Introduction

Over the last 6 months I have moved house, and had multiple parts of my family visit, travelled interstate and suffice to stay with a full time job it has been hectic for me. Yet in the middle of all this I ran into many issues that made it painfully obvious that I needed a NAS. My dad’s laptop was having severe issues and the only solution that I could find was to reinstall windows. Say what you want about the cost of macs, this is not something I have needed to do on a mac. Reinstalling meant that I had to back everything up on to one drive (he has a subscription) and then having to reinstall windows and add the files back. This was a solid half day of effort.

It got me thinking if my dad didn’t have a one drive subscription, I’d have to go out and buy a external hard drive and then have to back up over USB. I also noted that we have to have so many subscriptions now, One drive, Apple iCloud, Google One, and so and so on. They are all expensive and increase in price year on year. I wanted to look at a solution that had no ongoing costs, an would allow me to store backups for all of my computers and devices as well as potentially act as control centre for my home.

Research

With that aim in my mind I started researching. My initial idea was to buy a Synology NAS. I have come to appreciate the ease of close systems as long as they allow me to do what I want. I use a mac and iPhone, because its easy. I don’t have to worry about things breaking randomly, or drivers failing. Yet Synology was not the answer. They have been mired in controversy recently as they have been pushing updates to their systems to only allow hard drives with Synology firmware. It was a clear an egregious attempt at vendor lock in. As I said I don’t mind if the convenience outweighs the cost, but if you look at the prices $450 AUD for a Synology 4TB hard drive was $150 AUD for the Seagate 4TB hard drive, this is, excuse my Australian, clearly taking the piss.

Synology was out initially on a economic front an even though they have reversed this policy, I cannot trust them to bring it back later, so they are out on a moral front as well.

So I continued my search there are boxes from Ubiquiti, Ugreen and others, yet they all had issues in one way or another, whether its the quality of the product, software support or other limitations. In the end I decided to abandon prebuilts and look at building my own NAS. As I googled around I came across a build that I liked.

Brian McMoses builds NASs every year. He has put a good deal of thought into the choices he makes. I chose the 2025 version as a base for mine.

https://blog.briancmoses.com/2024/11/diy-nas-2025-edition.html

Building the NAS

I chose to use 4TB drives which I got for $113 which at the time and even more so today is a great bargain. The small form factor is an added advantage as I need it to be easily movable. The other choices i made were to only go for 16GB of ram and I went with an i3 rather than the n100. The reasons for such? It has better performance and for ram? Cost. For the same reasons I didn’t use an app drive instead I partitioned the os drive to act as an app drive. This saved cost but introduces risk for me.

I chose to install TrueNas Scale, over all the other options out there. This is open source software and also free. I chose it over Open Media Vault and HexOS for both cost, openness, ease of use and feature availability reasons. I am very happy with the choice.

I used this method to partition the NVME drive to support the boot partition and apps partition on one drive. It is not recommended and not supported but as with al my project I want to learn as much as I can.

https://www.reddit.com/r/truenas/comments/lgf75w/scalehowto_split_ssd_during_installation/?share_id=7FNx79h5XJcC9OYsxSdcT

My overall cost for this project can be seen in the table below.

Overall it was relatively cheap for today. I recommend buying the motherboard of Aliexpress but everything else from local stores during sales. The stores tend to have great deals.

Issues

I had one annoying issue. The hard drive bay fan ran full tilt all the time. To solve it I disconnected it. It isn;t noisy anymore. This is a well known issue this board. I probably would have bought a different one if I had done a bit more research. The other major issue is that the board only has 6 slots for HDDs, 1 NVME and 1 SSD. This limits expansion possibilities but that is fine.

Conclusion

Overall I am very happy with my NAS and it has been running for 3-4 months now. I have deployed applications like Jellyfin, and tailscale on it. These though will be the topic of another post.