[Guide] NAS Killer 5.0


6. HDD Options

SATA drives (shuckable)

These hard drives are external consumer HDDs removed from their outer shell. Inside is a normal enterprise-grade 3.5" HDD. Western Digital is the king of the shuckable drive market right now, offering high capacity drives at low prices.

Reference the topic below to track shuckable drive prices.

SAS Drives

If you’re using SAS drives, you must connect them to a SAS controller. SATA drives can be used with your motherboard’s onboard SATA OR a SAS controller.

Take a look at the forum post below for more information on SAS controllers.

Pricing

Always, always, always make use of the “best offer” option on ebay. Especially if you’re buying multiple. Some sellers also have quantity discounts built into the listings, but those are not shown in the table below.

Brand Model (link) Capacaity Spindle RPM Cache Interface Price/TB Expected Price
Seagate ST32000444SS 2TB 7200 16MB SAS $9.50/TB $18.99
HGST/Hitachi HUS723030ALS640 3TB 7200 64MB SAS $7.98/TB $23.95
Seagate ST33000650SS 3TB 7200 64MB SAS $8.33/TB $25.00
HGST/Hitachi HUS724040ALS640 4TB 7200 64MB SAS $11.25/TB $44.99
HGST/Hitachi HUS726060AL5210 6TB 7200 128MB SAS $11.50/TB $69.00
Seagate ST6000NM0034 6TB 7200 128MB SAS $12.50/TB $75.00
HGST/Hitachi HUH728080AL4205 8TB 7200 128MB SAS $13.63/TB $109.00
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7. Cases / Chassis

Tower Cases

Brand Case (link) Fits 3.5" (Native + Non-native) Expected Price
Cooler Master N400 <= ATX 8 + 2 $60.00
Cooler Master Elite 350 (with PSU) <= ATX 6 + 4 $85.00
Fractal Design Node 804 <= mATX 10 $110.00
Fractal Design Node 304 Mini-ITX 6 $90.00
Silverstone DS380B DTX, Mini-ITX 8 hotswap $189.00

Rackmount Chassis

Brand Case (link) Fits 3.5" (Native + Non-native) Expected Price
Rosewill RSV-L4500 All 15 $149.00
Rosewill RSV-R4100 All 6 + 2 $99.00
Rosewill RSV-R4000 All 8 + 3 $100.00
Rosewill RSV-L4000 All 8 + 3 $117.00
Rosewill RSV-L4412 All 12 hotswap $250.00
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8. Power Supplies

Below are a list of affordable power supplies readily available on Amazon. I would highly recommend looking at power supplies on EVGA’s B-Stock Wednesday sale first. Of all the parts featured in the guide, the PSU matters the least. If you find a good deal and it’s 400W or more, I’d go with that instead.

Brand Model (link) Expected Price
Cooler Master MasterWatt 550 semi-fanless $75.00
Cooler Master Elite V3 600W $64.00
EVGA 500 W1 $48.00
EVGA 750 N1 $63.00
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9. CPU Coolers

Check out the thread below for heatsink options.

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10. Other Parts

For the internal SAS HBAs and Warp Drive/Flash Accelerator cards, you may need a full height bracket. Good thing is that they are really cheap ($1), bad thing is that they may take a week or two to arrive.

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Thanks for the updated guide. I’m kinda running a NAS 4.0 build with a i7-3770 CPU now. Learned alot from your posts.

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What great timing! I was just thinking about turning my old PC into a server, and it just so happens to be a LGA1150! My question is this:

Is it worth it to get a new mobo that supports ECC and IPMI?

My consumer grade mobo is the ASrock Z97 Extreme 6. And while it comes with the very good benefit of being free to me, I’m nervous about running a ZFS pool without ECC, or the hassle of hooking up KVM for maintenance or troubleshooting. (If I stick with this I may get the Pi KVM I’ve been hearing about.)

In either case, I think I will buy a new set of 4x 8Gb of RAM, since the 2x 8Gb I have now will be moving to another machine.

Also, I don’t see it listed here, probably because it’s not worth the price to a new buyer, but is there any reason why I shouldn’t use my i7-4790K in this build?

Oh, and my intentions are for running Proxmox for a few VMs. The usual Home Assistant, Plex Server, Docker stack, and possibly a Mastodon server.

Thanks!

If you have a working setup, no, it’s definitely not worth it.

Have you considered Unraid? You don’t need ECC.

Awesome to hear. And with Non-ECC going for less than ECC on ebay, that’s more good news.

I’ve considered Unraid, and I’ll consider it again, but I’ve been running a little FreeNAS (OK fine, TrueNAS) box for years on that old explody mobo (C2550D4I), and I’ve got a NUC running Proxmox now. I figured this could get me down to 1 box to do both. I bet Unraid would be a simpler setup.

It definitely would. It’s a hypervisor with an awesome storage setup, it also has a nice GUI for docker if you want to get into that. I moved from FreeNAS to unraid a couple of years ago, and I have zero plans to change back. FreeNAS has a place, but not in the home IMO.

I’ve got an old Lenovo ThinkStation E30 Mini Tower with an intel Xeon E3-1220 I’m looking to turn into a NAS

Did some research and it looks like it can handle a Xeon E3-1225 V3

Is it worth the upgrade?

According to this your Lenovo can only handle V1 CPUs, but probably V2 if there is an updated BIOS available. Definitely not V3, as that’s a different socket.

Can you confirm the specific model?

Damn, well alright.

It’s a CTO 7783

Now I’m wondering if I should just gut it use the case and get a secondhand mobo. Whatcha think?

I appreciate your guides and help!

It’s a prebuilt, which means you will run into various issues with part compatibility, stemming from motherboard size, PSU pinout, etc.

I’d either use it, or ditch it. You can always add a DAS if you just need more storage. Your Lenovo is NAS Killer 4.0 level anyway, so it’s not exactly bad.

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This is super helpful. I have an 1150 CPU and a couple 4G RAM sticks after upgrading another box and had just purchased an LSI SAS controller to upgrade my file server, but it’s an old socket 775 board with only one pciex16 slot and won’t boot with the SAS controller installed. After reading this I managed to find a supermicro X10SAE on ebay for $80 and ordered the Cooler Master N400, a CPU cooler and a SAS breakout cable on Amazon. Back to ebay for four 3TB SAS drives and I’m all set, almost. Just have to remember to look for a PSU at EVGA on Wednesday. Thanks!

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Regarding the HDD Options, I know you’ve mentioned used Hard drive options. However, from inquiring from the Ebay sellers I’m being told some of the drives have thousands of hours logged. Is there a baseline for the number of hours that are fine for the used drives? Or its more if the drive is healthy? Just wanted to be sure before I purchased by hard drives

I had read a while back on backblaze that you should expect to start seeing errors on HDDs after the 4 year mark (someone please correct me if my memory fails me here). That said, if these drives were running 24x7 in a data center, that would be 24hrsx365days or 8,760 hrs of use. So, how many thousands of hours logged are we talking about here? The four year mark turns into a little over 35,000 hours. Hope this give you a baseline to go off of for future reference.

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Great guide! Here is a silly question: My wall mounted rack has a total of 6U. I have 3U available. I was going to pull the trigger on one of these Rosewill 2U Server Chassis that have 5 bays. Currently I have my collection on 3 external drives (totaling around 10 TB).

Other than overall storage capacity, are there any other downsides with this? I suppose I could just focus on buying larger drives, too. Any recommended 3u rack mounted chassis?

What kind of performance upgrade do you think you see on say from the most basic lowest power 4.0 build to one of the better 5.0 builds assuming your not trying to transcode?