GoKawiilGoogle nagged me into this, along with every other enshittified cloud provider dealer. For about a year, my phone warned me that the account was nearly full, so I migrated the picture backups to a Nextcloud instance and freed the space, at which point the nagging switched to reminding me that backups were turned off. Gmail does the same and provides helpful "Upgrade" buttons here and there. I do not want to rent space for my own pictures for the rest of my life, and I certainly do not want Google looking at them either. I wanted a place to keep the family's files, an automatic backup for years of pictures that were living on phones and ageing PCs, and a machine that could download Linux ISOs around the clock without anyone noticing. I thought I wanted a NAS, so I built one.
The finished build
An Old Friend
Let's be honest, it's been increasingly crazy to buy computers in the last few years, GPUs especially. Fortunately, every computer I ever bought had a GPU (you never know when you'll need that sweet, sweet fast matrix multiplication), and it turned out I had just the computer for the job.
Enter the Zotac MAGNUS EN1070K, a compact box with an i5 and a good old GTX 1070. It spent a few years as the living room media centre and occasional gaming rig. I used the same model in robot prototypes, where it did great. It idles low, it transcodes video on the GPU, and it runs a small local model without complaining.
The problem is that Zotac designed it to hold a single 2.5" drive. So I designed an extension for its body in Onshape, printed it in glass-filled ABS, and bolted it on. Inside are an ICY Dock five-bay hot-swap cage, a printed holder for a sixth drive, a Pico PSU fed from the Zotac's upgraded 19.5 V brick through a DC-DC converter (six drives spinning up at once pull about 125 W for a brief moment), and Noctua fans to move the air. The six SATA ports come from an ASM1166 adapter in the M.2 slot, which is why the 1 TB boot SSD lives in the 2.5" bay now.
The Zotac atop the printed extension
The rest of the upgrade came out of my junk drawers. Two DDR4 sticks from an old laptop take the memory to the platform maximum of 32 GB, an SSD I had lying around boots it, and a WiFi card from a previous project replaces the original one. The only parts I paid for were the cage, the adapter, and, much to my dismay, the drives.
The Hard Way
It's 2026, and I bought six hard disk drives. I did not want to; I thought we were past mechanically spinning storage. SSDs at this capacity, if you can find them, will cost you a couple of kidneys. For a NAS, the price per TB matters a lot; I did my best to keep it as low as practical. Don't get me wrong, hard drives are not cheap either. AI data centres are buying every drive, every memory chip, and every GPU the fabs can make: Western Digital's hard drive production is sold out for all of 2026, DRAM and NAND contract prices nearly doubled in a single quarter, and the rest of us get what is left at whatever price. There's a healthy market for second-hand NAS drives on eBay, and I was able to snatch a matched set of 8 TB WD Red Plus at a reasonable price.
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