In this video, we’re going to build a home
server that is compact, power efficient, has plenty of performance for Docker
containers, VMs, video transcoding and NAS use… and the best part – all of the
components are readily available and you won’t have to sell a kidney to build it. This build is going to be
practical, quiet, easy on the eyes and will still have lots of
space for all of your storage. So without further ado, let’s get to building! Actually no, I lied to you guys… there is going to be a further ado Namely, this message from
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video, and now, let’s get to building. For real this time The heart of this system is
an N5105 NAS board by Topton. Now as my friend Natalie says, "Um..."
"There's a lot to unpack here" This little board is powered by
a 10W quad core Jasper Lake chip, which supports H265 video transcoding,
as well as hardware virtualization and IOMMU. It also supports all the new encryption
technologies, such as AES-NI, so you’ll have no issues running Tailscale,
Wireguard and other VPNs on this thing. For the storage, we have 6 SATA
ports and two M.2 NVMe slots. And if six SATA ports somehow
aren’t enough for you, you can also get one of these M.2 to SATA
adapters for a total of eleven SATA ports. Just like a lot of other similar boards,
this one also takes laptop memory. But despite some Intel claiming that
the CPU only supports up to 16 gigs, the system also runs perfectly
fine with 32 and even 64 gigabytes. As you can see, the cooler on
my unit is slightly damaged… It’s a long story. The tiny built-in fan does get
pretty loud out of the box, which can actually be fixed by
removing the thick plastic washers between the screws and the motherboard, and replacing them with some
thinner ones, like these After doing that, and
reapplying the thermal paste, the CPU runs way cooler. Moving on to networking,
we’ve got not one, not two, but four 2.5 gig Ethernet ports. These are powered by the Intel i-226-V NICs,
and basically let you connect up to three devices to your NAS
without using a separate switch. I’m not counting the fourth one because you’ll still probably
want plug it into your router. And if 2.5 Gbit networking isn’t enough for you,
you can also turn one of the M.2 slots into a PCIe slot using a riser,
and connect a 10 gig networking card. There are also some versions of this motherboard
with one M.2 slot and one PCIe slot, so you can also go with that
if you need full-size PCIE. Do keep in mind though, that both
M.2 ports are actually PCIe Gen.3 x1, so in reality you’ll be limited
to somewhere around 7.5 Gbit/s. Which is still more than 2.5, I guess. Now with four 2.5Gbit NICs and full
support for IOMMU and virtualization, you could, theoretically, use this
machine to run your entire homelab Router, NAS, docker host, the whole thing. You probably shouldn’t do that though.. But if you really hate me
and want to see me suffer Make sure to subscribe because
god knows I will try it. Other than that, this board
also has a lot of other cool and useful features, such
as “Meker Buruner” and... “Gorge” "Hey, go..." No~ come, on, really, two Contrapoints
references in the same video? Anyway, it’s not all unicorns and rainbows,
and this system definitely has its downsides. First and foremost, the CPU performance…
definitely leaves a lot to be desired. The base model with Celeron N5105 performs
about on par with the Intel Core i3-6100, though at only a fifth of its power consumption. At the same time, this should still be
plenty for using this system as a NAS, running some Docker containers
and even a couple of VMs. And there’s also a slightly more expensive version that comes with Pentium N6005,
which performs a bit better. And finally, the second flaw of this system
is lack of support for ECC memory. Now these two cons might seem pretty significant…
That is, until you look at the price. You can get this board for as little as 160€, and for that price it has
pretty much no competition. I mean, think about it – 6
SATA ports, two M.2 NVMe slots, four 2.5 Gbit Ethernet ports,
and a super power efficient quad core CPU with
virtualization and IOMMU support… for 160€. Now I can already hear you guys asking
“what about those miniITX Erying boards with mobile CPUs?
Surely something like i5-11400H would destroy that wimpy Celeron?
