Noobs Guide to Building a NAS - 5 Mistakes Everyone Makes!

foreign [Music] today we want to continue with our series of videos on building your own Nas and frankly this is the video in the series that's either going to please a lot of you or absolutely hack a lot of you off this is five things that people always forget Overlook or ignore when specking up their new DIY server but before we go any further a few disclaimers number one this video is about building a server it's about building either a desktop or in some cases a rack mount server this is not really suitable as a video for building a PC from scratch or Windows or any other OS because a lot of things are incredibly server specific secondly I've already done a few videos on either DIY servers or Os free Nas servers in the market such as this one the cwwk io aoi 6t 6 Bay there and of course the John's bow that we've banged on about the channel for a while and some of the things I'm going to about today are counter to particularly that John's bow video but the reason being was the remit of those videos was to get the device under a certain price point and most of the things I'm going to talk about today when I say they're the things that people don't do most of the time it's because people are saving the old onega so with regards those Jumbo's the reason that uh the Jumbo Video was like that was because we were trying to get it and not dissimilar spec to certain TurnKey now Solutions so again before any of you go to the comments and go well you didn't do that in your video that's why and we started as such in that video but let's crack on with number one this is one that gets overlooked really really easily and I would argue of all the points I'm going to talk about in today's video it's the one that seems the most obvious than what you think about it is to do with SATA connections when you're running a Nas server unless you're going to go top top spec go fabric go nvme or basically Go full flash chances are you're going to be occupying a bunch of Bays with SATA hard drives you might have some M2 nvmes or some Sartor ssds banged inside the panels but the majority of that storage the long term you're warm you're cold storage is going to be hard drive based and each one of those Bays needs to be connected on Sat all SAS if you're going high-end the problem is when you look at the motherboards that go inside a lot of these Solutions and that's if you're not just going to buy a standard you know PC case and turn it into a server they don't have a lot of SATA connectors on the motherboards there indeed when you're looking at a lot of these um kind of os free ready to go Solutions in some cases or you know like that's the wwk there or building your own and you're limited to ITX motherboard in most cases because of that compact nature of the chassis getting one that's got more than about four SATA maybe five SATA ports on it are actually quite hard to come by and you might go and get yourself a motherboard with a decent little spec CPU on there you know support of a decent amount of memory and it's going to fit neatly inside the case that you want to buy and then you go to connect all the drives and realize you've only got four SATA connectors and once you realize you also need one drive in many cases with things like true Nash to be an OS Drive you're down another one now of course if you're using M2 and vmes you're fine for that but you still need starter connectors otherwise you're going to be limited on the number of Bays now there's going to be some of you putting in the comments already or at least shouting at me uh start a bridge card uh utilizing a pcie rate card or standard upgrade to our car and you're right those are options that are open to you however if you used to use the ie that means you're losing a pcie slot to start a drive you're not even utilizing it to bang in your 10 GB or 20 GB you're not using it for a decent graphics card you're not using it for M2 and vme Speedy base you're using a pcie potentially times three times 16 slot or even times 4 times 16 slot for SATA hard drives which is insanity now maybe you were going to buy a raid card anyway with a SAS fan out fine good for you but the rest of you who aren't going to do that are going for more con you know you know concise can smaller builds you're going to need those starter base now if you go for the bridging card something I talked about in my um uh three recommended Jonesboro bills video for 250 500 and 750 so there are thereabouts you wouldn't see that I talked about that little SATA Bridge there it has a main starter connector going into it and power delivered from the PSU and it goes out into five individual SATA outputs there that's great right you can add five drives right well you can but remember all five of those drives are going to be sharing a SATA Paul just because you're connected into a starter port on the mobile you've only got six gigabit or around you know 600 or so megabytes per second to share across those drives now your average starter hard drives only going to give you you know to 250 makes normal so you're only really going to have the saturation there for 2 two or maybe three regular class drives so do bear in mind that using those little bridging boards starter Bridge boards will reduce the available uh bandwidth for those connected drives and using a pcie card upgrade means you're losing a pcie slot that you may otherwise have wanted to use more effectively however another reason this is on the table is there is a third option which might not please everyone but I would argue will place some users sorry for the noise there because this employs a slightly more recently adapted uh alternative this here now if I bring that close to the camera can you see all of those little starter connectors they are connected to an M2 nvme that's going in a gen three times one or gen 3 times 2 M2 slot that little adapter will set