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What motherboard should I use for a DIY NAS? (lemmy.zip)

submitted 3 days ago by stoy@lemmy.zip to c/sysadmin@lemmy.world

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I posted last week about building a NAS, and on friday I saw that the Jonsbo N4 case I had been eyeing for a while was in stock at a good price.

So now I am looking for a motherboard to base my system on, which seems to be a bit difficult.

I need an mATX or ITX board that can handle six SATA drives and also have an NVME slot for a boot drive.

Performance, I value power efficiency more than super high performance, and am on the fence between Open Media Vault or TrueNAS, I like the familiarity of Linux, but I do value the features of ZFS.

If I end up on TrueNAS I may run a VM in the hypervisor from time to time, mostly just for testing.

The NAS will not be an HTPC, but will serve media through SMB and possibly NFS later.

Cooling could be a bit of an issue as the case does not have a lot of space for a cooler

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[–] stoy@lemmy.zip 2 points 3 days ago (2 children)

As it is right now, I have zero redundancy, just my media spread across two HDDs, a future plan is to have two NAS units, the primary unit that I access from my machine as normal, and a separate unit that runs rsync or borgbackup from the primary unit every night.

At this moment I don't want perfect being the enemy of good.

[–] thisbenzingring 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

i hear you, you can always just get a add in card for more drives, buy some older but new platter drives and you can make it a lot easier

[–] stoy@lemmy.zip 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Yeah, I have thought about getting a PCIE SATA controller card but have heard about mixed oppinions of those...

[–] thisbenzingring 2 points 3 days ago

you get what you pay for generally

[–] Dran_Arcana@lemmy.world 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I run clusters of both LSI-based hwraid and zfs at work. I strongly recommend zfs over hwraid. The long and short of it is hwraid hasn't kept up with software solutions, and software solutions are often both more performant and more resilient (at the cost of CPU/memory).

For homelab scale, zfs is definitely the way to go, especially for archive data.

Wendel wrote up a pretty good guide for those looking to understand what makes zfs so good if you want to dive deeper. https://forum.level1techs.com/t/zfs-guide-for-starters-and-advanced-users-concepts-pool-config-tuning-troubleshooting/196035

[–] stoy@lemmy.zip 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Yeah, I am a bit weary of hwraid since I have no experience with it, I have some experience with software raid.

My initial plan was going with Linux set up an mdadm raid and run an LVM on top of it, though the more I think about it, it feel like more of a lab/experiment scenario, snd I may get another NAS build to lab with.

As it stands now, I'll probably go with TrueNAS and ZFS since it will be running in "prod" at home.

[–] hperrin@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 day ago

I’d recommend ZFS or Btrfs over mdadm. They both have data repair if something goes wrong, and mdadm doesn’t.