Building a Home NAS? - Let's Talk Motherboards
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- Опубликовано: 26 май 2024
- Choosing a motherboard for your NAS can require some knowledge. Let's learn about it.
The motherboard and CPU market is constantly changing. The recommendations at the end of this video could become obsolete in just a few months, as new CPUs have been announced a couple days before the completion of this video.
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I'm attempting to build an all-NVME NAS, and I selected my motherboard based on the number of Gen3x4 or Gen4x4 connection points. The reason for this is a device from OWC called the U2 Shuttle which can fit 4 Gen3 NVME drives in a 3.5" HD form factor enclosure. You connect it to your motherboard via U.2 which requires 4 PCIe lanes that you can get either from a PCIe slot, an M.2 slot, or by other connectors not generally available on consumer motherboards (all via adapters). The Shuttle does this using a PCIe switch, but it should still get you speeds faster than your network connection. If you search around for the right motherboard, you can connect up to 8 or 9 U2 Shuttles, for a frankly ridiculous 36 NVME drives on one consumer PC. Motherboards eg. ASRock X670E Steel Legend (9 Shuttles), Asus Prime Z790-P WIFI (8 Shuttles). I'm still scraping up the funds to populate just the one Shuttle...
I don't know if anybody mentioned this yet but Intel is the go to option if IDLE power is what you're worried about. Something like i3 12100 or i5 12400 sips much less power at idle than 7600 for example (Ryzen 5000 has even worse idle power usage). If you expect to be writing/reading from your NAS at all times (for example editing daily) then AMD could be the better option. Also things like older NIC's and HBA's don't always support lower "C-states" which can prevent your CPU from going to deeper "C-states" (power saving modes).
P.S. before anybody calls me an Intel shill, most of my homelab servers are AMD based so I have had to experienced this first hand... :P
The death of SLI made it super hard/expensive to find boards with dual 8x pcie slot configuration. 14 years ago you could easily get that for less than 150$ now 400$ if you're lucky
I would look for used server gear, preferably by Supermicro they are less locked down in the bios.
This video is BRILLANT. I was blind, but now I see. Building a new NAS and this sorted me out. Thank you!
well, I think that CWWK Q670 Gen 5 NAS Board will also do the job. in much cases
Well done. A lot of weekend warriors have no idea what they're doing, and guides like this are extremely helpful.
An idea for a follow up video might be to talk about the actual storage for the NAS (NVMes and HDDs). Which NVMes for a lot of data read/write, which for PCIe 4, which for PCIe 5, etc... White labels HDDs might be worth mentioning for the Casual option (cuz cheaper). 8:33 some recent HDDs (e.g. Seagate Exos) are advertised at 285MB/s (2.285Gbps) so that following math doesn't exactly match up.
Nice vid. I've gone between with a decently high end setup. An ASrock z690 with 8 sata, thunderbolt 4 header, 4 PCIE and 3 M.2 slots. Might be tad expensive to run when idle, but the plan is to use a plex server and family album archive plus UniFi controller host and maybe something to do with a VPN, firewall, and ad blocker. Couple of 18tb disks and more smaller HDDs in Unraid.
Perhaps a used server motherboard would be a better option. They come with much more expansion possibilities.
I'm using a Chinese x99 with a xeon 2683v4, the motherboard comes with 2 pcie x16, 1 x4, 2 x1 and an nvme, although they are all gen 3
Thanks, I appreciate your work. I am actually testing a home server on a raspberry pi and thinking of building a proper setup for storage, streaming service and a Minecraft server. Now I know what to look for.
All the best
This was a great video, informative and care taken to develop the configurations fully with very good recommendations and considerations. I really felt informed once I finished the video. I will keep this handy. I am retired as a network engineer, but I keep a hand in the game. I need to shatter my cloud storage dependence, so I keep this video and your channel handy! Thank you did a good job!
I upgraded my PC last year and I'm thinking about using my old motherboard for a NAS. As it is my first NAS and I'm mostly going to use it as a plex server and possible data backup for some small projects and personal files, I was thinking that I could use some of my old hardware as a cost saving, and it would be like a hobby project where I could learn about NAS and all that, then some time in the future I could buy or build something better.
I have no idea if it will do okay or not, but my old parts (specs) will be:
ASUS Z170 Pro Gaming motherboard
Intel i7-6700K CPU
DDR4 2x16GB (32GB) 3200MHz RAM
I also have a set of 2x8GB (16GB) 3200MHz, which I've run fine together with the 2x16 stick for a total of 48GB, both are Corsair Vengeance Dual Channel RAM kits, and I guess it could be better to have more RAM, again I don't know.
