Build Advice Debating on correct specs for a NAS/Server setup with options to expand in the future

[eternalabys]

Hello everyone,

As the title suggests, I'm currently in the midst of working out a NAS PC with the ability of expanding both storage and capabilities in the future without breaking the bank.
I'm relatively new to the NAS/Server side of things, usually just kept towards networking and PC building, but I've recently understood that I'm becoming increasingly annoyed with having to hear spinning rust on my desk all of the time.
But most importantly, I'm looking to create a NAS for backups and storage of personal files and mass media, while also using it for docker and streaming of movies/videos locally and remotely.
My main concern is around reliability, noise level and power draw, as I do believe that most of the time the system will be either off or in an idle state.

My current idea is this:

https://de.pcpartpicker.com/list/zZzgcH

Drives would be a mix of new and used drives, thinking about using TrueNAS. Any and all advice welcome.
Thank you in advanced.

 

[hotaru.hino]

Things I want to point out

• Unless this is going to do real-time transcoding of videos to serve to other people, the CPU is kinda overkill.
  • I don't even know if this feature is useful anymore. It had some value when you had a mix of devices that couldn't decode H.264 efficiently or whatnot, but even 1080p H.264 is peanuts for most modern devices.
  • If you are deadset on this, I recommend power limiting and/or disabling turbo.
• Same with the cooler. A tower air cooler like a Thermalright Peerless Assassin would be fine.
• Motherboard also seems kind of overkill.
• I'm not sure what the WD and Seagate drives are for, other than one of them being the OS drive. If one of them is the OS drive, dump it for an NVMe SSD
• You don't need an 850W power supply. You could run all of this off a 400W power supply easily.

 

[thestryker]

I'd highly recommend going with air cooling over liquid and the Peerless Assassin is a great recommendation.

Personally speaking I wouldn't buy a motherboard without official ECC support/ECC memory listed on QVL. It's not that you absolutely need to get ECC memory now, but it is a good thing to have for long term systems. From some reading it sounds like Asus is the most transparent company with regards to ECC UDIMM support. It looks like MSI says "non-ECC" on all their AMD board specs. ASRock mentions ECC support, but the board you're looking at for example doesn't list any ECC kits on the QVL.

You'll want a good quality lower power usage power supply as the system will be mostly idle and I'd expect the power consumption to be fairly low. My server box has a 12700K, 64GB ECC DRAM, 5x 18TB HDDs, 1x 2TB SSD, 6x 118GB Optane, 2x CPU fans, 4x case fans and idle is 80-90W so yours ought to be much lower (I'm using a fanless 450W PSU).

Intel would likely have lower idle power usage and quicksync can be fantastic for transcoding. These are just more things to consider, but Intel's ECC support is also more limited.

The storage situation seems somewhat odd so I don't know if these are just drives you already have or just a starting point. I'd suggest going with same capacity drives and personally wouldn't use less than RAID-Z2 or a mirror for data integrity. You also might want more than 32GB DRAM for maximum performance (ZFS is a memory hog), but I did run my system with that for a while without noticing issues.