Building a Home NAS System: A Cost-Effective Alternative to Off-the-Shelf Units

In this article, we will explore the process of building a home NAS system using older hardware, specifically focusing on the T20 case from Dell. This project is an excellent example of how to create a capable and reliable NAS system without breaking the bank. By reusing older hardware, we can significantly reduce the cost compared to buying an off-the-shelf unit.

The first step in building our NAS system was finding the necessary components. We started by selecting a motherboard that could accommodate the T20 case's four SATA ports. After researching and considering various options, we settled on a T20 model with four large and two small drive bays. However, since there are only four SATA ports available, we needed to find an alternative solution for connecting multiple drives.

A PCI Express SATA card was the perfect solution for this problem, as it allowed us to connect six drives while utilizing one of the case's PCIe slots. We found a card that met our requirements on Amazon for £15, which might seem like a compromise due to its use of a single lane slot, resulting in a theoretical bandwidth of 500 Mbps per second. Although this might not be enough for both SATA ports to run at full speed simultaneously, it is sufficient for one drive to operate close to full capacity once the overheads are factored in.

To add power to our system, we needed to find an alternative solution since the T20 case only has four power connectors available. We found a pack of three Y-splitter cables on Amazon that solved this issue perfectly and added another £7 to our total cost. Additionally, we purchased a pack of three SATA cables for just over £5.

With all the necessary components in hand, we moved on to installing them into the T20 case. The boot drive was easily installed using the PCIe card, while the temporary file storage and other drives were connected via the SATA ports. TrueNAS was chosen as our operating system, which has proven to be excellent, with a user-friendly web interface that makes setting up and managing the NAS system a breeze.

After completing the build process, we tested our home NAS system thoroughly in the year since its creation. We were thrilled with the performance, particularly when it came to transfer speeds. The RAM cache proved to be an effective solution for faster data transfer rates, as shown in the provided screenshot of our testing results.

The experience of building this home NAS system has been nothing short of brilliant, and we are thoroughly happy with our decision to take this route. If you have any questions or would like to share your own experiences with building a NAS system, please leave a comment below. We also invite you to support the channel by using Amazon links in the description to purchase these components, as well as give us a thumbs up, thumbs down, and consider subscribing to our channel for more content like this.

The T20 case is another great option when it comes to building a home NAS system, offering documentation on Dell's website that can be found, and schematics stuck to the door. We also recommend exploring other options in older hardware, as these can still comfortably outperform newer, more expensive chips used in off-the-shelf NAS systems.

