Building A DIY NAS On A Budget - TrueNAS Scale

Great work :)
The iscsi thing is cool, good to see youpushing the limits, of performance and flexibility..... BUT! you may find an iscsi connection will thwart recovery if you have a controller failure, or at least make it difficult. ... you have effectively turned your NIC into a SATA cable (nothing wrong with that) It will also limit other computers connecting to that share (unless you share it from your Laptop, but then, isn't that the job of the NAS?).
I would encourage you to investigate SMB3, It is really amazing, I don't say that lightly... I am unaware of how much support it gets from TrueNAS.
it has amazing performance and can share the bandwidth of 2 NICs. Good Luck
Good Luck!

Thanks for nice explanation.

Nice cable management

no way bro! i actually needed this video cuz i had a useless laptop that has a broken screen now i can finally make my own NAS

Power supply will blow up 😂

👍

Thanks! You are very didactic (and thank you). I only come to comment that, in my personal experience, I prefer to use OpenMediavault because (among other things) it allows me to install it in a previously formed RAID-1 and also use that same pool where the OS resides. I have had a lot of defeat with self-destructed memory-strics as truNAS as OMV in my past. At home I have plenty operating more than one home-made NAS (and QNAP NAS, too) and I have no differences. With OMV I use distinctive and differentiated ports for FTP in every machine. With SMB no problems for access neither copy (or syncronize) from one to other

Any more 4TB HDDs going for free for my budget NAS build?

That looks sweet to me! Been thinking of setting up my own NAS lately. i already old hardware laying around. i just need to get another case and power supply. also drives of course lol

That power supply is going to explode!

Thanks for that, do you have a video or tips for converting my 2.5” drives to a NAS with enclosures

its been quite some time since these psu got "fixed", i would dare to say its one of the better option for the price right now, as they have all japanese semiconductors on both main and secondary line

I've vuild several NAS servers over a decade, and I get kinda unwell when I see people using non-ECC RAM in their systems. ECC memory is a MUST when it comes to running ZFS as storage filesystem.

way too complicated.

I gave up on NAS, I just got a USB HDD enclosure. If I didn't need mobility, I would get a desktop. NAS just sits there wasting electricity 90% of the time just blowing dust around until the vents clog up.

Great video, very captivating storytelling!

How much did the hard drives cost and where do I get that deal?

Bro you don’t have to say “go ahead” in every sentence.

I have what is likely some pretty basic noob questions related to a NAS system.

Basically I want to create a NAS system for my personal home network that will backup all my devices on a centralized HDD. I see that mirroring is highly advisable because if the main backup drive fails it could mean all my data is at risk of being lost. So I was thinking having two 6TB HDDs where the system makes a mirror to each one, therefore if one fails the other has recent backups.

What’s the benefit of setting up a more sophisticated RAID backup array system with like 5 HDDs? Would this be better for a business solution but complete overkill for a simple home backup like I would like to maintain? In other words, is having two HDDs with a mirrored backup adequate to protect my data or should I consider having more disks in a RAID setup?

Also, I am considering whether I should have the NAS data accessible over the wider internet. I would like the accessibility of having access to my documents even if I’m traveling or just not at home, but I also could see how this could have some big security risks being exposed to the open internet.

This video popped up in my suggested list and I'm so glad it did.
I'm building a NAS out of unused computer gear I already own plus some new drives.
The idea of adding a high-speed network card for a dedicated connection to an editing machine is golden.
I'm borrowing that for sure. Cheers! 👍

You'll regret the budget route in the end. Nothing wrong with DIY or TrueNAS but you should be aiming for better performance and more space for a video editing NAS. 10Gbe minimum and 20TB of space after redundancy - and you'll eventually want more. That motherboard, cpu and and memory will be a huge limiting factor along with the bottlenecked network.

The "go ahead" drinking game is brutal

Will connecting the nas and the PC through a 2.5G switch achieve similar speed comparing with 2.5G direct connection?

years ago I used to think having a hard drive with a few hundred MB was more then enough data storage capacity, as I don't store photos, music or video. But I looked up my external hard drive where I store mostly documents, pdf's webpages from various tech and business related topics. It's 180 GB and growing. If you backing up data locally I recommend you have at least 2 storage devices (in case of failure), I have seen more then my share of failed drives (including NAS, USB external drives and other storage media). Also research different backup/restore software (one that you can schedule to do backups on a regular basis. In addition to backing up data, I recommend cloning the hard drive on your computer (so if it fails, you do a restore of the entire operating system, programs, configurations, data).

Nice details on the iSCSI setup, very informative, thanks.

Lol I have that case. It’s sitting in my garage, and I’m going to use that for a firewall.

This is just what I want.

one of the advantages I see of something like synology is the apps are already there for your phones so you can backup photos. This isn't true for DIY NAS. Yes there are syncing apps but more often than not these don't work well.

