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Comment by zeroq | Hacker News Reader

I wanted to join the NAS club for so long but it was always either bang for buck for prebuilts ($1k for 4 bays, with 4Gb RAM and the CPU is slower than my previous phone?!) or lack of availability for 4+ SATA boards.

Last year I had aha moment when I learned about SAS boards.

My final build was:

  - Jonsbo N3 case
  - ITX PSU
  - ASRock B550M/ITX
  - Ryzen 5500GT
  - LSI 9207-8i
  - 16GB DDR4

Result - for ~$1k I have 8 bay NAS that's also strong HTPC and console capable of running games like Silksong with no sweat.

Before I learned about SAS cards my biggest limiter was number of SATA slots. If not for that card I would be looking at $600+ niche mobos.

But the biggest winner was 5500GT. I was looking at N300 for lower power consumption, but Ryzen draws 1W at idle and has APU capable of serious gaming (not 4k Elden Ring, but c'mon).

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> LSI 9207-8i

Awesome! Now erase your Truenas, install XCP-ng, passthrough the LSI to the TrueNas VM :)

Great point. What drives did you end up getting.. and any issues w/ fans on the N3? (I'm considering something similar given the LSI 9300 with IT :)

hello

I like terramaster if you're looking for budget. software is a bit potato (it's all there, and you can install apps, just 7-8/10 polished, not 10/10), hardware build quality is solid

for 10 bays i like asus lockerstore, also two NVMes, times I've bought those, a bit north of 1000

i do not have affiliations or interests with either company, just a data hoarder

that's within the last year so not sure if anything changed in the last few months in light of things

What is Ryzen adding here towards the NAS part of this system? Or is it only for gaming?

NAS in this context is more about home server then an actual plain network attached storage.

I usually call mine NAS too, despite technically using it more for selfhosting - and basically never mounting it's data volumes. I think this applies to almost everyone using them nowadays, which is also the reason why the pre built ones are less and less relevant - because they always have super conservative CPUs (which are more then sufficient for a NAS that's actually used as a plain network attached storage - but severely underperforming if the user wants to run services on it.)

Main benefit of Ryzen is that previously I was aiming for something like Atom or N300 for low power consumption - now, with Ryzen I have CPU with 10x computing power, powerful integrated GPU, that idles at 1W, and I can do serious gaming with it.

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