Hi guys, I’m building my first PC ever! I wanted a NAS so I could access all my files on my local home network on any device, and so I could have remote access to my files / a Plex or Jellyfin server as well. I plan on setting up two drives in a RAID 1 configuration for mirroring/redundancy.
I was looking at some prebuilt NAS units, but, aside from wanting the fun project of building it myself anyway, a major drawback I saw in reviews was how crappy the proprietary OS’s for these units were. I see that TrueNas is a popular free OS option, but I wonder if I even need something that robust?
I understand TrueNas has a nice web GUI, which would be useful considering I don’t plan on having a mouse/keyboard/monitor set up with this PC. Although I’m sure there are also easy Windows remote desktop solutions for that as well.
Any recommendations would be super appreciated! All my parts are on their way from Newegg currently:
Case: Fractal Design Node 304
MoBo: ASRock Z690M-ITX/ax LGA 1700
CPU: Intel Core i5-12600K
Cooler: SAMA CPU Air Cooler 4PI120MM
PSU: EVGA 500 GE, 80 Plus Gold 500W
HDDs: x2 TOSHIBA N300 HDWG11AXZSTA 10TB 7200 RPM 256MB Cache SATA
SSD: SANDISK X400 M.2 2280 128GB SATA M.2 SSD
RAM: x2 NEMIX RAM 8GB DDR4
So you’ve gotten a lot of comments here and they’re very good. They certainly give you options. Now I’m going to probably go the other way because running network attached storage from Windows has never been a great solution over the years in my experience. And I’ll also temper this with if you want the chance with this new server to learn and use other platforms you certainly have the ability with that processor.
So my normal suggestion, is to load Proxmox as a hypervisor. This allows you to run LXC containers directly and virtual machines. I would run TrueNAS Scale in a VM and give it direct access to the two 10TB volumes it needs to create your RAID1 NAS in ZFS. I might tend to put a second 256GB NVMe drive to run my VMs on. The nice thing with your setup here is you’d still have two SATA ports available for more drives in the future. The bad thing of course is if you create a RAID1 array now with two drives you’re not going to be able to expand it in the future as anything but a RAID1 array. Which won’t be what you want. Maybe food for thought.
This setup gives you the ability to learn Proxmox and to learn TrueNAS in baby steps. One thing that intrigued me about this system is that you could put four more NVMe drives and run them as a ZFS RAID5 or 6. That is a pretty sweet motherboard! Especially for being so small.
You’ve got both 10 Gbps and 20 Gbps USB channels so you could use that for an external drive for your backup. As it was already mentioned, RAID is not a backup ™ and you’ll probably want to back up your important data so you don’t have to number one lose it or number two reload it all from the internet.
With a setup I’ve mentioned you can easily run multiple VMs so you could run let’s say a Debian 12 VM and have it run Docker containers and there you have your Plex and or Jellyfin and dozens of other Dockers and you’re all happy. And yes, with Proxmox you could run those same containers as LXC. For a long time I guess I didn’t realize or understand about lxc containers and so I ignored them and through the growth of proxmox in my basement-- yes it’s like a plague I’ve got 14 systems running it now–I really do like LXC. While I really like TrueNAS Scale and have four instances of it running, I do not like running containers on it because I see it as a NAS operating system and not great at running containers. That’s completely my prejudice.
I’m sure we’ll have other people chiming in about using unRAID, Open Media Vault, and things like that but while they’re certainly options, I have always found TrueNAS to be a better NAS.