Fourteen years ago, my storage needs outpaced my capacity and I began to look into building a network attached storage server. I had a few criteria in mind and was curious to see if anyone had _ recently_ shared something similar, but I couldn’t find anything that was relevant.
In fact, I found that the communities I was looking for answers in were actively hostile towards what I wanted to do. This resulted in my decision to build my own DIY NAS and share that as one of my very first blogs.
Much to my surprise, people were very interested in that blog! Ever since, I’ve been building a similar DIY NAS machine almost every year trying to satisfy the curiosity of other prospective DIY NAS builders.
Here are those criteria:
Small form factor: It’s not the case for me any more, but at the time the space was limited in my office. I always assume that space in everybody’s office is limited. As a result, I want my DIY NAS builds to occupy as little of that office space as I can. At least six drive bays: Back when I built my NAS, it took about four drives’ worth of storage to meet my storage needs. Plus I desired two empty drive bays for future use. However, in the years since hard drive capacities have increased dramatically. At some point in the future, I may reduce this to four drive bays. An integrated, low power CPU: I intend my DIY NAS to run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and 52 weeks a year. When it comes to power consumption, that can do some damage on your electric bill! Thankfully our electricity here isn’t as expensive as others’ in the United States, or even further outside its borders, but I try and keep power consumption in mind when picking components for a DIY NAS build. Homelab potential: It does not take up a lot of CPU horsepower for a NAS to serve up files, which means that on modern hardware there’s a lot of untapped potential in a DIY NAS for virtual machines or containers to self-host services.
It’s important to remember that these are my criteria, and not necessarily yours. Every DIY NAS builder should be making their own list of criteria and reconcile all of their component purchases against the criteria that’s important to them.
Is it even a good time to build a NAS?
As I prepared to build this NAS, component prices disappointed me. Hard drives, SSDs, and RAM prices were all rising. Based on what I’ve been told, I expect Intel CPU prices to increase as well. My contact at Topton has been encouraging me to stock up on motherboards while they still have some in inventory. Based on what’s been explained to me, I expect the motherboard’s prices to rise and for their availability to potentially dwindle.
In short, the economy sucks and the price of DIY NAS components is a pretty good reflection of just how sucky things are becoming. I briefly considered not publishing a DIY NAS build this year hoping that things would improve a few months down the road. But then I asked myself, “What if it’s even worse in a few months?”
I sure hope things get better, but I fear and expect that they’ll get worse.
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