Since 2011, I have been changing my NAS regularly.
2011, it was salvaged (an old Qbic Soltek, a motherboard with a fanless Atom).
2014 was even more of a hack, because I just put a motherboard in my Red Helmer.
2018, I was tired of managing the OS myself, OS upgrade problems, etc. So I switched to a commercial NAS ( a QNAP ).
After 6 years of good and not very loyal service, I decided to rebuild a new one, myself.
Hardware criteria
Through iteration, I'm starting to know what I want/don't want for my NAS. Here is the list:
Four locations
One or more 2.5 Gbps ethernet ports
A nice case, which looks a bit serious, relatively compact (not a tower)
No noise, little heating
Reasonable power consumption
Ability to hotswap disks
These criteria are mainly hardware, but I add some which are more software-related, while remaining linked to the hardware:
The possibility of making virtual machines (if I ever want to) and containers
The choice of components
This is the most complicated step when making a DIY NAS.
The main problem is finding a suitable case. I've been looking for years (even in 2011/2014) and often the cases are rare, expensive, bulky and/or ugly. The hotswap side is often absent.
Fortunately, I found a case that ticks all the boxes, even if it is difficult to where I live: the Jonsbo N2 . I had heard about this brand on Next Inpact with the Jonsbo N1, more compact, but which did not have hotswap.
You can get it here: https://amzn.to/4atz5Wk (Yes, this is an affiliate link. Yes, I get a commission. No, you won’t pay more, but I might buy snacks with it. Priorities!)
The Jonsbo N2 corrects this defect. It is roughly a cube of 22 cm on each side, it is rather beautiful even if a little big for my taste.
Compatibility-wise, it can be powered with a SFX-format PSU and a Mini ITX-format motherboard. This is relatively expected, given its compactness, but it adds a whole bunch of additional issues.
Food
First, SFX power supplies are rarer, more expensive and less efficient. Finding a low-power, economical, cheap and semi-passive (for noise) model is impossible.
The best I found is a 300w Be Quiet SFX Power 3 power supply . It is not semi-passive (so it continually makes noise, even if it is reasonable) and only 80Plus Bronze (so there are significant energy losses). As an alternative, I could have taken (to be checked, the size is not clear) the SFX-L from Be Quiet, which have the advantage of being 80 Plus Gold and modular.
You can get it here: https://amzn.to/3PDG7Or (Again it's an affilate link clicking it might make you feel generous. I get a small commission, but your wallet stays the same. Win-win!)
Motherboard
Then, mini-ITX motherboards often have few SATA ports, which doesn't fit with my need for four drives. From there, there are 3 solutions, none of which are really "wow".
Most Mini ITX boards have 2 (or even 1) SATA ports, but some also have M.2 ports for NVMe and/or a PCIe port:
There are 1 NVMe => 6 SATA adapters
There are PCIe => SATA expansion cards
But I have absolutely no confidence in the quality of these things, so I gave up on the idea. Especially since I might need the PCI-e port to add an expansion card to get the 2.5 Gbps.
I found a card with four SATA ports and AM4 socket support (example ASRock B550M-ITX/AC ). If I add a Ryzen 5 5600G, I check the “possibility of making VMs” box, but it is relatively expensive and especially the CPU consumes a lot of electricity (TDP 22w).
Lastly, there are also some UFOs like the ASRock Rack X570D4I-2T card with OCuLink ports allowing to manage 4 SATA each, but it is almost impossible to find and very expensive.
While searching Aliexpress, I quickly came across this type of “noname” card model:
There are many models and variations of the same kind of cards. Roughly speaking, it is an Intel Atom compatible chipset of different generations with 4 x 2.5 Gbps Ethernet ports, 6 SATA, sometimes fanless, sometimes not.
On paper, this is exactly what I'm looking for. I have a motherboard and its N100 (only 6w TDP) + cooler that ticks all my boxes. You just have to not be too afraid of the "no-name motherboard" side.
I took the risk, I chose this card, which I managed to get for around €200 (here €250 on the screenshot).
Misc
To install the OS of my NAS, I added a 500 GB NVMe SSD (the cheapest brand I found).
I also added 16GB of DDR5 RAM, with the idea that I might need that for containers/VMs.
Since I don't have a 2.5 Gbps network at home yet, I had to upgrade. I chose a "noname" switch on Aliexpress (again), a PCI-e card for my personal PC.
For the disks, I made the mistake (we'll talk about it again) of recovering old 4TB Western Digital Red disks that I had in stock...
Assembly
The case is very nice, well designed, seems to be of good quality / good workmanship. The motherboard is on top, the power supply is positioned on the bottom + side and the disks on the other.
On the motherboard side, it comes with a large copper contact surface on which I added the low profile cooler.
To be perfectly honest, I wonder if the fan is really necessary. We'll talk about that in the next article.
To be hotswappable, the hard drives are connected to a backplane, ventilated by a low profile fan (15 mm thick) that I replaced with a 25mm (classic) because I read that it was noisy. The problem is that there is very little space, not enough for a 25mm, but it fits with a shoehorn.
Note: There are 3D printing plans to fix this issue, if needed. But I didn't need them.
Conclusion
Once the editing is finished, I find it pretty clean :)
In the next article we will talk about the different performance tests that I carried out.