And that’s for 220€!" Well, yes, the motherboard itself is 220€. It also only has one Ethernet
port and four SATA ports. And once you add the price
of a dedicated quad 2.5 gig Intel Ethernet card and an M.2 SATA controller,
you’re actually looking at somewhere around €320. And that’s for a platform with
dubious virtualization support and no proper PCIe power management. Though, spoiler alert, the latter is
kind of the case for our Celeron board as well. Now personally, I don’t use my
home server to crunch any numbers, or serve mission-critical
applications for millions of users. I do, however, run things
like Plex, Jellyfin, Deluge, the Arr-Suite, Nextcloud,
Vaultwarden, Invoice Ninja, as well as an occasional
Windows VM here and there. And the N5105 handles it like a champ. But, if you know that you
need the extra horsepower and don’t really need the
SATA or networking ports – then yeah, the Erying boards
could be a better choice. And as for the lack of ECC memory... [Ugh, I’m gonna regret this] I think the importance of ECC memory for a
personal use home server is greatly exaggerated. Now, don’t get me wrong, ECC is a very nice
feature to have, especially on a storage server. The risk of a memory error causing a significant
and permanent data corruption is pretty low, but to be fair, it’s never zero. Still, as a home user who
mostly uses their server for media storage, backups, photo
sync and personal applications You’re more likely to lose your
data to a hard drive failure, a power outage or even a human error. That being said, if you do have
a mission critical use case in which you absolutely cannot afford
to lose the data on your hard drives, and don’t want to take any chances Then yes, you probably should look
into a platform that supports ECC. The problem is, getting a
power efficient ITX motherboard and CPU combo with ECC support
and all the same features as this NAS board from Topton for a similar price…
is pretty much impossible. Old server gear is cheap, but it’s
also super loud and very power hungry. You can buy an old Dell
server for as little as $100, but you’ll also pay twice its price
in utility bills after a year. And probably get tinnitus. And newer server gear is much more expensive. This motherboard with a low power Xeon, 6 SATA slots and 2 Ethernet ports
will set you back 420€. Nice. And here’s the kicker – the
Xeon D-1520 performs even worse than the Celeron N5105 and also
doesn’t have onboard graphics which means no hardware
transcoding in Plex and Jellyfin. There are like three motherboards
in existence that are miniITX, power efficient, have a buttload
of SATA ports, support ECC and don’t cost an arm and a leg And they’re pretty much impossible to find. Then there are Ryzen CPUs, which
do unofficially support ECC memory. However, the AMD AM4 CPUs tend to be less
efficient at idle than the Intel CPUs. You can check out this blog post from Hatted
Squirrel if you want to know more about that. So, if you’re building a
server for serious business, if you handle large amounts
of irreplacable sensitive data and don’t want to take any chances with it.. And if you know that the
server you’re building will earn more money than you invest into it... Then yes, a server-grade platform
with ECC support is the way to go. But if you’re a home lab user whose
use cases are media management, backups and personal use... Then, in my humble opinion,
ECC memory is not a must have. We’re building a home server here,
not an enterprise grade database cluster. Now that that’s out of the way,
let’s talk about the memory itself. For this build, I’ll be using 32 gigs
of DDR4 laptop memory from Crucial. 16 gigs should be enough if you’re running
something like Unraid or OpenMediaVault, But if you want to use ZFS,
or maybe even run Proxmox with a couple of VMs, you
might want to go for 32 gigs. You can get a 16 gig kit for 38€
or a 32 gig kit for 66€ You can also check out used laptop memory as well. But whether you buy it new or used,
make sure to run Memtest on your sticks. For the case, I’m gonna be using Fractal Node 304. As you can see, mine looks
slightly different from stock. It has a custom 3D printed front
panel which fits a 200mm Noctua fan. I’ve also replaced one of the hard
drive caddies with a custom bracket That can fit up to six 2.5" SSDs. Still, even without these mods,
the Node 304 is a beautiful case. It can fit six 3.5" hard drives,
a full-size ATX power supply And a dual slot full-size PCIe card. Even though Node 304 doesn’t
have some ‘nice to have’ features Like hot swap hard drive bays or microATX support,
it’s also pretty cheap and easily available. You can get it for 100€ new, or even as little as 35€
used on websites like eBay. Power supply is a pretty
important part of the build, especially if you focus on power efficiency. However, the problem is that
most of the PC power supplies on the market are pretty
inefficient at lower loads. Which is understandable – a
typical home PC doesn’t run 24/7 And when it runs, it’s going to be under load –
either gaming, rendering, or crunching some numbers. However, for a power efficient
