this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2025
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That’s a shame. Building your own NAS it’s not that difficult and a valuable learning experience.
Have any handy non-video guides you would recommend on how to do so? I’m keen to learn this.
Any PC building guide, use a case with enough 3.5" bays and a mainboard with plenty of SATA and M.2 ports (if you want SSD csche).
After that it gets more specialized.
Get a fractal case, go to pcpartpicker for the rest... Get a gold PSU... Be sure to check on getting a motherboard-cpu combo that supports ECC RAM... Install a linux distro with proper support for zfs (e.g. I wouldn't recommend Arch), perhaps TrueNAS Scale. Done :)
I'm using TrueNAS Scale right now on my second server (landfill bound, offered money for it, got it for free baby!) which was just some Dell computer from some older people who bought a brand new computer because this one was "not letting them install stuff". The permissions, and the way things are explained for the settings/permissions, are AWFUL for someone who has just now dipped their toes into this OS.
TrueNAS Scale is great for what it is, but please be ready for some headaches if you're fresh into the scene. I still recommend it for now.
Ha, mines an old Dell too. Not running Scale on mine though.
My NAS is a 10+ year old Dell XPS I had laying unused. ~16TB of storage in RAIDZ1 and I still have SATA ports free. Like you said though my limiting factor is space for 3.5HDD.
Their low power compute hardware, very compact form factor, and OS/apps are the selling points.
There are both commercial and DIY alternatives, but I am not aware of any that really check all three boxes quite as well.
When my disk station eventually dies I'll go the DIY route but that doesn't mean I'll be excited to do so.
What do you buy for the chassis? Seems like that (with hot swappable drives and two color LEDs next to each) is the main reason you'd buy something like synology
I built my own nas back in the day and it is not worth it. trying to remember an the mdadm commands, setting up Cron jobs for scrubbing and smart tests, setting up email notifications if the tests fail, flashing the firmware on my hba, setting up dynamic DNS, fail2ban (later a private key whitelist), borg etc etc. it's not too bad if you're an experienced Linux user but it's still a lot of time out of your day, meanwhile if you're a new Linux user then you're basically just playing russian roulette with your data. building a jellyfin server is a good learning experience but for a nas I would pick an off the shelf appliance every time