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Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

mtlynch.io

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Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#71

Post by srinathkrishna »

mtlynch wrote: post #49

Author here. I consider myself an intermediate homelabber and a TrueNAS beginner. I just built my first NAS server, so wrote this to capture everything I wish I'd known at the start. I hope it's helpful for anyone else thinking about building their first NAS server. Any questions or feedback about the post are more than welcome.

Just wanted to share my appreciation for not just this post but all your work in recent times! Been following your trail since your post about Google promos and the set of useful projects you've been working on since then.

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#72

Post by sandreas »

Building your own NAS Server by hand may be a nice project, but if you would like to get something up and running quickly, you should consider prebuild servers like Dell T* series or HP Microserver. It is real server hardware, supporting ECC RAM and by far less work to build, often providing (semi-)professional remote management.

If you plan to build a budget NAS and enough room is not a problem, I personally would recommend to get an old and used Dell T20 Xeon E3-1225v3 with min. 16GB ECC DDR3 RAM, 2x10TB Seagate Exos ZFS RAID and a bootable USB Stick with TrueNAS or if you prefer Linux, TrueNAS Scale / OpenMediaVault.

If room IS a problem, you could get a HP Microserver Gen8 or higher with a Xeon the config above.

- Server Cost: 150 Bucks

- Total Cost: 650 Bucks (150 for server, 500 for HDD)

- Power Consumption: 33W Idle, 60W Heavy File Transfer

- Silent enough without modding the fans

- Ethernet-Transfer-Speed: 110MB/s on 30% System Load

I do not own a 10Gbit ethernet card, but I'm pretty sure, transfer speeds with 10Gbit would be acceptable, too.

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#74

Post by fuzzy2 »

627467 wrote: post #13

How do you handle backups of such amount of data?

Buy another, use ZFS send/receive. It's only double the price! Better yet, put it elsewhere (georedundancy). With ZFS encryption, the target system need not know about the data.

For critical data though I use Borg and a Hetzner StorageBox.

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#75

Post by Macha »

vladvasiliu wrote: post #65
Macha wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is performance, especially with regards to load times, if your steam library is mounted remotely? I ask because the difference between a SSD and a hard drive can be massive in this regards, so I'd be really interested to know if the network latency is also a comparable hit.

I'm not a hardcore gamer by any means, but I really wonder how much influence drives actually have on games. My gaming computer had an old SATA SSD (Samsung 840 Evo IIRC). Some games took ages to load (particularly Fallout 4). I switched to a much faster NVME drive, and subjectively, it's not any faster loading games. I'd say this was a very underwhelming purchase.

There's certainly diminishing returns between "an SSD" and "a faster SSD" (unless the slower one is DRAMless or QLC), but hard drive to SSD is still a big gulf

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#76

Post by the_only_law »

jazzythom wrote: post #73

Quoted post unavailable.

> who needs to store 32tb of data?

People hosting large private media libraries, I assume. Think people eschew music/movie streaming services and instead download FLACs/videos and stream those over their local network.

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#77

Post by bombcar »

memcg wrote: post #43
planb wrote: post #22

Thanks for including energy usage in the article. I carry USB-C SSDs around the house for backups and storage of archived files. Of course this is a bit of a hassle and I played with the idea of either buying or building a NAS. My current standby consumption for all computer stuff (access points, router, switches, a dozen or so microcontrollers and various SmartHome stuff, but not TVs, running computers or gaming con…

I agree and plan to buy a Kill A Watt P4460 meter. My HPE Gen 9 servers were free, but I still would like to know the operating cost of a single server.

Some of that off-lease equipment idles pretty low - be sure to check the bios for all “energy saving” options.

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#78

Post by benlivengood »

About 7 years ago there was an Amazon sale ($300) on Lenovo TS140 towers with the low-powered Xeon chip and ECC RAM and 4 drive bays. Ever since I've been unable to find a similar price point for the same quality, but wanted a backup server. I recently got a Raspberry Pi 4 (8GB model) and external USB hard drive (8TB) mirrored with a s3backer volume on backblaze B2 for about $300 total, and as a backup server it's fast enough (performance limited by the Internet speed to B2) and probably idles at 10W-15W.

One of the nice benefits of ZFS native encryption + s3backer is that if I had a total outage locally and needed to recover some files quickly I could mount the s3backer-based zpool from any machine, decrypt the dataset, and pull the individual files out of a filesystem. It's also a weird situation with cloud providers that convenient network-attached block storage is ~10X the price of object storage at the moment but performance can be similar using s3backer.

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#79

Post by kalleboo »

NicoJuicy wrote: post #28

> I chose raidz1. With only a handful of disks, the odds of two drives failing simultaneously is fairly low. Only if you buy different hard drives or at least from different production batches. I had a lot of trouble on the same premise and I won't make that mistake again. Edit: He mentioned it though ( a bit later in the article) > The problem is that disks aren’t statistically independent. If one disk fails, its ne…

> I had a lot of trouble on the same premise and I won't make that mistake again.

Please elaborate, I'd love to hear your story!

I hear a lot of advice around raid/z-levels and it often seems backed up by shaky math that doesn't seem to be backed up by reality (like the blog posts that claim that a rebuild of an array of 8 TB drives will absolutely have hard read errors, no exceptions, and yet monthly ZFS scrubs pass with flying colors?)

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#80

Post by dhzhzjsbevs »

mtlynch wrote: post #49

Author here. I consider myself an intermediate homelabber and a TrueNAS beginner. I just built my first NAS server, so wrote this to capture everything I wish I'd known at the start. I hope it's helpful for anyone else thinking about building their first NAS server. Any questions or feedback about the post are more than welcome.

Did similar recently.

Some suggestions for anyone else looking to do the same:

i3 runs a bit cooler than ryzen, still 8 threads. 8tb WD blues (they're SMR at 8 and up). You can find Atx boards with 8 sata ports and dual nvme slots for caching / fast pools.

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