I’m building a NAS for the first time on my own, so I wanted to share the story so far here.
I’m not a stranger to custom builds, in fact I don’t think I ever bought an assembled PC (not counting second hand 386 box a million years ago). But this is my first small, low power build, so it’s not perfect, I already ran into a wall (more later).
I base the build on an AsRock mini-ITX board, the CPU is included, it’s passively cooled, low power consumption but still powerful for a NAS. I’m sticking it into a Node 304 Fractal Design case. Here’s the full list of parts I got:
- AsRock J4125-ITX board with a Celeron 4125 (4-core CPU)
- 8GB DDR4 RAM (a Crucial kit)
- a 500GB NVMe SSD (which I can’t use)
- a couple of Seagate IronWolf 4TB drives
- 90W PicoPSU and some no-name power brick
- Fractal Design Node 304 mini-ITX case.
I planned to have an SSD for OS, these two disks for my photography and media, and then later on expand with more storage (preferably SSD, when I can afford it).
As mentioned, I messed up: the M2 slot on the motherboard is a “Key E” slot. I never bothered with these keys before, so I didn’t know that a Key E slot does not have a SATA protocol, it won’t take my SSD.
Another thing, the PicoPSU is a 20-pin power supply, and the board has a 24-pin slot. It should still be fine, the specs say that this is still okay, but I’ll have to see. According to my back-of-the-napkin calculations, 90 Watts should be enough power for the mobo and CPU, the SSD and the two spinning disks.
Anyway I’ll get a regular SATA SSD tomorrow and see how it’s shaping up. Let me know if you want me to post more on my progress/end result or if you have any questions.
To people negging about the CPU being under powered:
File sharing, media management, a couple of services for a handful of clients… It’s perfectly fine.
At 10W in with a tiny footprint it’s great when you don’t need any more computing power and next winter electricity bill drops.
Not everybody needs a full racks of decommissioned Xeons and arrays on arrays of RAIDs that draw juice like an industrial fruit press regardless it’s in use or not.
Yep, that was my intention. First, it’s low power, so it can be always-on with only a small impact on the power bill. Second, it’s only gonna serve a few things - my photography hobby and media library, and maybe a service or two will come with time. If I need other services, I put them on a Hetzner box and they’re much better taken care of.
I’ve done my share of sysadmin work and even a bit of server-room maintenance, I don’t want a full-time, or even a part time job. This is mostly gonna sit in the corner, and be quiet. If the prices matched, I would have probably just gone with QNap or Synology, but this way I get the NAS and the disks for the same price.
Ha. I thought that piece of red was some sort of meat in a vacuumpack
Yes, it didn’t inspire confidence when it arrived so, but it’s actually a tiny PSU, it’s essentially all bolted onto the power connector :)
Yeah that makes more sense. But with power, better a bigger block than just enough power. I read somewhere that a powerunit works better if it has more left then just enough
Well, yes, kind of. More power means the PSU or the power adapter is heating up, generating more losses. Closer to their top power, it’s also a bit spikier. You have a bigger reserve for spikes.
The downside is a slightly higher power draw (in absolute values, it’s negligible, but in comparison, it can be a double-digit percentage difference).
I’ve been reading a bit, and I believe that my setup won’t exceed 50 Watts, maybe a bit more if I add two more spinning disks. It should be quite a good match, I think.
Can you let us know your price when its all said and done? I just bought and set up a QNAS and am interested in a comparison.
Sure, here’s the breakdown:
AsRock J4125-ITX -> 120,62€ Crucial 8GB RAM kit -> 19,90€ 2 x Seagate IronWolf 4TB -> 2 x 114,99€ Samsung 870 EVO SSD 500GB -> 31,41€ (I originally ordered an NVMe one that cost 29€). Fractal Design Node 304 -> 91,89€ PicoPSU -> 35,95€ No-name Power Adapter (220V to 12V) -> 12,99€ Molex-2x Sata -> 9,99€ (there is a ~1€ option, but I wanted a nicer cable for some cable management.
