Feedback on NAS Build - LGA1151

[Mahmood]

Hi all! This is my first post in this forum and I'm looking to build my first NAS.
We have WD 24TB My Cloud EX4100 EX4 but it is very slow and would like to have a NAS my own.

 

My use case:

- Archive important family photos and videos(Converted VHS, iPhone video, and h264 from mirrorless camera).

- Plex (I will probably need transcoding as I will be streaming from a smart TV).

- Experiment with dockers (Plex, Sonarr, radarr, PiHole). not interested in VMs

 

 

What is your budget?
Around ~$1300 with drives.

How many drives?
At least 4 drives

how much capacity?
2x18TB (Unraid Single Parity) + 2x500GB SSD for cache pool

Is expandability important to you? what's your long term goal?
I think up to 36TB of usable storage would be more than enough.

Do you have any spare parts?
(1x Samsung EVO 860 500gb)
 

 

Draft list

 

Mobo: Fujitsu D3644-B

CPU: i3-8100 (locally used for $54)

RAM: Crucial CT16G4WFD8266

HDD: 2x Seagate Ironwolf Pro 18TB

SSD: 2x 870 EVO SATA 2.5" SSD 500GB
Case: Cooler Master N300 Or Meshify 2 XL - Fractal design
PSU: be quiet! Pure Power 11 400W

Side Notes:

- I'm having hard time looking Fujitsu D3644-B stock, can anyone advise if they have expiernce with inpexopcion?
- Although watt rate in my country is relatively low ($0.048/kWh), I would like power draw to be reasonable.
- 

Looking for your feedback!

Edited February 9, 2023 by Mahmood

[Decto]

25 minutes ago, Mahmood said:

Hi all! This is my first post in this forum and I'm looking to build my first NAS.
We have WD 24TB My Cloud EX4100 but it is very slow and would like to have a NAS my own.
 

 

The My Cloud EX4100 should be capable to saturate the gigabit connection.

if you consider this slow, you are not likely to get a significant speed up with Unraid unless you add a 2.5Gb, 10Gb network cards etc.

Even then spinning HDD would not be more than ~ 1.5x faster. 

 

18TB drives take a long time (>1 day) to run parity check , clear, recover etc so personally I feel the optimum size is around 8TB.

 

Otherwise config looks fine.

 

Unraid is not backup, do you have a backup plan at least for 'important family photos and videos(Converted VHS, iPhone video, and h264 from mirrorless camera).'

Movies etc. can be redownloaded.

 

[Mahmood]

My WD EX4:
Sorry, it's EX4 not EX4100. 
I can't do the test now but from this video, Read/Write speeds hover around 60MB/s, 27MB/s respectively.

New Build:
If I'm going with 4x8TB, do I need to increase the power supply wattage?

Backup Strategy:
I'm thinking of Single WD 18TB Elements Desktop External Hard Drive and connect to the NAS weekly/monthly as automated backup.

[Decto]

13 hours ago, Mahmood said:

My WD EX4:
Sorry, it's EX4 not EX4100. 
I can't do the test now but from this video, Read/Write speeds hover around 60MB/s, 27MB/s respectively.

New Build:
If I'm going with 4x8TB, do I need to increase the power supply wattage?

Backup Strategy:
I'm thinking of Single WD 18TB Elements Desktop External Hard Drive and connect to the NAS weekly/monthly as automated backup.

 

 

With Gigabit you should get ~90-100MB/s each way depending on file size. Lots of small files is slow, big files should max the connection.

 

Each drive takes 7-10W during read/write - depends on the model so the PSU with this CPU etc should be good for at least 10 spinners and some SSDs (2-5W)

You can start with 3 drives for now, 2+parity, it's really easy to add in extra drives later as long as it is the same size or smaller than the parity.

 

For disks, have a look at price performance, 8GB is a good minimim but don't turn down a deal of larger drives if it's to good

 

For backup, you may also want to consider if you can store a copy of your most precious files in an online account or a second backup you leave with a relative and swap every 3 months. I'd say 10% of my data is critical (multiple redundancy), perhaps 20% I would take some extra precautions and the remaining data is not that important or can be easily replaced so I don't really back it up. (I do have some of it copied onto old high hours drives and on a shelf for convenience but I don't conisder this a real backup).

Splitting strategy gives me quite good bang for the buck on backup. I actually have been using some 2TB externals which get rotated for the critcal data + it's duplicated in online accounts.