Seagate Barracuda? AFAIK these doe not carry a "NAS certified" seal of approval. If they don't, then be prepared for a short life. What's the potential problem? Read/write heads move at extremely fast accelerations and these cause vibration. A drive can handle its own vibrations but not the vibrations from other neighbouring drives. Those "foreign" vibrations cause wear in the drive in focus and vice versa. When drives are "NAS certified" then they are designed to be adapted to this problem. This is why and how the market distinguishes desktop, workstation, array, and enterprise class drives.
As you buy your drives at the same time, expect a second drive failure to happen within the time frame your NAS needs to rebuild data on a drive that replaces a failed one. Presuming you have a RAID-5 like protection level in your file system configuration.
Note that RAID 1 does not have an inherently decidable logic to figure out the proper disk between a failed pair (or blocks in a pair) - the redundancy is only about availability. I remember ZFS being very advanced in all sorts of ways and so these problems may be addressed in there, but the number of physical standby (cold or warm) drives for cases of failure is certainly not dictated in there.

As to I/O performance, this tower case has inside volume enough to hold a second motherboard, power supply, and its own network connection, so this would facilitate to have parallel access to separate data volumes. I don't think it raises the electrical bill a lot, given the Watts you report. And this way you can serve different clients provided you have anon-blocking switch, or your own workstation on two network cables, maybe.

As to the PCIe to S-ATA adapter, while yours failed miserably because of lacking robustness, we have to be aware that the drives connected to the motherboard directly run their I/O through the Southbridge (SB) chipset to the CPU. That SB gives time sharing between all of its I/O connections that could include a mouse, keyboard, optical disc player, USB devices, etc.. - time sharing for its limited data links with the CPU. The PCIe card, on the other hand (likely) has its I/O lines connected directly to separate PCIe lanes of the CPU (that are not used if nothing is "on" them). Latency in this case will depend on how efficient the operating system works with this presumed PCIe priority. In my workstation, the direct PCIe lines are really significantly faster than the SB connections.

Finally, have you tried to play with non-default block sizes in the network setup? As your home network likely is very clean and generally no resends are necessary, larger block sizes may increase throughput.

no need to raise the bump music every time you stop talking.

Need the setup at Indian market

Very well put together video!

By the way, it's a common mistake to create a RAID using HDDs from the same batch. While it may seem logical to purchase them all together, when one of the drives fails, it's highly likely that others will follow suit. Since they were manufactured and used together under the same conditions, their reliability can be compromised simultaneously.

I have encountered numerous horror stories where a single drive failure in a RAID led to the loss of all data. As you attempt to copy data from the remaining drives, they too may fail in your hands during the process.

I literally have 2 of these cases, one for my old intel q6600 and one for my dads old dell i rebuilt

I didn't do any exact calculations but with that power consumption at idle, in few years you might pay on energy bills what you have saved on the original purchase of a NAS. (some of them have as low as 5W).
Also i`m not familiar with TrueNAS, but a Synology for example has apps that work with iOS and android an a bunch of other stuff that I'm not sure that TrueNAS will have.
At the end of the day I suppose it comes down to what you want to do with your hardware. I had DIY NAS myself but it had zero chance against my wife's use scenario.
Girls in general are not that techy and if the stuff isn't running by itself or if it doesn't have an app to easily interact with it they will not use it.

My current nas is a supermicro intel xeon matx board in what's left of a dell inspiron desktop case. Where i live there is a lack of good deals on used cases, and most affordable new cases only have 2 hard drive bays. I use openmediavault as my drives are not matching in capacity and i only have 3, meaning a ZFS raid setup wouldnt make any sense and my nas does alot more than just file sharing so Debian-based distros work better. Openmediavault does have a ZFS plugin but from my experience it causes alot of problems, although i may have just misconfigured it.

I’m kind of surprised you didn’t short your motherboard by removing the rubber spacers and having it connected right against the case directly.

I think I got really lucky. I got given a free HP ProDesk 400 G1 SFF that has an i7-4770, Radeon HD 8490, 4GB DDR3 RAM and a 1TB HDD.

I just ordered 16GB of DDR3 for $10 and then its gonna be a good server/NAS.

Useful video. May I know what kind of 2.5 Gb switch you were using for your network?

how do people accept 2 bay nas. i dont see how you can fit anything in like 30tb

Could I use this as a game server?

Back in the Freenas 9 days running off a USB drive was recommended as they ran most of the OS in ram and very little was written to the drive. Now from Freenas10 up to Truenas13 it uses a lot more writes with the usb so it will chew through that USB in a few months. Even with your redundancy set up there will still die and you WILL be replacing drives on the regular

And almost a million views!
Almost anyone with brains can do that.
The only problem - it has a very bad energy efficiency.

Hi, I'm new on this NAS technology. Does the NAS server has to be online 24/7 or we just power it on when we need to access it?

I use these solutions and recommend them to everyone. That's a good idea.

If you lose your boot drive are you going to lose the info on the storage drive? If you did not run the 2 usb like in your video.

I clicked on this specifically for what storage options were used and how it was so cheap.... I guess if we all had sponsors everything would be cheap..

HEHE i have two desktops that i found for free and a bunch of 1tb and up drives that i have found for free but those i got to test first but if it works im making a nas and some sort of wifi router because of my wifi being garbage but idk where to start for the wifi router build would you beable to make a tutorial for that if thats even a thing?

On the network side, you could create a network bridge in TrueNAS. That essentially acts like a software switch, meaning that both interfaces will have the same IP address. Then your editing PC can access the NAS through the 2.5G port, but also still be able to access the rest of the network as the NAS will forward it. Then you don't have two IP addresses to worry about!