A few cables that I had. Total: 552,73€
I wanted to get a 4-bay NAS, and QNAP, Synology or Asustor would be a bit less, but without the disks. Also, I wanted an x86 CPU, for potential future use. This way I turned out a little cheaper, and it is a bit more flexible.
What OS do you plan on using?
I’d like to do a really basic NAS build which is just a PC with 2 drives in RAID 1, and some room to run a few services in the future.
- dedicated game servers
- Home Automation service
- far future - old GPU to run a local AI
I’m assuming some kind of Linux-Based OS, but I’m not sure which one to go with that would be easy for a Linux Novice.
I plan to try the OpenMediaVault first. For my use - a lot less for services and dynamic changes and a lot more for sitting in the closet quietly - it’s good enough. And I can still dig into the internals if I wanted to.
And with OMV I can also teach my non-techy wife and kids how to add themselves more disk space :)
These kinds of posts are very helpful, thanks!
The Celeron gave me pause, because I remember them from way back as being underpowered CPUs for cheaper laptops. Seems like they would drag down performance a bit on a new build, especially for CPU intensive media management? Unless the situation is different with newer Celerons and they’re much better for performance?
My old HP laptop was referred to as having celery for a CPU. It was about capable of using Chrome without having a breakdown.
Better than having a potato as a CPU, I s’pose
Good thing I’m not gonna run Chrome on this :)
Well, look at these few things:
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Modern CPUs, even Celerons, are powerful. People are driving a lot of workload even on ARM CPUs, and this is a proper 4-core x64 CPU. I mean, look at your phone, it’s most likely doing a lot of full-hd media, right? And it’s doing just fine.
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Most commercially-available Home/Small Office NAS systems, by Synology, Asustor, QNAP and others, they have either CPUs in this class, or weaker, ARM CPUs. I’m not gonna be sitting at this box. I have 3 desktops and 3 laptops around the house for work - this is gonna be mostly storage.
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My planned media management workload is a bit different than media processing. I mostly want to serve files around, maybe transcode something in the background. I don’t plan to watch movies off of this (yet). I have a 4-core Hetzner VPS that is similar in power to this, and it’s driving something like 4-5 docker containers and still serving all the files.
I think it’s gonna be fine, but we shall see.
Yeah, that’s fair, I have an Odroid HC2 with an arm32 server which easily handles Plex atreaming, qB, *arrs, etc. I think it’s just nostalgic prejudice on my part! I don’t doubt that it’ll handle your workload just fine.
I also didn’t think much of them, but when I compare this with off-the-shelf Synology or QNAP (in the consumer-grade, like I’m building), the Celeron is a beast :)
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Looks like a really cool build! Is 90w gonna be enough for a couple of spinning HDD?
Yes, the specs say less then 5W per HDD. Even if I had older and hungrier disks at 10W each, it’s still good. The CPU is consuming about 10 watts, the rest of the board, let’s say another 10. Even if I fill all six HDD slots that the case has room for, I think it would work.
I went this route but with louder cooling as it’s mainly sitting in a closet, and I’m glad I did. The extra space keeps the drives cooler and I was able to add on a PCI M2 card without too much trouble.
Plus since it’s just a PC case you can gut it entirely and have standard parts to do complete up grades, so you don’t lose your case stickers.
I thought about it, but I got rid of a lot of my electronic junk in the recent years and would have to buy everything from scratch anyway. So I went with the “small and silent and low-power” route. I also think it’s going to live in a closet in my home office as well :)
Any reason you chose that cpu?
Yes, in fact! Two main reasons.
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I wanted low-power, this is mostly gonna sit in the closet and serve files around. Even ARM CPUs like the RasPi can do that. But I didn’t want it to be too weak, in case I wanted a simple service or two, this still has extra oomph. This isn’t too powerful, but it is a 64-bit x86 CPU.
