New update: my current setup is a dell power edge t310 with 6x4tb SAS, zeon CPU, and 12gb ECC all parts stock. No hardware raid. 2.5gb network card. Should I just replace the 6 drives? With larger capacities? That will probably be more than $10/tb… I didn’t buy the 16 drives yet, they are used SAS drives 4tb each, turn to be about $40 each.

Current storage 8tb used out of 14… And lots of cold drives waiting to get copied… 10tb+ probably. Is it worth copying all the cold storage drives to the redundant nas.

Update: budget(200-600), the reason for the build is I found cheap 4tb drives for almost $10/Terabyte. So I want to use as much of them as I can

I am trying to build my final NAS build as a beginner.

I have a 6x4tb dell server, but it’s not enough.

I am currently trying to build the final boss of my nasses. 4x16tb with truenas with raid

I am unsure of what parts to buy as I am a complete beginner.

I found a case that can hold all 14 drives.

I need a motherboard, CPU, ram, PSU

I am on a budget, kind of.

What motherboard do you recommend? Pulled from a workstations with CPU and ram? A server board? Normal consumer with normal consumer CPU? Motherboard should have some pcie slots for 2 sata cards and one 2.5 GB card.

What CPU to run all these drives?

What ram and how much? 16? 32? Ecc, non ecc? Ddr4? Ddr3?

Power supply: 850w or more?

All parts should be able to support the 16 drives with headroom…

I would appreciate any help on this build, I want to build this as soon as possible.

Thanks

  • Hiro8811@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    3 days ago

    Is that a fractal define 5XL? Looks similar, well anyway if you plan on using zfs the more ram the better.

    • JGrffn@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      9 days ago

      I also went with 16 drives, but they were 20TB each. OP, if you don’t already have those 4tb drives, reconsider the amount and sizes. 4tb can’t be the price sweet spot for HDDs…

    • frongt@lemmy.zipEnglish
      01·
      9 days ago

      I would seek the best price per terabyte while still allowing redundancy.

      • hesh@quokk.auEnglish
        0·
        9 days ago

        True, but I would factor in some kind of negative to cost/longevity from increasing number of drives. Even if 16x4 is a bit cheaper than 4x16 today, will it die faster?

        • frongt@lemmy.zipEnglish
          01·
          9 days ago

          At these scales, I don’t think it’s measurable, if statistically significant at all.

          In any case, you should always be ready to replace a drive that fails. I buy used because they’re significantly cheaper (or at least they used to be) and I’ve never had any major failures.

  • Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyzBEnglish
    1·
    3 days ago

    Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

    Fewer Letters More Letters
    NAS Network-Attached Storage
    NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers
    PSU Power Supply Unit
    RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage
    SSD Solid State Drive mass storage
    ZFS Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity

    6 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 16 acronyms.

    [Thread #156 for this comm, first seen 11th Mar 2026, 21:50] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

  • vane@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    9 days ago

    It’s better to buy 4x 16-20TB drives and expand storage instead of buying 16 4TB drives. Also 16 3.5 inch HDD drives draw around 200W of power alone.

  • Flipper@feddit.orgEnglish
    1·
    9 days ago

    You say you are on a budget. Yet you talk about 128 Gigs of ram.

    Maybe you should clarify what your budget is.

  • Shimitar@downonthestreet.euEnglish
    0·
    8 days ago

    I wouldn’t use more than 4 or 6 disks in a home environment. Specially with mechanical drivers, power consumption 24/7 would get me very worried.

    I run 4 x 8Tb SSDs, not cheap, but solid, low power AND low heat (even more important).

    Consider also heat dissipation as most likely at home you don’t have a constant temperature and humidity, so many spinning disks can suffer from heat, and that will kill them faster

    Longevity… With so much space I would expect to keep it running a decade or more… So factor in 10x365x24 hours of operation, energy consumed, heat dissipation and failure rate.

    On top of that, whatever gpu and ram you throw at it is meaningless, whatever wi work, even an Intel n100 NUC. Having enough cables and port instead… Well.

    • Something Burger 🍔@jlai.luEnglish
      1·
      8 days ago

      20W/drive means 30x24x0.2 kWh each month for 10 drives. At 0.20€/kWh, that’s 28€/month, cheaper than a 20TB Hetzner box. That’s assuming all drives are always spinning, as an idle drive uses more like 5W.

      • Shimitar@downonthestreet.euEnglish
        0·
        8 days ago

        10x4tb = 40tb can be achieved with 4 12tb drives (actually 36tb in raid5) .

        Doubtfully those 12tb uses much more power than the 4tb ones, each. So the 28€/m probably cut down to 14,€/m counted in excess.

        Considering 120m (10y) of uptime, you should save enough to justify cutting down from 10 to 4 drives.

        • Passerby6497@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          8 days ago

          But going with more smaller drives gives you higher IO and the ability to have more concurrent failures before disaster. Losing a disk during resilvering is horrible when you’re only running with 1 redundant drive normally.