this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2025
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What motherboard should I use for a DIY NAS? (lemmy.zip)
submitted 2 days ago by stoy@lemmy.zip to c/sysadmin@lemmy.world
28 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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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[–] hperrin@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 hours ago

If your concern is which motherboard will perform well, you can go with any. NAS applications are incredibly easy to run. Basically no resources required.

Your biggest issue will be narrowing it down based on port requirements. Then just go with whatever is cheapest. I’d still recommend AM4, because AM5 is still expensive af. It does mean you won’t have any upgrade path, but for what you’re doing, you shouldn’t need to upgrade ever.

If you’re planning on transcoding the media you’re serving, then you may want to think about throwing an A310 in there to handle that.

You could conceivable even just get a used desktop second hand and harvest the parts.

[–] Brkdncr@lemmy.world 9 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Supermicro.

What memory do you need? Storage systems usually like ecc.

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

I am looking at a minimum of 16 GB, memory is fairly cheap these days.

What about slow boot times of super micro, I have heard that they take a long time to boot through the bios.

[–] Brkdncr@lemmy.world 11 points 2 days ago

Why would boot times matter?

Truenas appears to recommend ecc. That may dictate what board to buy.

[–] Eideen@lemmy.world 4 points 2 days ago

Zfs loves memory, vm loves memory.

If you have the funds for it I would get a minimum of 32 GB.

[–] frankenswine@lemmy.world 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

one with as many SATA slots as possible

[–] stoy@lemmy.zip 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Yeah, so far I am having a bit of trouble finding this, I am located in Sweden and the selection is limited.

[–] frankenswine@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago

can't you order online and have it ship to you?

i have an ancient server mobo with not-that-much RAM but like 6 SATA. not beefy enough for many VMs and such but enough for a tough ZFS storage. additional SATAs are provided by PCI/SATA cards

[–] slazer2au@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago

You should so cross post this to !homelab@lemmy.world they will have some good information for you.

[–] marauding_gibberish142@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 day ago

Search "NAS Motherboard" on Alibaba and you'll get a bunch with 6+ SATA ports

[–] rmean@feddit.org 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

I'm using this for my TrueNAS Setup and it's working fine:

https://aliexpress.com/item/1005005272971853.html

Can it be trusted? I don't know. But it works for my setup. It doesn't have ECC, but I don't care. :)

[–] stoy@lemmy.zip 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Interesting, can you send me the modelnumber as I can't seem to navigate away from the german language in Ali Express?

[–] rmean@feddit.org 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I'm sorry, but the model name is:

Intel 4x i226-V 2,5G LANs 6-Bay N100 N150 i3-N305 N355 NAS Motherboard 2*NVMe 6*SATA3.0 DDR5 Mini ITX Mainboard PCIex1 Typ-C

Maybe try searching for "Topton official store" on Aliexpress and try navigating from there.. Good luck!

[–] stoy@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 day ago

Ah, thank you!

This seems like exactly what I need!

[–] thisbenzingring 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

you want to use a hardware raid system with redundancy imo

uses drives up but your shit will be a lot safer until you back it up onto something you can keep offline

which mobo would that be? idk I just work in data storage as a system admin and this is what I'd start at

[–] hperrin@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 hours ago

Why use a hardware RAID? If your controller dies, your data is inaccessible. Software RAID with something like ZFS or Btrfs is safer.

[–] Badabinski@kbin.earth 2 points 1 day ago

imo, hardware raid is irrelevant for most small-scale use-cases and can be a liability for homelabbers. In a professional context, I've had a raid card shit itself causing temporary data loss and downtime because my idiot bosses didn't buy a spare card back when they set up their system. If you're doing hardware RAID, you must buy two cards, and they MUST be on the same firmware version. Software RAID is basically just as fast, is far more flexible, has one less SPOF, and is cheaper (a cheap HBA being all you need hardware-wise). About the only other thing some RAID cards have is a battery backup unit to get around write hole issues, but good filesystems can help with that too.

Hardware RAID isn't necessarily obsolete, but I'd say it's like mainframes—the applications for it are highly specialized.

[–] stoy@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 day 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 1 day 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 1 day 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 1 day ago

you get what you pay for generally

[–] Dran_Arcana@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day 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 1 day 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 2 hours ago

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

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip -2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I think this is the wrong community

[–] stoy@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

That's fair, though it is keeping the community alive

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Yeah I do miss r/sysadmin

We need some actual sysadmins to post

[–] stoy@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 day ago

I am an actual sysadmin, at my last place of work I was the only Linux sysadmin, I still worked mainly in a 365 environment as a Helpdesk technician and a VIP technician.

At my current place of work I am a 365 admin.

I thought that since building a NAS is in the interest of other sysadmins, and when I posted my last thread it was fine that I should continue.

Especially since it seemed pretty dead since I posted the last time.

Some semi-related content seemed better than no content.

But if these questions are better served by another community, I will move there.

And yes, /r/sysadmin is the best forum for getting help in the sysadmin world that I have used.