A NAS build: part 1 - Getting ideas and parts

Howdy

I finally took some time to revamp my homelab. The original setup was pretty humble: a Raspberry Pi flashed with OpenMediaVault and two USB DAS units hanging off it. I had a few containers running, and it served me well for a while.

But then Home Assistant came into my life.

Running it in a container was limiting—especially since I didn’t want my DAS drives spinning 24/7 just because of some background logging. That was my first bottleneck. So when I got my hands on a refurbished Dell Optiplex 7050 Micro, I saw a golden opportunity to expand my capabilities and split concerns. I flashed Proxmox onto it immediately, and everything worked like a charm.

With all this new tinkering power, I started dreaming bigger: a real NAS. One with more “spine.”

I started looking—both new and used—and wow. NAS prices are insane for what you get. Sure, there’s the convenience of plug-and-play, custom software, and lower power consumption. But €800 for a 4-bay NAS without hard drives? That’s wild.

So I asked myself: what is a NAS, really?

An optimized computer with some room for drives. Why not just build one?

Of course, I’d be giving up the plug-and-play niceties. It’d be more power-hungry. And I’d have to invest time tinkering. But in return, I’d get:

• Something way more powerful.
• Fully serviceable and upgradeable hardware.
• A hands-on learning playground for everything I’ve wanted to try.

The idea is to use this new box to serve media across my LAN, run some more containers, and maybe even spin up an Ollama instance. Full disclosure: I told my girlfriend it was for safely storing our kids' photos. We don’t have kids yet, but hey—future-proofing, am I right?

The Build

Everything depended on what I could afford and what I could scrounge up locally. The secondhand market wasn’t too kind—prices were higher than expected, and selection was limited.

So, here’s the list of parts I went with, guided by a bit of research, trial-and-error, and a helpful LLM that explained a few things I hadn’t wrapped my head around yet.

Some Thoughts:

Case: I really wanted to go mATX for space reasons, but wow, there’s a drought of cases that support mATX and have decent HDD capacity. I originally had my eye on the Fractal Node 804, but it went out of stock fast. The Sagittarius case was a solid plan B at a similar price.

PSU: It’s not top-shelf, but it’ll do for now—as long as it doesn’t explode. I’ll probably upgrade it once I add spinning rust.

CPU: Nothing fancy, just needed something with an iGPU. Storage is the main job; the rest is experimental. I found a used one, and since CPUs generally outlive everything else, I’m good with it.

RAM: No ECC, sorry! Finding a budget-friendly mATX board with ECC support and enough SATA ports was a lost cause. Also, ECC RAM is expensive. I’m planning to use ZFS, and while ECC is preferred, the general consensus is that ZFS without ECC is still safer than EXT4. Good enough for a SOHO setup.

Power-wise, I should be idling around 20–30W, which in Italy translates to roughly €6/month. Not bad at all.

The Plan (aka “Things That Might Fail”)

As every tinkerer knows, a plan is just a list of things that can go wrong. So I’m keeping it short and sweet:

• Add an Optane module I’ve got lying around—maybe for SLOG.
• Install Proxmox on the SSDs, set up in RAIDZ1.
• Use my existing DAS for scheduled backups.
• Eventually add at least 4 HDDs to set up a RAIDZ array for data.
• Grab a UPS, upgrade the PSU.

Could it have been better? Sure.
Could I have saved more? Probably.

But I think I nailed the sweet spot: a budget-friendly, fully serviceable, future-proof NAS box that will grow with me—and teach me along the way.

I’ll keep you posted as the parts arrive and the build comes together.

Happy building ⚒