Hi, I did a lot of research over the last few weeks but im still very new to this topic so i would be glad if somebody would take a look at my build and point out some flaws or recommendations.
What is your budget?
At first it was 1000€ (drives included) but i highered a bit, my current build costs around ~1200€ and im still ok with that but i dont want to go significantly higher.
How many drives do you want your server to be able to support and how much capacity do you need?
I thought alot about that and im OK with the 6 drives that the Node 304 can hold. I will start with 4 drives, which gives me 24TB minus 6TB for parity. That should be enough for the foreseeable future and then i can still easily add another two drives. When the 6 drive setup still isnt enough in the far future im totally OK with upgrading the whole setup and get a new Case, MoBo and so on.
Is expandability important to you? If so, what's your long term goal?
This is allready partially answered in the previous question. I like the ability to add another two drives but that should be enough for a long time. I'm not willing to get a bigger case just to be able to add more drives in 6 years or something.
What is your use case? Are you interested in running any unRAID Add Ons? If so, which ones? Be specific.
Pure network storage for movies and a backup of my Computer is the main use case here. I want to experiment with dockers like plex, piHole ,syncthing, OpenVPN and stuff like that but that will not be the main use case and i dont want to spend much more on a better CPU.
If i will use plex, one video stream at a time will be enough and i think this CPU is able to handle that.
I dont want to run VMs, i know i would need a better CPU and more RAM for that.
Power consumption is very important to me. At first i planned to use a Atom CPU but then i learned that a modern Coffee Lake CPU will use about the same power in idle, is that correct? I like the idea of having some head room for stuff like plex but also having a low power consumption in idle mode.
I know i have chosen consumer grade hardware, the first NAS software i looked into was FreeNAS and i looked into server grade stuff like supermicro boards and ECC RAM but i learned that this is not really needed for a home use NAS for 1-3 users and replaceable data on it. Data that is really important to me and not replaceable will additionally be saved to other places like external HDD and maybe some cloud. I know that this hardware will die at some point but given the fact that this is my first NAS and its not ment to hold forever, thats OK for me. I still hope i will get alot of years out of it and i dont have to replace everything at the day the warranty is over.
Do you want to run green/low power drives or faster 7200 rpm drives? If you don't have a specific need for 7200 rpm drives, then choose green drives. What do you plan to run for hard drives?
I think WD Reds will be a solid choise.
Do you have any spare parts laying around that you would like to apply towards your build? This includes drives.
No spare Parts, need to buy the whole setup.
TLDR - Main Goals:
- Low Power Consumption
- 4-6 drives with RAID5-type redundancy
- Use Case: Casual Home Use Network Storage and some spare processing power to play around with some Dockers but in a very Limited way
- Budget 1000€ - 1200€
- Low noise level but not silent
The Build: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/K8xgQZ
CPU: Intel - Pentium Gold G5400 3.7GHz Dual-Core Processor
Motherboard: ASRock - H370M-ITX/ac Mini ITX LGA1151 I know i could get a cheaper board when i switch to Micro ATX but i like the case and it only fits Mini-ITX
RAM: G.Skill - Value 8GB (1 x 8GB) DDR4-2400 Memory
HDD: 4x Western Digital - Red 6TB 3.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive
Case: Fractal Design - Node 304 Mini ITX
PSU: SeaSonic - 450W 80+ Gold Certified Semi-Modular ATX
Fans: 1x Noctua - NF-A14 PWM 2x Noctua - NF-A9 PWM 1x InLine 33328Y Y-Adapter for 4-Pin Fans CPU Cooler: Stock
USB Stick for OS: Kingston DataTraveler SE9 16GB, USB-A 2.0 (DTSE9H/16GB)