Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

If you are not after speed, then you can do a redundant array of cheap nodes. Instead of using raid, just shove in an 8-12tb disk in a number of thin clients.

The key is that they spend most of the time turned off.

https://imgur.com/a/JqbBN1p

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/dLhNvf

I used a Supermicro MB and ECC RAM. It's not much more expensive and it's nice having IPMI. I personally think it's crazy to forego ECC. The SAS controller, expander, and drives were used, everything else was new. Prices have gone up. The new parts were $638 at the time. The drives were ~$20/ea. The HBA and expander were ~$85 for both. After the fans, cables, extra drive cage and brackets, total cost was around $1K. This hardware is all supported out-of-the-box by TrueNAS. I haven't done the math to figure out when the cost of running this will exceed having purchased higher capacity drives.

This is what a typical used SAS drive looks like. 30K hours hours but very few on/off cycles. Zero defect list:

https://pastebin.com/WcUYX4JR

The failed SMART test turned out to be a firmware issue. I had to update the firmware on all the drives. That was a bit of an adventure:

https://pastebin.com/j3AGX0xN

A few drives arrived with a non-zero defect list or otherwise failed burn-in. I contacted the seller on eBay and they sent me replacements w/o any fuss. I'm not necessarily recommending used SAS drives, but I'm not recommended against them either. I will recommend the serverbuilds forum for generally good advice on all this. I think this post got me started:

https://forums.serverbuilds.net/t/another-nas-killer-4-0-bui...

The current NAS killer version is 5.0:

https://forums.serverbuilds.net/c/builds/18

At the beginning of the year 0.35€/kWh was a good estimate. An extra 10W for one year then costs about 30€.

I get the "recycled" motivation, but at that point you might be wasting lots of electricity (and as a result also money).

- ZFS is pretty amazing in it's abilities, with it ushering in the age of software RAID over hardware RAID

- ZFS shouldn't be limited to FreeBSD. The Linux port has come quite a long way. I'd advise you to use PPA over repo though, as many key features are missing from the version on repos.

- TrueNAS is more targeted towards enterprise applications. If you want good utility as a home user then give Proxmox or the like a look. Then you can make it into more than just a NAS (if you're open to it).

- If you want to make things even more simple then consider something like UnRAID.

- ZFS' snapshotting can really shine on a virtualization server application, with the ability to revert KVM VMs to a previous state in a matter of seconds. Lookup Jim Salter's (great dude) Sanoid project to see a prime example.

- I don't recall why, but I've heard that RAIDZ should be avoided, in favor of stripped mirrors.