Some things are priceless.
I never really thought much about backing up files (Especially extremely old files) until I started digging for some photos from way back when I was in high school. After not finding them, I came to the conclusion that I must have deleted them to clear up space for something else, or just didn’t care about them at the time, and now I’m paying the price.
What’s the price? About $1500 in hard drives and computer hardware, it’s time I finally build a NAS.
I ended up opting for Toshiba’s NAS N300 drives for three reasons.
- Price/TB was lower than WesternDigital’s Red equivalent.
- 7200 RPM rather than 5400 RPM (Higher power usage, but higher read/write speeds).
- 3 year warranty +1 year from my credit card (Highly recommend credit cards for extra warranty if you’re paying it off monthly and don’t over-spend.)
I decided that 4 should be plenty for now, as I’m planning to do RAID Z instead of Z2 or Z3, I end up losing 8TB to parity. So 32 – 8 = 24TB of usable space. If I went for RAID Z2 or Z3 I’d need a lot more drives (5 and 8 respectively), and that’s not in the budget right now. Oh well, I can always upgrade later down the road.
I couldn’t decide on whether to buy a NAS from Synology or similar, and ended up going the custom route. I ordered a Rosewill RSV-L4500U for a few reasons.
- It holds up to 15 3.5″ drives
- Supports ATX power supplies – server psu wasn’t in the budget
- It supports up to EATX and has PCIE mounts
- RACK MOUNTABLE BABY!
When I look for hardware, I’m typically looking for long term. Even if the drives and all the internals end up being obsolete in 10 years, the metal chassis will remain usable for anything I can throw at it. I don’t want to buy a NAS from Synology only to put it in a land fill if storage becomes much smaller and more efficient. In the case that this happens, I can always install my personal PC in this chassis and keep it running in a separate room – then hook all my peripherals up with thunderbolt. It may be the tech-hoarder in me, but I enjoy re-using things whenever possible.
Speaking of tech-hoarding.. I installed a 2nd gen i5 – the first desktop I ever built into the chassis. I figure I’m mostly using this for archiving, hosting Plex, and a few small apps potentially, so why buy a new CPU?
I ended up putting it under one of my desks (Under being a little bit of an overstatement). It’s a 32″ case, so there’s no way I can hide it away until I get a server cabinet / rack, but that’s a problem for another day. Something worth noting is how quiet the fans are. They’re not on any fancy controller, they’re all just molex connected, but man are they silent. I hear the air moving, but not the fans buzzing away. Overall a great 4U.
Setting up TrueNAS was a breeze. Hardest part was figuring out how to properly create a SMB share, but it would have taken less time if I had just read the manual. I backed up all of my files with a good ol’ copy/paste, and I still have 11TB spare.
I’m now digging into mining Chia with my extra space, but that’s a topic for another day.
