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DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

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Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

#51

Post by gforce_de »

Alive-in-2025 wrote: post #47
evanjrowley wrote: post #45

I would have chosen the i3-n305 version of that motherboard because it has In-Band ECC (IBECC) support - great for ZFS. IBECC is very underrated feature that doesn't get talked about enough. It may be available for the N150/N355, but I have never seen a confirmation.

what is the impact on performance, does it require special ram? just heard about this here

sorry for the german comment - ECC is mandatory!

Obligatorische Pastete: "16GB Ram sind Flischt, ohne wenn und aber. ECC ist nicht Flischt aber ZFS ist dafür ausgelegt. Wenn in Strandnähe Daten gelesen werden und es kommt irgendwie was in den Arbeitsspeicher, könnte eine eigentlich intakte Datei auf der Festplatte mit einem Fehler "korrigiert" werden. Also ECC ja. Das Problem bei ECC ist nicht der ECC-Speicher an sich, der nur wenig mehr als konventioneller Speicher kostet, es sind die Mutterbretter, die ECC unterstützen. Aufpassen bei AMD: Oft steht dabei, dass ECC unterstützt wird. Gemeint ist aber, dass ECC-Speicher läuft, aber die ECC-Funktion nicht genutzt wird. LOL. Die meisten MBs mit ECC sind Serverboards. Wer nichts gegen gebrauchte Hardware hat, kann z.B. mit einem alten Sockel 1155-Xeon mit Asus-Brett ein Schnäppchen machen. Ansonsten ist die Asrock Rack-Reihe zu empfehlen. Teuer, aber stromsparend. Generell Nachteil bei Serverboards: Die Bootzeit dauert eine Ewigkeit. Von Consumerboards wird man mit kurzen Bootzeiten verwöhnt, Server brauchen da oft mal 2 Minuten, bis der eigentliche Bootvorgang beginnt. Bernds Server besteht also aus einem alten Xeon, einem Asus Brett, 16GB 1333Mhz ECC-Ram und 6x 2TB-Platten in einem RaidZ2 (Raid6).6TB sind Netto nutzbar. Ich mag alte Hardware irgendwie. Ich reize Hardware gerne bis zum Gehtnichtmehr aus. Die Platten sind auch schon 5 Jahre alt, machen aber keine Mucken. Geschwindigkeit ist super, 80-100MB/s über Samba und FTP. Ich lasse den Server übrigens nicht laufen, sondern schalte ihn aus, wenn ich ihn nicht brauche. Was noch? Komression ist super. Obwohl ich haupsächlich nicht weiter komprimierbare Daten speichere (Musik, Videos), hat mir die interne Kompression 1% Speicherplatz beschert. Bei 4TB sind das ca. 40GB Platz gespart. Der Xeon langweilt sich trotzdem ein bisschen. Testweise habe ich gzip-9-Komprimierung getestet, da kam er dann schon ins Schwitzen."

Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

#52

Post by zenoprax »

Lammy wrote: post #21
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's only for deduplication. https://superuser.com/a/993019

I do like to deduplicate my BitTorrent downloads/seeding directory with my media directories so I can edit metadata to my heart's content while still seeding forever without having to incur 2x storage usage. I tune the `recordsize` to 1MiB so it has vastly fewer blocks to keep track of compared to the default 128K, at the cost of any modification wasting very slightly more space. Really not a big deal though when tal…

Have you considered "reflinks"? Supported as of [OpenZFS 2.2](https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/pull/13392).

Haven't used them yet myself but seems like a nice use case for things like minor metadata changes to media files. The bulk of the file is shared and only the delta between the two are saved.

Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

#53

Post by adastra22 »

p1necone wrote: post #39
mvkel wrote: post #37

Wait. You build a new one every -year-?! How does one establish the reliability of the hardware (particularly the aliexpress motherboard), not to mention data retention, if its maximum life expectancy is 365 days?

Looks like they built a new NAS, but kept using the same drives. Which given the number of drive bays in the NAS probably make up a large majority of the overall cost in something like this. Edit: reading comprehension fail - they bought drives earlier, at an unspecified price, but they weren't from the old NAS - I agree, when lifetimes of drives are measures in decades and huge amounts of tbw it seems pretty silly t…

MB and other elements are more concerning than the drives.

Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

#54

Post by starky »

I think the worry about power consumption is a bit overblown in the article. My NAS has an i5-12600 + Quadro P4000 and uses maybe 50% more power than the one in this article under normal conditions. That works out to maybe $4/month more cost. Given the relatively small delta, I'd encourage picking hardware based on what services you want to run.

Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

#55

Post by adastra22 »

zenoprax wrote: post #49
evanjrowley wrote: post #45

I would have chosen the i3-n305 version of that motherboard because it has In-Band ECC (IBECC) support - great for ZFS. IBECC is very underrated feature that doesn't get talked about enough. It may be available for the N150/N355, but I have never seen a confirmation.

Can you explain why ECC is great for ZFS in particular as opposed to any other filesystem? And if the data leaves the NAS to be modified by a regular desktop computer then you lose the ECC assurance anyway, don't you?

The oversimplified answer is that ZFS’ in-memory structures are not designed to minimize bitflip risk, as some file systems are. Content is hashed when written to memory cache, but it can be a long time before it then gets to disk. Very little validation is done at that point to protect against writing bad data.

Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

#56

Post by silversmith »

starky wrote: post #54

I think the worry about power consumption is a bit overblown in the article. My NAS has an i5-12600 + Quadro P4000 and uses maybe 50% more power than the one in this article under normal conditions. That works out to maybe $4/month more cost. Given the relatively small delta, I'd encourage picking hardware based on what services you want to run.

Less power, less heat. Less heat, less cooling required. At some point that allows you to go fanless, and that's very beneficial if you have to share a room with the device.

Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

#57

Post by dontlaugh »

starky wrote: post #54

I think the worry about power consumption is a bit overblown in the article. My NAS has an i5-12600 + Quadro P4000 and uses maybe 50% more power than the one in this article under normal conditions. That works out to maybe $4/month more cost. Given the relatively small delta, I'd encourage picking hardware based on what services you want to run.

It depends how much electricity costs where you live. I’m quite pleased mine idles at ~15W.

Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

#58

Post by supermatt »

zenoprax wrote: post #49
evanjrowley wrote: post #45

I would have chosen the i3-n305 version of that motherboard because it has In-Band ECC (IBECC) support - great for ZFS. IBECC is very underrated feature that doesn't get talked about enough. It may be available for the N150/N355, but I have never seen a confirmation.

Can you explain why ECC is great for ZFS in particular as opposed to any other filesystem? And if the data leaves the NAS to be modified by a regular desktop computer then you lose the ECC assurance anyway, don't you?

ZFS is about end-to-end integrity, not just redundancy. It stores checksums of data when writing, checks them when reading, and can perform automatic restores from mirror members if mismatches occur. During writes, ZFS generates checksums from blocks in RAM. If a bit flips in memory before the block is written, ZFS will store a checksum matching the corrupted data, breaking the integrity guarantee. That’s why ECC RAM is particularly important for ZFS - without it you risk undermining the filesystem’s end-to-end integrity. Other filesystems usually lack such guarantees.

Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

#59

Post by Mashimo »

ekropotin wrote: post #48
DeathArrow wrote: post #36

I wonder how many consumer level HDDs in RAID5 will take to saturate a 10Gbps connection. My napkin math says that from 1,250 MB/s we can achieve around 1,150 MB/s due to network overhead so it means about 5 Red Pro/ Ironwolf Pro (reading at about 250–260 MB/s each) in RAID5 to saturate the connection.

I though raid5 is highly discouraged

I can't remember the details, but was that not specifically for hardware raid controllers? 2000s style.

I think for home use with MDADM or raid z2 on zfs it's just gucci. It's cost effective.

Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

#60

Post by fmajid »

I upgraded my home backup server a couple of months ago to a Minisforum N5 Pro, and am very happy with it. It only has 4 3.5” drive slots, but I only use two with 2x20TB drives mirrored, and two 14TB external drives for offsite backups. The AMD AI 370 CPU is plenty fast so I also run Immich on it, and it has ECC RAM and 10G Ethernet.
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