Finally, we would like to thank you for spending some time with us today. If you have any questions or concerns about building a home NAS system, please don't hesitate to reach out. We'll see you again soon for another article and possibly more content related to this topic.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthis is an Old Dell T20 server and there's not much that's remarkable about that but this one has been given a new lease of life because about a year ago I did some careful upgrades and I repurposed this old server as a network storage device running true naaz and here's the cool bit in addition to helping the environment by reusing old Hardware you can take something like this and build a Nas that is more powerful than off the-shelf systems for under £200 or $200 now for those who are new to the topic Nas stands for network attached storage basically a set of hard drives that you can access over a local network from any of your machines and you can join multiple Drives together to give you a larger storage space and to create redundancy to protect your data in the event of a drive failure I have been using an off-the-shelf Asus store Nas which I reviewed previously on the channel and I've got to say it's really good but it network connectivity is limited and I wanted a new solution with the fastest 10 gbit network speed and when I was shopping around a year ago prices were up around the ,000 mark probably the same in dollars about $1,000 now they've come down a little in price since then but these devices are still expensive and what do you get for that ,000 or $1,000 outlay well usually a slow seller on processor and about 4 Gaby of ram oh and that price doesn't include any drives so that got me thinking that I could build something better myself for that price point and long story short I ended up coming to the conclusion that buying an old use machine might be the way to go enter this Dell T20 we bought this particular machine some years ago for our web Studio business it was a cheap simple server that did a sterling job hosting our source code repositories and Version Control System it's got a basic Zeon cadore CPU I think it's an E31 1225 version 3 but I'll put the exact model up on the screen and since our business didn't need the machine anymore I got this particular one for free but if you had to go and buy one used on eBay you'll find there's plenty to choose from for not much money I found an identical one for £65 on eBay UK or $75 on eBay us the T20 does need a few careful upgrades and additional components to make this setup work but before we get to that the first step of course is to clean out the years of dust and dirt that had accumulated inside so a careful vacuum and a wipe down got it looking fresh again and we're ready to consider the first upgrade which is the ram now we want the maximum for this motherboard of 32 GB the true nasos will use the ram as a file cache and this has a big impact on the speed of file copies when you send files over the network they'll go into the ram first and then flush from there into the storage drives so if you're just copying small files you can use the maximum speed of the network regardless of the speed of the drives so for the ram I found a company in the UK called bargain hardware and they had some used Bram of the right type in stock four of those Sticks came to £72 I think the machine did originally have a single 8 GB dim in there so I could have just bought three sticks to save £18 there but I wanted them all to be matching installing the ram of course is nice and easy so on to the next challenge which is upgrading the network speed as standard the T20 has a 1 gabit network card which I'm going to use as a backup but I want to have 10 GB network speed eBay to the rescue I found this used solar flare PCI Express card for £28 looking at the specs I could see it needs a pcie 2.08 lane slot and the T20 does have one of those in fact the slot I'm using is actually PCI Express Generation 3 there is another slot on the motherboard that appears to be an eight Lane slot but it's actually only a four-lane slot supporting pcie generation 2 four lanes of pcie2 would be enough for a 10 GB network card but since the card that I've bought is designed as an eight Lane card I've decided to put it in that faster slot so that was a very easy and cheap upgrade the card arrived in good condition and was nice and easy to install and it works straight away with no drivers so thumbs up there I also picked up some cat 7 ethernet cables on Amazon got a few different lengths and I've been really pleased with them now of course you do need additional Network gear Beyond just the nas you're going to need a 10 gbit switch of course I've got a ubiquity UniFi four port switch which wasn't cheap but it has been absolutely Rock Solid but I'm not including this in the price of the nas because you need a 10 gig switch whether you buy your own or you buy an off the shelf Nas and of course you'll also want 10 gig support in your computer but I do also have a 2.5 GB USB adapter to plug my MacBook into it's not quite as fast but it's not as slow as you might think as you'll see my spinning discs run at just under 400 megabytes per second and that's equivalent to 3.2 gbits so you're losing about a quarter of the performance on Long longer file copies uh and a bit more on smaller copies but it's still quick enough so if you're in a multi-user environment especially 2.5 gigabit adapters will work fine with a spinning disc setup and I'm going with spinning discs because they're cheaper and also because options for SSD in this chassis are limited the T20 doesn't have any support for nvme drives and we just use the fastest PCI slot for the network card so there's probably not much point in adding more via a pcie carriable so I've got four 8 TB Seagate ironwolf drives in my USBC enclosure and I'm removing those and then installing them into this Nas I've got some other older drives that will go back in that enclosure which I'll continue to use for backups now when you buy an off the shelf NZ you typically install your own drives and that's why I'm not including drives in the price either you might already have drives like me but if you do need to go out and buy something like the ironwolf 8 tbte models I'm using they're about2 200 or $180 per drive you might be able to find a better deal and you might choose to go for smaller or even larger capacities just make sure that you're buying drives that are specifically designed for Nas use my plan is to install these four 8 TB drives in a raid 6 configuration and that means that I'll only have half the total capacity 16 terabytes but the benefit is that any two of the drives can fail and I won't lose any data now of course I do have other backups but this is our main storage array so I don't want to have to spend time restoring data from backup if I don't have to I'd rather just swap out a disc and let it rebuild the array in the background with traz you also need a separate drive for the operating system and I also thought that I'd