The motherboard has a M.2 PCIe 3.0 connected to the chipset, and I was thinking of using that as a OS drive for TrueNAS.
Also I have noticed not all motherboards have Raid controllers on them, although that only applies to low end boards, but I thought it could have been mentioned in the video, especially if someone like in my case wanted to retrofit an old system into a NAS.
👍on the video.
You can use software raid which will be fine for a small Nas. Your hardware seems fine.
Great video and very well explained. One minor correction: SATA uses 8b/10b encoding: thus 6 Gbps SATA is not 750 MB/s, but 600 MB/s.
In the examples, 220 MB/s = 2.2 Gbps (not 1.76 Gbps) & 560 MB/s = 5.6 Gbps (not 4.5 Gbps). Thus a SATA SSD is truly nearly exhausting the available data rate. The overhead is minimal (560 MB/s achieved, 600 MB/s theoretically).
How did you calculate those
@@notaras1985 It is confusingly written, apologies. 220 MB/s, as delivered via SATA, is 2.2 Gbps. SATA includes the overhead in their MB/s numbers. This is mandatory overhead because it's used in parity; it's not like a "more optimized" SATA controller will reduce this overhead.
That's why the maximum real data rate of SATA III is set to 600 MB/s; there's no way to "find" that 150 MB/s. That 150 MB/s was used for parity and did not contain any actual data.
So the calculation is to divide by 10. 6 Gbps = 600 MB/s. The SATA specs:
SATA III: 6 Gbps = 600 MB/s
SATA II: 3 Gbps = 300 MB/s
SATA I: 1.5 Gbps = 150 MB/s
We need 1.0 Gigabit to deliver 100 MB/s with 8b/10b encoding.
This is a physical specification, so we need to take into account encoding / decoding.
I really like your video content!
Keep doing what you're doing!
... Aside from the WHITE screen transitions!
My poor retinas were nuked so many times in this video. Please, have mercy.
I like the way you have proceeded with your plan, and reasoning. But these would serve a home server. For a NAS you don’t need all that power. Just hard drives and wired Ethernet, with the least power consuming CPU.
Awesome video! Very easy to follow, and custom animations are amazing. Must be a lot of work to make though. Gj
I bought my computer 3 years ago, had a guy build it to my specs cheaper than I could source all the parta, he must have access to price discounts that I dont. 2 nvme drives 2 hdd 2 2.5gb ports. Its been serving me well. Rtx 2080 video card its not top of the line anymore but It was closer a few years ago when I bought it.
Well, cool video so far. One flaw still: the comparison of power consumption on AMD vs. Intel platforms is not sufficient for average users, I'd say. What weighs much more than TDP or maximum power draw is the average power consumption at idle state because NAS (and home servers) are sitting at idle by far most of the time instead of doing high load. So quantification of these idle state draw would be a blast. My old Core i9-9900K e.g. at idle takes 6 W from the wall while my Ryzen 7 7800X3D never goes below 30 W at idle. Taking into account that the NAS (or server) CPU will be in idle 90% of the time this will make a huge difference in power draw and on your bill during a year. Good luck with AMD! They all are bad at idle, while Intel CPUs with an ideal CPU-Mobo combination in idle might just suck 0.1-0.2 W from the wall (like my 6500 in a Lenovo mini pc does...) 😆
this guy crushes my hopes and dreams and tells me to get a paper and pen within 5 minutes... and so I do :(
You recommend amd over intel.
While intel uses more power when it is used amd usually has much higher idle power.
If you know your system is going to idle most of the time intel is usually the better choice unless you go for a modt (mobile on desktop) motherboard.
Subscribed. Looking forward to a video on how to use a cache drive on truenas
great video dude
good effort..... one thing i'd say you could have expanded on is how things are attached to the chipset.
Like how some of the PCIe slots on a motherboard are attached to the chipset and not the CPU.
Keep it up
That's a great point! I don't know how I missed that!
There are 5 common types of PCIe slots and cards: x1, x2, x4, x8 and x16. The numbers represent the number of lanes on the card or slot
I bought a Supermicro MB. Both their Server boards and Workstation boards have most of what you need for a server.
They do, but they can require higher end equipment to accommodate their server centric focus. Often their power considerations have been more data center level than home user level as well. But their boards are good but somewhat different from consumer boards, it just depends on what you think is best for your device machine build! There is usually a cheaper resource for used equipment also that can be a consideration if you wish to build Supermicro!
the music is WAY too loud, making it harder to hear what you are saying - and why is it even there in the first place? 🤮