home server that runs 24/7, lower load efficiency is very important. Most of the time, our server is
gonna be drawing less than 40W. Compare it to a gaming PC, which
could easily draw 500+W during gaming, and I think you get the idea. Because of that, a lot of homelab enthusiasts
use these little power supplies called PicoPSU. These can be plugged into a
laptop power brick and pretty much obliterate any ATX power supply
when it comes to efficiency. However, the catch is that the PicoPSUs
also don’t have a lot of power connectors. Sure, you can use SATA or Molex
splitters to connect more devices, but that’s janky at best,
and a fire hazard at worst. So instead, we’re gonna be
using a Corsair RM550x 2021. I got mine for 130€ and for that
price it’s a pretty nice unit. It comes with modular cables and
has a zero RPM mode for the fan. But this power supply also hides a little secret. After buying one online, an Unraid user Marc Gutt looked at its its low load efficiency and found
out that it’s almost as efficient as a PicoPSU. This is actually one of
the reasons why I went with Node 304 for the case, instead
of something like Jonsbo N2. Right now, the SFX and FlexATX power supplies which you usually find in
small form factor builds, are simply not even close to the RM550x
when it comes to lower load power efficiency. And even if you’re not going
to buy this exact power supply, it is way easier to find an decent, inexpensive and quiet ATX pee ess you than
an SFX one, let alone FlexATX. And with way more power connectors than a PicoPSU,
I think it’s a clear winner. For the hard drives, I went with these
‘Recertified New’ Exos drives from Seagate. These are pretty much the best bang for
your buck drives in Europe right now, and go for as little as 13.21€ per terabyte. 'Recertified New' basically means
that a drive has been professionally refurbished by Seagate and is
now being sold at a discount. I got three of 16 Tb Exos
x18 drives for 219€ each, which is 40€ cheaper than their new price of 258€. As of making this video, you can
also get a 12 tb model for 159€, which is 82€ cheaper than the new price. Despite being 7200RPM Enterprise drives, these are actually pretty
quiet and power efficient. And since they’re refurbished
by Seagate themselves, they also come with a one year warranty. So if you’re on a budget, definitely don’t
sleep on refurbished enterprise drives. These would normally have a way longer
lifespan than new consumer drives, and as long as you buy them
from a trustworthy seller, it’s definitely a good option. Another great option if you’re building a home NAS
are 3.5" external drives. These are basically regular SATA
hard drives in a trenchcoat, and cost way cheaper than internal
drives of the same capacity. You can normally open up a drive
like that without causing any damage, which means that you also
get to keep your warranty. This process is called ‘shucking’ and
it’s a great way to save on your storage. Two of the most popular
drive models for shucking are Western Digital My Book and
Western Digital Elements. Right now you can get a 12TB
WD Elements drive for 167€ This one is a display unit,
according to the seller, and you can also often get
customer returned drives with like, minor scratches and only a few power on hours. With 8TB and above, you are getting CMR drives, but anything below that will be
SMR, so do keep that in mind. You probably don’t want SMR drives in a NAS,
especially if you use ZFS or RAID, And besides, higher capacity
drives usually provide a better value when you look
at the price per terabyte. That being said, times change
and if you’re watching this video one, two or three years after it came out,
none of what I said probably applies anymore. So here’s a website that I personally use
to monitor hard drive prices, diskprices.com. You can choose between different countries
and it also sorts by “price per terabyte”. Which is basically thee way to
find the best bang for your buck. Another good place for research
are the Backblaze drive statistics, which they’ve been publishing since 2015. Here you can find very
detailed statistics about a lot of hard drive models and their failure rates, which could be very useful if
you’re shopping for a new drive. Last but not least, and I
really want to stress that Whether you go for an expensive
enterprise drive or a cheap shucked one Don’t trust your hardware and
always make offsite backups. Now let’s talk about flash storage. As of making this video, the
SSD prices are in a freefall, and right now you can get a 1
TB drive for as little as 45€, or a 2 TB drive for 90€. Now I’m not going to get into reasons
as to why the prices are falling, I’ll leave that to serious tech analysts… But what I will say, is that you should definitely get a couple of SSDs for your
NAS if you can afford it. You can use them as cache
drives, either with ZFS L2Arc, or for tiered caching in Unraid, and they can dramatically speed up
all file operations on your server. You can get a couple of 1TB
Crucial MX500 SSDs for 50€ each, and then add more drives as your server grows. I’ll be using WD Red SSDs here,
