheduled and i also set up scheduled smart tests and even set up cloud sync to back up this nas weekly to google drive smb is great but i also want to have iscsi set up with this system iscsi is a network share protocol but instead of sharing files it shares block storage when you connect it with windows the operating system basically just sees it as another drive connected locally on your system and my plan is to use this as a drive i can put all my current projects that i'm editing on to do that i set up a z volume in my hard drive haven pool gave it 750 gigabytes of storage and set it as sparse meaning the volume will essentially expand as more storage as needed then i went to the iscsi wizard to set up the share if you're wanting to do something similar to this i'd recommend checking out craft computing's video on it which i'll have a link for in the description below once the share was all set up i tried connecting to it using the built-in iscsi initiator in windows but that failed and that was because i just forgot to start the actual iscsi service in trunas after fixing that we were able to connect the iscsi target format the drive using ntfs [Music] and then access it as if it were any other local drive in my system pretty cool so far everything has worked really well but i'm not taking advantage of my two and a half gigabit nick to do this i'm going to directly connect that nick to a two and a half gigabit to usb adapter i have on my windows machine to get this to work though you have to do a little bit of tinkering with the ipv4 settings in windows i have this nick set to an ip address of 169.254.100.2 and a subnet mask of 255.255.0.0 in truenize in true nas i went to the network tab found our two and a half gigabit nick and set it to a static ip of 169.254.100.3 and then slash 16 which is the same as having a subnet mask of 255.255.0.0 now for some reason when you deselect dhcp from this nic it also deselects dhcp from our gigabit neck so i just had to recheck that and then test and confirm those network settings with our two and a half gigabit connection ready i reconnected to our iscsi share and mapped our smb share using the faster connection with everything set up let's see how this not so little nas performs when transferring around 60 gigabytes worth of video audio and other project files to our smb share we were getting write speeds of about 150 megabytes per second or so and over 200 megabytes per second at times while reading those files back this isn't crazy or anything but we're at least taking advantage of the extra bandwidth we get with our two and a half gigabit connection because we set up iscsi crystal disk mark actually sees our iscsi drive as any other local drive so i decided to compare that to a 7 200 rpm 2 terabyte mechanical drive in my system and our diy nas definitely performed quite a bit better with solid improvements to sequential reads and writes and massive improvements to random reads and writes our iscsi drive looks a little less impressive when compared to a simple sata ssd but with iscsi and trunas we have the benefit of capacity as well as redundancy so there's a really good chance i'm going to actually try out editing off of this iscsi drive that way if there's a drive failure i shouldn't lose any footage or editing progress while this nas may look a little bit big and mean it really didn't consume much power pulling 38 watts from the wall at idle and around 45 watts during an extended data transfer i don't have any data when it comes to noise but i've had this nas on my desk for well over a week now and i don't really notice it all that much it isn't the quietest thing in the world by any means but it definitely wouldn't be very noticeable tucked away in a corner or something now i know some people are probably already typing comments about what is or could go wrong with this system and that's probably fair because this isn't perfect by any means i know someone is going to mention reliability but if you're trying to run some sort of critical or intense workload off of a 150 diy server well that might be on you there's always a chance that hardware can fail and that chance can go up in working with used or older hardware but realistically i don't think it's a huge deal for me at least if this motherboard crashes i can easily drop in a replacement and get my nas up and running fairly easily and that applies to basically all of the components in this build alright future me here just for a little bit and funny story the four port sata to pcie card actually failed on me after about a week and a half of using this nas but fortunately i was able to swap it out with a two port sata card i had lying around and i was pretty easily able to get my nas back up and running without losing any data just thought i'd mention this downtime isn't great but it's not a massive ordeal for what i do if that's not the case for you well then maybe look into something higher in to suit your needs another issue with this build is its size if you're needing your diy nas to fit into a tight space this case is definitely not for you if you're wanting something really compact you'll need to spend more on some sort of special case as well as a mini itx form factor motherboard speaking of motherboards there are quite a few limitations to this one first of all we're limited to only 8 gigabytes of ram while i think this is going to be fine for my use cases we would probably get better performance with trunaz if we could add more memory as zfs can really use any extra memory to help with caching and while the j29 holds its own running truenas we're probably not going to be running a bunch of containers services or virtual machines on it with a ton of success this motherboard is also somewhat limited on the i o side of things with only two sata 2.0 ports 2 pci gen two by one slots and a pci slot we could add one more hard drive into our pcie card but adding a fourth would probably start to cause a bottleneck on that pcie bus limiting performance we could get a pci to save a card to add one more hard drive but at that point it probably makes more sense just to upgrade the motherboard entirely which brings us to one of the first benefits of a system like this all of the components in this system can easily be swapped out and upgraded and even better the old components can still be used elsewhere because all the parts are fairly standard pc hardware it's a little ugly but it performs pretty well doesn't draw too much power and was fairly cheap compared to buying something from a manufacturer the total cost on this was around 150 dollars and most forbade nases you can buy are often more than double that price if you're curious as to how this might compare to something that's store-bought make sure to get subscribed because like i said before i'll be comparing this nas to this asus store drive store 4 really soon and i think it's going to be a lot of fun i also already have plans to upgrade this machine down the road so stay tuned for that if you're interested in building something like this for yourself but true nas isn't your thing maybe check out my video on converting an older gaming pc into a home server using unraid that's about it for this one though so as always thank you so much for watching stay curious and i really hope to see you in the next one [Music] you

Channel: Hardware Haven

Views: 806,050

Keywords: asustor, budget homelab, budget nas, can i build a nas, cheap nas, cpu, diy nas, diy nas server, freenas, home nas server, home server, home server build, homelab, how to build a nas, how to build home server, inexpensive nas, intel, low power nas build 2022, low power nas server, nas, nas 2022, nas build, nas guide, nas server, network attached storage, pc components, pcparts, synology, synology nas, truenas, truenas core, truenas scale, used pc componenets, used pc parts

Id: jf_5FaVFnrU

Length: 17min 8sec (1028 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 18 2022