Hardware and Storage options for first time Home NAS

[TheJagen]

Hi Everyone,

I am looking to build my first home NAS out of an old PC and I'm wondering if I am going in the right direction or if there are any recommendations/changes that I should make. 

My old gaming PC i want to use has a 3930k, 16GB Ram, 200gb SSD and a GTX680 or GTX1080 in it (depending on requirements which one i end up leaving in there). The SSD will be the OS boot.

I mainly want to use it for photo backup (Immich) and a plex (or other recommendation) media server. For the photo back up I want to be able to remotely back up mine and my wife's phone photos and view them. For the media server the main use case is over a 2.5g ethernet to 4k TV/Theatre PC and the occasional remote view on my phone or tablet/laptop.

My main questions are about what storage solution i should use and if my current hardware is enough for a NAS and media server.

I have found a good deal on refurbished SAS hard drives, 4x4tb dell enterprise so 12tb usable with 1 fail redundancy for about half the price of 4x ironwolf red 4tb. I do want to eventually add more drives but depending on pricing availability i may have to change to SATA for the new ones. I will be buying a pcie controller for the drives anyway so i don't mind getting a SAS or SATA and my MB has some on board SATA ports for future if required. if i decide to go SATA for future drives and have SAS currently can i add them to the partition pool or can i make a second pool out of the SATA drives or will it not let me have 2 kinds of drives at all. 

Is my current CPU powerful enough for HexOS and a Plex server, i heard there may be issues with encoding etc but will it work for just over network if i don't remotely watch. What recommendations do people have for a pcie SAS or SATA controller depending on what kind of configuration I decide on. 

 

Any help will be much appreciated and I cant wait to join the home NAS community 🙂 

[ubergeek]

So that is enough to run a nas. My only issue is with drive selection, if you don't need sas I would stay away from it. My first nas I built for hexos was slapped together with random cheap 4tb drives I pulled from ebay and for it's lifetime I only lost 3 drives. So save some scratch and just focus on a better quality sata drive. 

[PsychoWards]

Look into Jellyfin as a completely free alternative to plex (which has a subscription model for certain things) and none of your GPUs are supported by Hexos. With Truenas Version 25.10 currently only GTX16 Series or newer (RTX Series) are supported, supported for everything up to GTX10 Series was dropped.

Also make sure your motherboard doesn't have a Realtek NIC, if it does, it's possible and highly likely that it's not supported. In that case you need to get another NIC, preferably Intel.