put another separate single drive in for temporary file storage the T20 has four large Drive Bays two at the bottom of the chassis and two at the top and there space on the top carrier for a slim DVD drive but if you don't use that there's mounting points for two 2 and 1/2 in SATA drives so I'm going to do exactly that I'm going to mount two 2 and 1/2 in SATA ssds in this position one will be for the operating system and one is going to be devoted to that temporary file storage and given that it's an SSD it should run quickly but actually in practice I haven't used that temporary storage much at all in the past year so our T20 can accommodate six drives in total four large and two small or if you wanted to create a near silent SSD Nas you could Mount six small ssds and then have five of them in a raid array nice however we only have four SATA ports and four power connectors in the T20 so I went looking for a PCI Express SATA card and I found this one on Amazon for £15 it is a bit of a compromise because it runs on a PCI Express 2.0 single Lane slot and that means total theoretical bandwidth of 500 mbes per second and if you do your math you'll realize that's a little bit low for two 6 GB SATA ports it's enough for one to run at close to full speed once you've factored in overheads but it's not enough for both to run simultaneously at full speed I could have bought a more expensive card and I could have put it in that empty four lane slot that I mentioned earlier so it is technically possible to give those SATA drives full bandwidth I just figured that it didn't really matter to my use case because it's unlikely that both the system drive and that temporary file Drive will be getting hammered at the same time and it's quick enough the card works perfectly I was able to get the boot Drive working as well whilst connected to this card so I picked up some additional SATA cables on Amazon a pack of three for just over5 and I solved the power issue using some y splitter cables again a pack of three from Amazon was just £7 and that's everything so my total cost before adding drives came to £ 1227 if I've done my math correctly uh so even factoring in having to buy a T20 you can do a build just like this for £200 or $200 or even less just compare that to spending four or five times as much on an off-the-shelf unit but you're getting a much more capable CPU you're getting more RAM and the satisfaction of reusing older Hardware which is good for the environment and it's Hardware that is pretty low powered so it's not going to be using much in the way of electricity especially if you do what I do and shut it down when you're not using it when it comes to volume I find it's not that loud the loudest noise coming from the case is the spinning discs I think the P20 is a really nice chassis to work with you can still find documentation for it on Dell's website and I just love the schematics that are stuck to the door of course there are lots of other options in older Hardware that are well worth checking out because you just don't need the latest and greatest CPU and motherboard for a Nas system like this these older chips will still comfortably outperform the cerons and embedded chips that you usually find in offthe shelf Nas systems when it comes to the OS I've got to say that true Nas is excellent it's got a really useful and easy to use web interface and it was pretty easy to set up and it's been completely reliable but that's probably a deeper dive subject for another video so finally how does this homebuilt Nas perform well the answer is really well transfer speeds are excellent as you can see you can also see the effect of that Ram cache on the larger transfers just have a look at this screenshot you can see the slight dip in performance as the cache fills up and then takes a moment to clear and I'm guessing that as you transfer data the ram cach is immediately flushed out to the drives whilst fresh data is still coming into the cache obviously the data comes in faster than it can flush out to the spinning disc So eventually you hit this bottleneck and it dips in performance for a moment but in the meantime the nas continues to accept data at a decent speed and that keeps overall speeds up hopefully that makes sense I've thoroughly tested this machine in the year since doing the build and I have to say it's been brilliant I'm really happy that we took this route and I hope the experience has been useful to you in some way um if you've got any questions incidentally please leave a comment I'll do my best to answer as many as I can but if you've done a build like this yourself please also share your experience because I'm by no means an expert with true Na and probably made a mistake somewhere now as always you can support the channel by using the Amazon links in the description I've done a link to everything we featured uh you could also give us a thumbs up a thumbs down and please consider subscribing to the channel thank you for spending a bit of time with me today I'll see you again soon for some more geekthis is an Old Dell T20 server and there's not much that's remarkable about that but this one has been given a new lease of life because about a year ago I did some careful upgrades and I repurposed this old server as a network storage device running true naaz and here's the cool bit in addition to helping the environment by reusing old Hardware you can take something like this and build a Nas that is more powerful than off the-shelf systems for under £200 or $200 now for those who are new to the topic Nas stands for network attached storage basically a set of hard drives that you can access over a local network from any of your machines and you can join multiple Drives together to give you a larger storage space and to create redundancy to protect your data in the event of a drive failure I have been using an off-the-shelf Asus store Nas which I reviewed previously on the channel and I've got to say it's really good but it network connectivity is limited and I wanted a new solution with the fastest 10 gbit network speed and when I was shopping around a year ago prices were up around the ,000 mark probably the same in dollars about $1,000 now they've come down a little in price since then but these devices are still expensive and what do you get for that ,000 or $1,000 outlay well usually a slow seller on processor and about 4 Gaby of ram oh and that price doesn't include any drives so that got me thinking that I could build something better myself for that price point and long story short I ended up coming to the conclusion that buying an old use machine might be the way to go enter this Dell T20 we bought this particular machine some years ago for our web Studio business it was a cheap simple server that did a sterling job hosting our source code repositories and Version Control System it's got a basic Zeon cadore CPU I think it's an E31 1225 version 3 but I'll put the exact model up on the screen and since our business didn't need the machine anymore I got this particular one for free but if you had to go and buy