I’m building a NAS for the first time on my own, so I wanted to share the story so far here.

I’m not a stranger to custom builds, in fact I don’t think I ever bought an assembled PC (not counting second hand 386 box a million years ago). But this is my first small, low power build, so it’s not perfect, I already ran into a wall (more later).

I base the build on an AsRock mini-ITX board, the CPU is included, it’s passively cooled, low power consumption but still powerful for a NAS. I’m sticking it into a Node 304 Fractal Design case. Here’s the full list of parts I got:

  • AsRock J4125-ITX board with a Celeron 4125 (4-core CPU)
  • 8GB DDR4 RAM (a Crucial kit)
  • a 500GB NVMe SSD (which I can’t use)
  • a couple of Seagate IronWolf 4TB drives
  • 90W PicoPSU and some no-name power brick
  • Fractal Design Node 304 mini-ITX case.

I planned to have an SSD for OS, these two disks for my photography and media, and then later on expand with more storage (preferably SSD, when I can afford it).

As mentioned, I messed up: the M2 slot on the motherboard is a “Key E” slot. I never bothered with these keys before, so I didn’t know that a Key E slot does not have a SATA protocol, it won’t take my SSD.

Another thing, the PicoPSU is a 20-pin power supply, and the board has a 24-pin slot. It should still be fine, the specs say that this is still okay, but I’ll have to see. According to my back-of-the-napkin calculations, 90 Watts should be enough power for the mobo and CPU, the SSD and the two spinning disks.

Anyway I’ll get a regular SATA SSD tomorrow and see how it’s shaping up. Let me know if you want me to post more on my progress/end result or if you have any questions.

    • zlatko@programming.devOP
      1·
      1 year ago

      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.