you back 10 15 and it allows you to attach a rack of up to six SATA connectors there and there is more than enough bandwidth on that pcie to fully saturate each one of those drives in the right Ray configuration now as good as that sounds much like the pcie card you're gonna lose an M2 now in the case of this little micro ITX that board there has got two M2 slots inside there so I'm not losing it but if you're looking at a motherboard that's got two M2 nvme slots and you're already going to use one for an OS drive and you weren't going to do like a mirrored raid or use it as a cache disk that does allow you to maybe utilize that PCI that pcie M2 and vme Slot to get around like a SATA ports that may be on your motherboard I would say of all of the comments that I got were a bit critical on my John's bow videos the one that was the more recurrent of any other was my choice of PSU now my choice of PSU for a few different reasons did rub some users up the wrong way whilst trying to keep things under a budget and as I stated in that video I went for that budget option to stay on budget but personally that's not the PSU I've gone for for different reasons now one of the recurring things people mentioned is that this PSU is upside down on this build now that was an intentional Choice the reason it's facing the wrong way is because the main 80x ITX connector I should say the 20 pin connector that goes into the motherboard was an incredibly short cable when you look at cheaper psus the cabling they include is often very short I don't know whether it's the account in every single Cent I'm not sure but the result is that even in a compact case like this that has that PSU compartment I needed to rotate the PSU to give myself that extra it's a shy of two inches to get that um 20 pin connector inside the top mounted mobile there it's incredibly tight one but more on from that it was about the actual PSU itself it was some off-brand AliExpress 250 watt metal junker and again not a great PSU choice but if you're looking to save money there are options out there but what is the cost well the cost of cheap psus is actually felt in several different ways the first way is consistent power use so sometimes you see psus cheaper ones like that one that will have a reported 250 watt but I can't sustain that now you might not be cramming 250 Watts at any given time because bear in mind whether you go for a thousand watt PSU or 200 and what a 250 watt PSU if you're only drawing 200 Watts the two psus you're not using any more power in theory more on that in a moment but it's the consistency of that power across the system that's really really important and the other thing is efficiency because PSU efficiency particularly in 24 7 servers is Paramount now efficiency stems from different things number one when you are drawing power from a PSU PSU and the way PSU draws power is not 100 efficient you're always losing some of that power in the form of heat during the transfer but the bigger the PSU the bigger potential for that loss so if you go for a big big PSU a big you know 750 watt unbranded inefficient PSU you're actually losing a decent whack of power and ultimately in a 24 7 server that all adds up particularly if you know like most of Europe right now you are really feeling the old energy costs there now some psu's more expensive ones will arrive with a rating on the side that says 80 plus and it will have gold or silver or bronze or going all the way up to platinum and titanium what that is to do with is they are rated the most efficient psus in the market that means you keep at least 80 percent of that power and as you go through the grading systems all the way up to Titanium it gets even more efficient and the the amount of power lost to heat becomes lower and lower needless to say the higher that rating the more expensive the PSU is but ultimately if you're going to be running the server 24 7 for years upon years upon years those numbers will add up and hopefully hopefully depending on your usage Idol versus active will end up making up that deficit between the price difference between them and with more efficient psus are losing more power to that inefficiency there another thing I'll mentioned with regards to the cabling when I did that cable the wrong way up because it weren't with a cheap one when you start going towards more efficient uh psus that is also where you start to find clip-on psus these are ones that rather than have the cables pre-attached they are ones where you have inserts to attach the cables and then wire in more efficient efficiently there that actually gets around that issue of having shorter PSU cables or cheaply made PSU cables the last thing before we leave the subject of the issues I will touch on is much like I mentioned with the SATA connectors you've got to check that you've got the right amount of Molex Molex sounds really really silly but Molex such an old style connector in terms of building your own now server you tend to find that the back plane the SATA board because most of these systems have One Singular board that's being utilized with the CPU and the memory on it and another board that all of your hard drives are connected into that SATA Board needs power you can have those cables connecting it as mentioned earlier into the motherboard but it needs power tune in most cases these off-branded cards off-branded SATA boards that all your drives are connected into with their trays are connected with Molex and a Molex connector you tend to find for every grouping of three to four drives you get one Molex connector to the more drives you have the more Molex connectors for power going in and cheaper psus have fewer Molex connectors on them you can get little adapters that can be attached to singular molexes to Fan them out but you'll still then sharing that power bandwidth or the connectors that you can attach to the starters which can then go into the molexes