because I got them for free for a different video, but you can definitely get
away with cheaper drives. And as for the bootdrive These days you can get a 256
GB SSD for as little as 14€. And yes, it’s obviously gonna
be a slower DRAMless drive, but we don’t really need any
kind of crazy performance here. And even if you’re running Unraid,
which technically runs from a USB stick, it’s still recommended that you have a
separate volume for VMs and Docker data You probably don’t want to put
that on your hard drive array. Since this motherboard has two M.2 slots,
you can also use two SSDs in a mirrored array. That way, if one drive fails, the system will
still keep running until you get a replacement. And yes, as usual, RAID is not
a backup, so please make backups and make sure that you can actually restore them. Alright, let’s build it! Building in this case is pretty easy, especially since we don’t
have a tower cooler that would otherwise make the cable
management a bit of a pain. Speaking of the cables, I can
definitely recommend these short and low profile SATA cables from Aliexpress. These come in four-cable and six-cable variants, and are way easier to manage
than thicker regular SATA cables. One of the most important things in a
home server for me is power efficiency. Energy in Europe is expensive,
and in a lot of cases, buying one of those old dual-socket Xeon monsters
off of eBay is not even worth it economically. Even if you don’t mind the noise. And in terms of power efficiencty
our build definitely doesn’t disappoint. With all three hard drives spinning, the overall system power consumption
measured at the wall is 33 W. After two minutes of inactivity, the Seagate Exos drives go
into the head parking mode. In this mode, the system consumes around 26.5 W. And finally, with all 3 drives in the
sleep mode and completely spun down, the power consumption goes down to just 18 W. But what if we fill our server with 6 hard drives? Well, in that case, we’re looking at
48 W with all hard drives spinning, 35 watts with the hard
drives in head parking mode, and around 19 to 20 watts with
hard drives in spindown mode. Now believe it or not, this
build could go much lower, if not for the onboard JMicron SATA
controller that’s used by the motherboard. This controller doesn’t
support PCIe power management, which prevents the system from
entering more power efficient C-States. Moreover, executing powertop —auto-tune
basically locks up the entire system – great. Still, 18 watts is definitely nothing to scoff at,
and building a system with the same set of features and a compatible SATA controller
will basically negate any potential power savings in terms of costs.
Trust me, I’ve tried. And here’s the total build
cost, without the storage I think 492.44€ is a pretty
good price for a 6-bay NAS with 32 gigs of RAM, quad 2.5 gig
networking and virtualization support. And just for reference, here’s the total build cost with all
the silly case mods that I’ve done. To be clear, I wouldn’t recommend doing them if you’re just trying to build
a practical budget home server This was more of a passion project for me
and these mods are anything but cost effective, especially if you don’t have a 3D printer. Still putting this out there
for transparency’s sake, but the first build is still the one
that I would actually recommend building. For comparison, Synology’s
6-bay NAS, DS1621+, costs 952€. So for twice the price of our
build, you get an AMD Ryzen CPU, which performs slightly better than the
Celeron N5105 and comes with ECC support. As well as a more compact
package with hot swap drive bays. However, it also comes with gigabit
Ethernet ports instead of 2.5 gig, and most importantly –
basically locks you into the Synology DSM for your operating system. Unlike some NAS boxes from
vendors like TerraMaster, installing a 3rd party OS on a
Synology NAS is basically impossible. On the other hand, if you have a self-built NAS,
you could actually install Synology’s DSM on it And basically get all the
benefits of a user-friendly NAS-centric operating system
without having to pay the premium. Or just stick to TrueNAS,
Unraid or OpenMediaVault. And even when it comes to power efficiency,
which is often considered to be one of the main advantages of a pre-built NAS
Our build still does better! Now, after my last video,
some of you guys took issue with me not including storage in the total build cost. So here are some build templates
that should give you an idea With 16 terabytes of usable
storage and a 1TB of SSD cache, both in RAID1, this build will set you back 1047€ With 24 terabytes of usable
storage and a 2TB SSD cache, both in RAID5, you’re looking at 1144€. Here, we’re using 12TB drives instead of 16, which are a bit cheaper when
it comes to price per terabyte. Finally, 32 terabytes of usable
storage and a 3TB SSD cache, both in RAID5, will set you back 1385,44€. So yeah, there you have it guys. We built a nice, practical and
budget-friendly home server which you can use to run
Unraid, TrueNAS, OpenMediaVault, or even a hypervisor like Proxmox. I hope you guys enjoyed this video,
and as usual, I’d like to thank my Patrons