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I also wanted some ports. This has 4 SATA ports. It’s supposed to be a NAS. It has a Gbit ethernet - I don’t have a Gbit network at home so this is good enough for now, and I can expand it somewhat. It has USBs, expansion slots etc.
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those two combined resulted in a few selections, AsRock’s mini-ITX boards with integrated CPUs are quite good choices in this space.
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I wanted low power consumption. I could have gone with a slightly stronger J5040-ITX perhaps, but it’s also using just slightly more power.
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it’s also cheaper, the mobo with the CPU cost me 120€. The j5040 I mentioned would be a bit more - not a lot but still noticable.
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I wanted silent, and this board and CPU is passively cooled. If I had money, I would get SSDs for storage as well (less power, less noise) but it’s a LOT more expensive.
I know there are other CPUs in this space but in the end you have to pick one so I did.
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That’s the same exact case I chose for my nas
How did you find it for cable management?
Pretty terrible tbh
Node 304 is a solid case. Used for my last itx build.
Yes, I like it a lot. FD has this niche and does a good job.
Enjoy the ride! I too have been building PCs for a long time (since the 90s in my case) and went down the rabbit hole of NAS / self hosting starting about 7 years ago.
In that time I went from a Bitfenix Portal SFF case, to a Deep Silence 6, to an 18U cabinet… so fun and lots of learning.
Oh, I am enjoying it, but I didn’t expect to start learning already. I thought I’ll pick up a thing or two about the software side of things though, but most of the stuff I’ve been doing already for a long time. But yes, it’s a deep rabbit hole.
How do you like the case so far?
Ive been considering making a custom NAS myself but, struggling to find one that seems ideal for me.
I like the case a lot. It surprised me as it was bigger than expected and than it looked like, but I should have seen it coming. For one, it has room for a full-blown PSU (and I have the PicoPSU), and for two, I picked it because it has room for 6 3.5" HDDs.
But it’s still pretty small, it’s nice enough that my wife would let me keep it in a living room :)
I have the same case for my SFF work pc. Its great, but the front dust grill can be a pain to clean and service.
For the M.2 slot. I believe the E key is for WiFi modules. However, you should be able to buy an adapter for M key. Something like thisSintech M.2 (NGFF) NVME SSD to M2 A/E Key WiFi Port with 20cm Cable https://amzn.eu/d/3JG3dhO ( YMMV - I’ve never used this setup for a boot drive before, please do your research before purchasing!)
In my opinion, I would still recommend purchasing a standard SATA ssd. If you find the nvme adapter works and you can have it as your boot drive, you could always use the SATA ssd as a cache store for the spinning rust
Thanks! I ordered a SATA SSD already, and I did plan to read about the E key slot later, but for now I’m good. The board has 4 SATA slots, so I will either have to have an USB OS disk or an adapter like this, but for now I’ll just go with what I know.
Do you know what are the speeds like on that Sintech or similar adapter? I don’t really need NVMe speeds, it’s a simple OS disk, but I wouldn’t like to go down to something bellow regular SSD speeds.
Good luck with those Celeron CPUs. I owned a bunch of PCs running those and they are essentially space heaters that can do math.
They are perfectly fine for a home NAS.
That is why I bought a few Ryzen powered Mini PCs. They have plenty of computational power and they are also power efficient.
I also wanted some Ryzens, but my requirements were different. I did not want so much computational power, as much as I wanted low power. Combined with the price and availability, this works good enough for mne. We’ll see in the long run.
The machines I use pull less than 100w at full load. There is another variant that pulls less than 50. They use the laptop chips (HX/45W or U/15W)
Oh, I don’t want this to be a PC. I have plenty of CPU power for what I do, this has a different purpose.
I’m not planning to run anything much on those Celerons - it’s mostly just a file server. People do that with a RasPi - a 4-core CPU is going to blow it out of the water I think.
