Thinking of Building a Server or NAS

Octavean · 2025-02-03T14:47:31+00:00

I’ve been considering building a server or NAS for storage as a backup for another NAS. Part of the reason is I already happen to have most of the parts I need to complete the build. Asus ROG Strix Gaming B550 (new / never used) G.Skill Ripjaw DDR3 3200 16GB (2x8GB) TeamGroup 1TB NVMe SSD Antec 900 case + 3x HDD backplanes (supports 12 hot-swap drives) Thermaltake 650w PSU GTX 970 (if necessary) The motherboard was obtained from Newegg with a video card during the video card drought of the pandemic. It was a bundle, I wanted the card and didn’t really care about the motherboard so it went unused. There is an old server build in the case but the hardware is now obsolete and wasn’t very powerful even when it was first built. So only the case and PSU would be of use. So I would only need a CPU or APU. I was initially thinking I might buy a RyZen 5 5500 from Microcenter for about ~$79 USD. I was also considering something with a built in GPU around ~$100 as well as something more powerful like the RyZen 5900XT with 16 core and 32 threads. That’s the new market, not sure what the used market has to offer with respect to CPU. I’d like to run a few programs, maybe docker and maybe a VM. I have a Windows Server 2022 license. I could use FreeNAS but I hate the interface. I guess my question is if the RyZen 5 5500 is worth it? My guess is that hardware prices are going to skyrocket soon. So either it’s make a move or wait it out.

ElQuintron

moonpie Are HDDs still king for a NAS or have NVME SSDs improved enough to take over?

NVME SSD prices have gone through the roof, I wouldn’t say HDDs are king, but they’re more affordable right now.

codezer0

One rule of thumb regarding a nas…

make sure you can afford to get spares. New or refurbished, it’s just good practice to be ready.

Just the other day I had one of my deployed drives throw up a bad SMART log. Thankfully, for a 4-drive NAS box I had bought six drives at the start. One to use for the bulk backup of what we had initially to store, and then one that would sit idle in case one of them broke. Thankfully the RAID 5 kept things usable and it was literally just a matter of power off the nas, replace bad disk, power back on and let it rebuild. Of course, the rebuild takes a long time (eta was 1.2 days for me) but at least because it’s not a computer I’m sitting at I could let it do its thing.

Octavean

codezer0 Yeah, I had a 14TB WD Red drive fail in my QNAP TS-653D 6 bay NAS and I was lucky enough to have a spare 16TB WD Red drive to swap in. The drive disappeared in the OS and it was likely that it was tossed from the array. I didn’t bother turning off the NAS I just hot-swapped the drives and initiated the rebuild.

That 14TB drive just totally died. It can’t be seen by any system. It was out of warranty too.

Unfortunately I don’t have any spare 14TB or 16TB drives now. So if something fails I’ll have to pay the going rate.

urbanriot

codezer0 make sure you can afford to get spares.

Most hobbyists can’t because they’re building something big for the future and every drive is breaking the bank.

Nine or so years ago I was shucking top quality 14TB Hitachi’s from some WD drives and my wife was breaking my balls about their $200 price tag along with the custom built server I was stuffing them into, the 8 drives in RAID5 getting me close to 100 TB clocked in around $2000 Canadian and if I had another $200 drive for a spare, that was too much…

Mind you in retrospect considering what’s going on in the industry I will be cursing myself if a drive fails and I have to go out and buy another (but so far it’s been almost a decade and no failures to report).

codezer0

Octavean In my case, i was HOPING by the time any of these started going bad, there would be some big enough capavity (sata) ssds to use in the nas especially. Id only have considered a giant raid 0 in the event of a set of 16tb sata ssd’s, the max capacity it can support per bay.

On spinning rust? Nah, right now im glad i got the raid 5 going. I iust had to power off to shuck out the old drice and go theough amazon to start requesting warranty on it. Slotted the unused spare… Four 12tb in raid 5 equating to about 32tb of accessible storage. And took about a day and change to rebuild, but no data lost.

Octavean

urbanriot I don’t generally buy a large block of drives in one go. If I did I’m sure I would hear about it from the Wife too. I usually buy one or two drives when on sale (Black Friday stateside). This is a slower build out process but it staggers the vintage of the drives. In theory, this slower capacity build out process will have the older drives fail first. I expect failures. I had a fair number of 4TB WD Red drives fail. Fewer 8TB WD Red drives failed and fewer still 14TB WD Red drives. As of yet, I’ve had no 16TB or 20TB WD Red failures.

If or when I see halfway decent prices again I’ll buy one or two 16TB or 20TB WD Red drives preemptively just to have them on hand. A good price in my mind would be around $260 to maybe $299.

ugly95

I’ve become comfortable getting recertified drives. Sometimes you can find drives on eBay that have been used in enterprise that have been cycled out for a good price.

It’s a bit of roulette in that you might get a drive with a lot of hours on them. But you get it at a discount. And at the very least you know they’ve been used long enough that they’re going to be beyond the first part of the ‘bathtub’ failure curve.

Maybe I’d feel differently if it was something mission critical. But I’m just playing around with TrueNAS as a side/learning project.

Octavean

ugly95 I’ve actually purchased a bunch of HGST 4TB 7200 enterprise decommissioned HDD’s over time. I typically bought them at around $40 to $50 and now probably have 12+ of these drives. I’ve had fairly good luck with them as they were in great condition and zero failures so far. Unfortunately these drives are around $100 now.

ugly95

Octavean Unfortunately these drives are around $100 now.

Ugh, yeah. I got lucky on a 12TB drive for $80 from goharddrive on eBay. I don’t think I’ll get that lucky again.

aaronwt

I’ve purchased 40+ renewed Seagate Enterprise drives (And Max Digital brand which are also typically renewed Exos drives) from Amazon, since 2019. Between 4TB and 14TB in size. Ones that came with several year warranties from the sellers. They have been working very well.
I only had issues with three drives. And those issues were found when I did a preclear in unRAID on them.

And I was able to just return them to the sellers for a refund or exchange.
Otherwise, so far, they have all been working great.

real_aurgathor

aaronwt

What kind of issues did you have? I have three 16 TB Exoses, all purchased when they were reasonably priced (under $180 or so), and I’m currently running a burn-in test on the last one, about halfway through the 4th pass. So far I got 20 reallocated sectors on it, and at least 18 of those on head 9 and they must be somewhere near to the end. The other two drives had no issues.

aaronwt

real_aurgathor

The drives were very slow. The speeds were half of what they should have been.

real_aurgathor

aaronwt

I think I’ve actually seen that before, although in my case the issue manifested itself by having significantly different DTRs depending on the program being used to test the drives.

Octavean

FWIW, I’ve found an issue with the Server Build / NAS. It seems fairly minor but annoying. I should have it nailed down soon. Currently it’s running ProxMox and I’ve uploaded a number of images I want to play with, which, is just easier than doing bare metal. Right now it’s running with FyGoOS which is very similar to UGreen OS

Edit:

Images on it now:

FyGoOS
UGreen UGOS Pro
ZimaOS
TrueNAS
OMV
Ubuntu

I plan to add:

Windows 11
XPEnology

IIRC there is a sale on UnRAID now but I don’t think it’ll be enough.

Astyanax

I just got a Synology Beestation. 🙂

https://bee.synology.com/en-us/BeeStation

« Previous Page