to power the drives but nevertheless you're still talking about a finite number of cables and that's just another way in which getting a more power efficiency PSU with connectors you can buy manually and attached to it allows you to be more selective about the SATA the bowlex and the board adapters length and quality that you're going to need yes it will cost you more but in the long term it might bring you that money back next up we've got to talk about Cooling and heat efficiency on these devices and by the way the irony that this is one of the seven days of the year in the UK that we actually have some sun and I'm sweating like a big here the irony is not lost on me but when it comes to 24 7 servers Cooling and heat efficiency and the maintenance of that temperature inside and cooling events is really really important why is that well and it's very base level if a system is overheating the components inside predominantly the CPU the memory to a lesser extent but certainly some of the storage May throttle itself to stop it damaging itself or overuse it will reduce its performance in a number of key different ways depending on the component if temperatures go too high on top of that not only will you see a dip in performance and potential long-term degradation on the components but on top of that the fans inside and the cooling will now rent a will improve and increase to compensate against that heat so you end up with a double barrel problem you've got components that are getting too hot and you have a system that is becoming noisy and consuming more power as it is increasing um heat active ventilation on the system with fans to push that warm air out of all of the passive ventilation of those vents so maintaining lots of ventilation throughout the system either passing through the system or having the fans in strategic locations is going to be crucial now depending on the case you're looking at you may be limited in your options what do I mean by that well at the moment we're working on our John's boat N3 build here on the channel in the background but one of the main differences we spotted very early doors between the John's boat N2 and the johnsbo N3 was here it was the height afforded to the motherboard they're both utilizing um uh ITX motherboards inside but the newer N3 has a taller compartment that allows you to take advantage of much better heat sinks and CPU fans inside now you can get smaller form factor CPU heat sinks and fans there but in order to maintain a decent level of heat dissipation they'll have a great deal more fans on them they'll have a copper piping throughout which will increase the price points but it needs that to be able to express and release all of that heat into the air that it's pulling from the CPU as much as possible in that confined space and that will increase the pricing there are ways you can use strategically placed copper piping around systems to draw that ink from the mobile and then release it into the air as the passive cooling goes from it but once again you've got to be mindful of airflow through the systems having for example that mobile at the top underneath that vent fan and going well there's a fan there that's fine if there's no way for active air to pass through this system over the components over the heat sinks inside and through the fans inside to continue that airflow throughout the case then that vent's not going to do very much because that is not going anywhere the heatsink has got all of those vents for the air to pass through but if the air ain't passing through it heat is rising of course but it's still only going to work for that limited capacity and in may just go into the heat panel which again then you're overly reliant on the dissipation of a metal top base panel there the same goes for when you're looking at drives again if you don't have sufficient spacing between drives or ventilation there on the front or if you don't even have that to allow air to pass through the front panel that warm air ain't going anywhere and if anything is being reabsorbed into the surrounding area thereby actually making things consistently worse and again when it comes to the fans then as those fans get up you're starting to hear it right now and it'll get super annoying if you're in close proximity to these devices so cooling heat dissipation and just strategic vent placement and areas inside for the air to flow is Paramount so just keep that in mind another way in which you can lower the heat being generated inside your system and open up airflow is of course going for external psu's now it's not for everyone there's a lot of users out there that do not like having external psu's that they've connected into their system and are just waiting for the day that them or the dog won't buy and accidentally disconnect their server therefore killing it on the spot now I get that there's lots of reasons but me personally I think there is a place for external psu's I talked about it several times on the channel in Naz videos in that thorax a video that having an external PSU is about 150 000 times easier to replace they're not as efficient I will say as an internal PSU but it means you are removing something that's generating heat from inside this chassis and making it a lot easier to replace now you can buy pre-made Nas chassis that have external psus and these will arrive as you can see at the top with a little bridging board inside that feeds into the connector that this is being connected into and it separates the power across the inside it makes it a little bit more of a complex exercise and much like we mentioned in the PSU section doing that will result in lower efficiency by the PSU and what's being drawn but still nonetheless when it comes to freeing up airflow inside your system going for more compact systems or removing the heat source that a PSU can generate inside compared with this one which has got that big old PSU