Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server
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Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server
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Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server
#2Home labs are always fun to build
Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server
#3As far as I can tell, building a similar system using NVMe is vastly more complicated. If you can fit everything into M.2 slots, it’s easy. Otherwise you need barely-standardized PCIe cards, backplanes, connectors ordered off a menu of enterprise things with bizarre model numbers, and possibly “RAID” cards even though you don’t actually want hardware RAID.
Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server
#4As far as I can tell, building a similar system using NVMe is vastly more complicated. If you can fit everything into M.2 slots, it’s easy. Otherwise you need barely-standardized PCIe cards, backplanes, connectors ordered off a menu of enterprise things with bizarre model numbers, and possibly “RAID” cards even though you don’t actually want hardware RAID.
You can use pcie switches on pcie x4 to 4xM.2x4 drives.
Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server
#5I also run a home NAS in a Node 304. I went with a supermicro mainboard for ECC support which means I had to swap the three fans that come with the case because the mainboard only supports PWM fans. Non-PWM fans would only spin at full speed otherwise.
Regarding the SLOG device, you probably don't need it for a file server, but if you do you can definitely free a drive bay for an HDD by just using double sided tape somewhere like on the PSU. I'm sure it's also possible to put three more HDDs above the CPU, right in front of the exhaust fan. If I had a 3D printer I would try to build something bringing the total to nine HDDs.
If you need more SATA ports but are running out of PCIe slots, you may be able to reuse an empty M.2 slot. An M.2 with two lanes of PCIe 3 gives you 5 SATA ports with an adapter[0].
Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server
#6> I see people talking about snapshotting, but I haven’t found a need for it. I already have snapshots in my restic backup solution. They’re not especially convenient, but I’ve been using restic for two years, and I only recall needing to recover data from a snapshot once.
The ease at which you can revert mistakes using ZFS snapshots is much better compared to restic. You can pretty much navigate to the correct snapshot on your live filesystem and restore whatever you need to restore.
It also makes backups easier as you can just send the snapshots to the backup device (another server or external storage device).
Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server
#7I wish there was a good guide for buying JBOD hba cards. I want to replace my drobo with all SATs ssds.
Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server
#8Thinking of doing the same for a similar scale! Thanks for sharing.
Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server
#9Nice build. I recently built my second NAS (from a used R720 from ebay). The total (without disks) is pretty similar to the build documented in this article.
Having a large NAS has had an interesting (though predictable) impact on all the computers around it: Pretty much every bit of data lives on the NAS (accessed either by CIFS, NFS, or iSCSI). When I had to reinstall Windows, it was mostly painless because all my important data and Steam games library was on a remote iSCSI disk. When I replaced the drives on my linux servers, I didn't have to backup hardly anything, as I worked almost exclusivly on NFS-mounted directories. When bringing up a new raspberry pi for projects, it also has instant access to more terabytes of storage than it could ever need.
Also, for a homelab, getting 10GBe fiber between two machines is surpringly cheap and easy. For certain workloads, it can be a noticable speed boost over 1GBe.
Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server
#10Nice article - though one misstatement is that ZFS dies not allow you add disks to a pool. It does [1] [2], by adding new vdevs. The linked issue is about adding support for expanding existing vdevs instead.
[1]: https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/man/8/zpool-add.8.htm...
[2]: https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E53394_01/html/E54801/gayrd.html