Hardware

Yep, that was my intention. First, it's low power, so it can be always-on with only a small impact on the power bill. Second, it's only gonna serve a few things - my photography hobby and media library, and maybe a service or two will come with time. If I need other services, I put them on a Hetzner box and they're much better taken care of.

I've done my share of sysadmin work and even a bit of server-room maintenance, I don't want a full-time, or even a part time job. This is mostly gonna sit in the corner, and be quiet. If the prices matched, I would have probably just gone with QNap or Synology, but this way I get the NAS and the disks for the same price.

Yes, it didn't inspire confidence when it arrived so, but it's actually a tiny PSU, it's essentially all bolted onto the power connector :)

Sure, here's the breakdown:

AsRock J4125-ITX -> 120,62€ Crucial 8GB RAM kit -> 19,90€ 2 x Seagate IronWolf 4TB -> 2 x 114,99€ Samsung 870 EVO SSD 500GB -> 31,41€ (I originally ordered an NVMe one that cost 29€). Fractal Design Node 304 -> 91,89€ PicoPSU -> 35,95€ No-name Power Adapter (220V to 12V) -> 12,99€ Molex-2x Sata -> 9,99€ (there is a ~1€ option, but I wanted a nicer cable for some cable management.

A few cables that I had. Total: 552,73€

I wanted to get a 4-bay NAS, and QNAP, Synology or Asustor would be a bit less, but without the disks. Also, I wanted an x86 CPU, for potential future use. This way I turned out a little cheaper, and it is a bit more flexible.

I plan to try the OpenMediaVault first. For my use - a lot less for services and dynamic changes and a lot more for sitting in the closet quietly - it's good enough. And I can still dig into the internals if I wanted to.

And with OMV I can also teach my non-techy wife and kids how to add themselves more disk space :)

I like the case a lot. It surprised me as it was bigger than expected and than it looked like, but I should have seen it coming. For one, it has room for a full-blown PSU (and I have the PicoPSU), and for two, I picked it because it has room for 6 3.5" HDDs.

But it's still pretty small, it's nice enough that my wife would let me keep it in a living room :)

I thought about it, but I got rid of a lot of my electronic junk in the recent years and would have to buy everything from scratch anyway. So I went with the "small and silent and low-power" route. I also think it's going to live in a closet in my home office as well :)

Oh, I am enjoying it, but I didn't expect to start learning already. I thought I'll pick up a thing or two about the software side of things though, but most of the stuff I've been doing already for a long time. But yes, it's a deep rabbit hole.

Yes, the specs say less then 5W per HDD. Even if I had older and hungrier disks at 10W each, it's still good. The CPU is consuming about 10 watts, the rest of the board, let's say another 10. Even if I fill all six HDD slots that the case has room for, I think it would work.

Thanks! Yes, getting some hardware work done is always exciting, like a kid with a new toy!

You're right, the cost is about 320€ without the disks, not something to throw away if you already have a working solution. But if I wanted to wait and get used parts (like case, board etc) and only get new disks, it would probably be even cheaper. I left a cost breakdown in a comment above somewhere, if you want to do some calculations and sell off that Synology. You would probably need to add some money anyway, but hey, that's why we have jobs so that we can have toys :)

Yes, in fact! Two main reasons.

• I wanted low-power, this is mostly gonna sit in the closet and serve files around. Even ARM CPUs like the RasPi can do that. But I didn't want it to be too weak, in case I wanted a simple service or two, this still has extra oomph. This isn't too powerful, but it is a 64-bit x86 CPU.

• I also wanted some ports. This has 4 SATA ports. It's supposed to be a NAS. It has a Gbit ethernet - I don't have a Gbit network at home so this is good enough for now, and I can expand it somewhat. It has USBs, expansion slots etc.

• those two combined resulted in a few selections, AsRock's mini-ITX boards with integrated CPUs are quite good choices in this space.

• I wanted low power consumption. I could have gone with a slightly stronger ‎J5040-ITX perhaps, but it's also using just slightly more power.

• it's also cheaper, the mobo with the CPU cost me 120€. The j5040 I mentioned would be a bit more - not a lot but still noticable.

• I wanted silent, and this board and CPU is passively cooled. If I had money, I would get SSDs for storage as well (less power, less noise) but it's a LOT more expensive.

I know there are other CPUs in this space but in the end you have to pick one so I did.

pata

How old are those? :)

How did you find it for cable management?

Yes, I like it a lot. FD has this niche and does a good job.

My old HP laptop was referred to as having celery for a CPU. It was about capable of using Chrome without having a breakdown.

Well, look at these few things:

1. Modern CPUs, even Celerons, are powerful. People are driving a lot of workload even on ARM CPUs, and this is a proper 4-core x64 CPU. I mean, look at your phone, it's most likely doing a lot of full-hd media, right? And it's doing just fine.

2. Most commercially-available Home/Small Office NAS systems, by Synology, Asustor, QNAP and others, they have either CPUs in this class, or weaker, ARM CPUs. I'm not gonna be sitting at this box. I have 3 desktops and 3 laptops around the house for work - this is gonna be mostly storage.

3. My planned media management workload is a bit different than media processing. I mostly want to serve files around, maybe transcode something in the background. I don't plan to watch movies off of this (yet). I have a 4-core Hetzner VPS that is similar in power to this, and it's driving something like 4-5 docker containers and still serving all the files.

I think it's gonna be fine, but we shall see.

Thanks! I ordered a SATA SSD already, and I did plan to read about the E key slot later, but for now I'm good. The board has 4 SATA slots, so I will either have to have an USB OS disk or an adapter like this, but for now I'll just go with what I know.

Do you know what are the speeds like on that Sintech or similar adapter? I don't really need NVMe speeds, it's a simple OS disk, but I wouldn't like to go down to something bellow regular SSD speeds.

They are perfectly fine for a home NAS.

That is why I bought a few Ryzen powered Mini PCs. They have plenty of computational power and they are also power efficient.

Oh, I don't want this to be a PC. I have plenty of CPU power for what I do, this has a different purpose.

I'm not planning to run anything much on those Celerons - it's mostly just a file server. People do that with a RasPi - a 4-core CPU is going to blow it out of the water I think.