inside it is something of a game changer and if you're worried about airflow that is a good way to go next up let's talk about getting the CPU choice right first time now if you're looking at CPUs for a server I think it'd be fair to say that a number of you you've been out the CPU game for a while I know I was and it's very easy to go well that's an i5 it must be good i5s have now been around for so long that the term I5 just isn't enough and you've got to break it down into Generations also new naming strategies that Intel have rolled out with a number of their you know high profile CPUs the elimination of the Celeron and Pentium range early in 2023 late 2022 have all added up to the landscape of PS of CPUs being very very tough to follow but let's take some baby steps first and foremost when you're putting a CPU inside these devices along with the mobile that you choose to go with bear in mind that those CPUs two important factors you're going to have to consider and there are many others is PCI lanes and the number of them now hard drives inside Nas servers you will end up using some lines for these pairing of these drives the same goes if you're going to be utilizing the pcie slot on the motherboard to take advantage again of m2nvme's newer generation M2 nvmes at Gen 4 so you have to get newer CPUs indeed there are just so many factors to put in when it comes to both the PCI lanes and the number of those Lanes when building from because that ultimately that's the landscape You're Building within you can't exceed those two things now when it comes to the Gen of gen 3 that's a thousand Megs per second per Lane Gen 4 which is 2 000 Megs per second per Lane and Gen 5 which is 4 000 Megs per second per Lane that's a lot of bandwidth to play with there you're still going to need the rest of the components to fill it but the newer generation CPUs will have a new agenda a newer gen of pcie architecture to play with there so if you're worried about limitations of scope with the devices you're connecting inside particularly if you've got multiple pcie cards or intend to lean a lot more on m2mvmes go for Gen 4 or Gen 5 CPUs it will cost you more but there's more room to grow within them another thing to bear in mind with CPUs to do with integrated Graphics a lot of CPUs arrive with an onboard component to handle graphics and if you're going to not have a pcie graphics card installed inside your system and you want to interface with it directly you're going to need a CPU with integrated graphics on board otherwise you're not going to be able to see the content of the system locally you'll still be able to access it on the network so if you're running a true Nas build or an unraised building you've already got your boot media sorted and therefore you don't need to KVM keyboard video Mouse into it then it's not a problem but just bear in mind that CPUs that don't have integrated Graphics will not allow you to keyboard video Mouse into it directly you'll only be able to do it from the network and you'll have to make sure that your system's already pre-configured in order for it to appear on the network integrated Graphics of course is defined in lots of different ways if you look at modern generation Intel Core particularly 11th 12th or 13th gen these the ones if you want that serious bandwidth I discussed you will often see a prefix at the end of K or F now K means it's got integrated Graphics it means you've got that on-board graphical component that only allows you to directly interface with it but it'll also have a portion of the CPU that is precisely designed to deal with graphical data in it we use less power to handle that data conversions transcoding visual data CAD editing anything like that or you know for gameplay not really equivalent to uh server building but that integrated Graphics is better designed than using the rest of the CPU which will use raw power to get the job done and use more power to get the job done overheat and just generally be nowhere near as good as integrated Graphics now CPU that has F on board that means there is no integrated Graphics if having no integrated Graphics means not only can you not directly interface with it but if you're running graphical tasks you're going to use more power while getting it done now again you can get around it you can install a graphics card into an available pcie slot if you choose to there's also some low profile stuff that you can store via M2 but again these are really expensive not very very efficient ultimately if you're not going to plan on directly KVM it's not a problem for you class um F-series CPUs can be overclocked quite substantially now there are CPUs out there that are both F and K together or kfcpus they don't have integrated Graphics either but they do give you the option of having the higher number of calls afforded to them and that overclocking option now on the subject of cores let's talk about that again if you've been out the CPU game for a while and you saw a CPU that was eight calls four calls whatever you know in the old days that was fine but now of course have become far more nuanced and traditionally in more modern CPUs you now find um e-cores and P cores now P cores are are power chords they are the cores that are designed for raw uses they are front end system use and again you generally find those on the more powerful CPUs in the integrated Graphics ones e-cores are more efficient CPUs and they're the ones that's going to run the background stuff now your OS and the system you're running will have to be smart enough and compatible to understand the difference and use these more efficiently as they go much like in the old days of hybrid drives understanding difference between solid state and mechanical but still nonetheless knowing the difference between those calls will mean that when you see a 16 core CPU and you dig in and then find out it's eight plus eight efficiency and power you need to know whether you're going to be able to leverage those performance benefits of either of them and ultimately whether you know that CPU is going to be better for you than a CPU with fewer cores but they're all power cores and finally something I didn't really go into enough detail on on my previous videos on the John's bow and the cwwk this year and that is to do with these motherboards you can buy that arrive with the CPU the CPU fan and the ram already pre-installed now you may not be aware this has become pretty lucrative these days we're finding more and more CPUs and motherboard combos arriving on the scene from single warranty manufacturers there there's even companies like ones here in the UK um again there should be one Linked In the description that I'm going to be talking about in a future video where they have combined CPU mobile and memory all on one board ready to rock if you look at AliExpress you look at eBay there's lots of them out there where they use our motherboard CPU pre-attached they got the memory included and everything's good to go you don't have to get any um silicon gel on the fingertips at all however one and this manner comes a big surprise they work out cost him more if you buy all those components independently and you know put it together yourself you will save money it's more hassle there's always the risk of oh my God I bent one of those pins on the PS on the CPU and making sure you get the real right LGA 1700 CPU with your LGA motherboard support and getting the socket correct and getting the right heatsink on board but you can save a decent amount of money there but the other thing that really really really gets overlooked is getting a motherboard that fits inside these cases now it's hard enough that you've had to get a CPU that's compatible with the motherboard it's hard enough that you've had to get a PSU that is compatible with both the motherboard and fitting inside that case but when you find out that you have to get a motherboard of a very specific size out there then it can be a real headache now as more and more pre-made now Server Chassis are rolling out these days again on the AliExpress on your eBay and stuff like that and your Amazon and we're seeing this big gap opening between turkey similarity qnap Etc and uh DIY true Nas unrated we've got this Middle Ground of people buying pre-made Solutions and putting their own OS of choice in the middle in this Middle Ground we're seeing more and more ready to rock Nast cases straight off the shelf be available to buy but most of them either do a very poor job of telling you the motherboard that you can use or they're too General so for example the jonesbow supports ITX it's great right there's a lot of it exports in the market and a lot of mitx they're standard ITX and you've got the there's mini and there's Micro ATX this for example utilizes a micro one so a microboard by far the smallest sorry about that screeching noise it's quite close to the mic and the board inside this is absolutely freaking tiny it's normally used inside little router boxes there again for PF sense it is by far the tiniest card now the one inside this is utilizing um an M ITX board which is bigger and has a pcie slot again you can find it on the video that I talked about before this seems to be the board the mitx that's comparable with most Nas cases I've seen on the market and if you look towards even uh rack mount chassis design the small cavity they afford for the mobile to go inside they generally all still ER towards an M ITX motherboard inside now there is one exception to the rule and that is to do with something called DTX motherboards now these are more gamer focused they are stylized on the mitx design of motherboards but these are the ones that have got that big fat freaking heat sink on the rear and generally you're they're the ones you also find with better network connections there on the rear ultimately this point is simply that if you're looking at motherboards to go inside a pre-made Nas chassis and Nas enclosure that just goes sticking your own gubbins just know that in most most cases an m-i-t-a IT export or a DTX motherboard is what you're going to need so if the if the you know specifications are being too General take my word for it that's the one you're gonna find there are some ATX Boards out there which as you scale things up they've got more pcie slots but you'll generally find that they will never fit in those cavities or they won't reach the alignment of that backplane there particularly if there's pcie slots that you need to factor in but these have been the five main areas that people Overlook forget or cheap out on when going for their own DIY build I know this has been a long video and I know it's been an enormous info dump I hope someone watching this has enjoyed this video enough to feel a little bit more confident about buying the components for their first new Nas build if you need further assistance there's the free advice section genuinely free over at NAS compares the big blue button on the right side of all of our Pages alternatively there's the Discord alternatively there's the ask Nas Compares Forum again you can reach out to me reach out to Eddie it's just us here and in the description there are three builds utilizing this case that I've put together for 250 500 and a little over 750 knicker that you can check out in the jonspo N3 build we're continuing this series while looking at these bigger pre-built cases and scaling up some of the components we use so do stay tuned for that but apart from that thank you so much for watching I hope you've enjoyed this let me if you're happy if you haven't let me know as well why not other than that I'll see you next time

Channel: NASCompares

Views: 84,474

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Id: -cBXp-Ss5S0

Length: 30min 39sec (1839 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 15 2023