one used on eBay you'll find there's plenty to choose from for not much money I found an identical one for £65 on eBay UK or $75 on eBay us the T20 does need a few careful upgrades and additional components to make this setup work but before we get to that the first step of course is to clean out the years of dust and dirt that had accumulated inside so a careful vacuum and a wipe down got it looking fresh again and we're ready to consider the first upgrade which is the ram now we want the maximum for this motherboard of 32 GB the true nasos will use the ram as a file cache and this has a big impact on the speed of file copies when you send files over the network they'll go into the ram first and then flush from there into the storage drives so if you're just copying small files you can use the maximum speed of the network regardless of the speed of the drives so for the ram I found a company in the UK called bargain hardware and they had some used Bram of the right type in stock four of those Sticks came to £72 I think the machine did originally have a single 8 GB dim in there so I could have just bought three sticks to save £18 there but I wanted them all to be matching installing the ram of course is nice and easy so on to the next challenge which is upgrading the network speed as standard the T20 has a 1 gabit network card which I'm going to use as a backup but I want to have 10 GB network speed eBay to the rescue I found this used solar flare PCI Express card for £28 looking at the specs I could see it needs a pcie 2.08 lane slot and the T20 does have one of those in fact the slot I'm using is actually PCI Express Generation 3 there is another slot on the motherboard that appears to be an eight Lane slot but it's actually only a four-lane slot supporting pcie generation 2 four lanes of pcie2 would be enough for a 10 GB network card but since the card that I've bought is designed as an eight Lane card I've decided to put it in that faster slot so that was a very easy and cheap upgrade the card arrived in good condition and was nice and easy to install and it works straight away with no drivers so thumbs up there I also picked up some cat 7 ethernet cables on Amazon got a few different lengths and I've been really pleased with them now of course you do need additional Network gear Beyond just the nas you're going to need a 10 gbit switch of course I've got a ubiquity UniFi four port switch which wasn't cheap but it has been absolutely Rock Solid but I'm not including this in the price of the nas because you need a 10 gig switch whether you buy your own or you buy an off the shelf Nas and of course you'll also want 10 gig support in your computer but I do also have a 2.5 GB USB adapter to plug my MacBook into it's not quite as fast but it's not as slow as you might think as you'll see my spinning discs run at just under 400 megabytes per second and that's equivalent to 3.2 gbits so you're losing about a quarter of the performance on Long longer file copies uh and a bit more on smaller copies but it's still quick enough so if you're in a multi-user environment especially 2.5 gigabit adapters will work fine with a spinning disc setup and I'm going with spinning discs because they're cheaper and also because options for SSD in this chassis are limited the T20 doesn't have any support for nvme drives and we just use the fastest PCI slot for the network card so there's probably not much point in adding more via a pcie carriable so I've got four 8 TB Seagate ironwolf drives in my USBC enclosure and I'm removing those and then installing them into this Nas I've got some other older drives that will go back in that enclosure which I'll continue to use for backups now when you buy an off the shelf NZ you typically install your own drives and that's why I'm not including drives in the price either you might already have drives like me but if you do need to go out and buy something like the ironwolf 8 tbte models I'm using they're about2 200 or $180 per drive you might be able to find a better deal and you might choose to go for smaller or even larger capacities just make sure that you're buying drives that are specifically designed for Nas use my plan is to install these four 8 TB drives in a raid 6 configuration and that means that I'll only have half the total capacity 16 terabytes but the benefit is that any two of the drives can fail and I won't lose any data now of course I do have other backups but this is our main storage array so I don't want to have to spend time restoring data from backup if I don't have to I'd rather just swap out a disc and let it rebuild the array in the background with traz you also need a separate drive for the operating system and I also thought that I'd put another separate single drive in for temporary file storage the T20 has four large Drive Bays two at the bottom of the chassis and two at the top and there space on the top carrier for a slim DVD drive but if you don't use that there's mounting points for two 2 and 1/2 in SATA drives so I'm going to do exactly that I'm going to mount two 2 and 1/2 in SATA ssds in this position one will be for the operating system and one is going to be devoted to that temporary file storage and given that it's an SSD it should run quickly but actually in practice I haven't used that temporary storage much at all in the past year so our T20 can accommodate six drives in total four large and two small or if you wanted to create a near silent SSD Nas you could Mount six small ssds and then have five of them in a raid array nice however we only have four SATA ports and four power connectors in the T20 so I went looking for a PCI Express SATA card and I found this one on Amazon for £15 it is a bit of a compromise because it runs on a PCI Express 2.0 single Lane slot and that means total theoretical bandwidth of 500 mbes per second and if you do your math you'll realize that's a little bit low for two 6 GB SATA ports it's enough for one to run at close to full speed once you've factored in overheads but it's not enough for both to run simultaneously at full speed I could have bought a more expensive card and I could have put it in that empty four lane slot that I mentioned earlier so it is technically possible to give those SATA drives full bandwidth I just figured that it didn't really matter to my use case because it's unlikely that both the system drive and that temporary file Drive will be getting hammered at the same time and it's quick enough the card works perfectly I was able to get the boot Drive working as well whilst connected to this card so I picked up some additional SATA cables on Amazon a pack of three for just over5 and I solved the power issue using some y splitter cables again a pack of three from Amazon was just £7 and that's everything so my total cost before adding drives came to £ 1227 if I've done my math correctly uh so even factoring in having to buy a T20 you can do a build just like this for £200 or $200 or even less just compare that to spending four or five times as much on an off-the-shelf unit but you're getting a much more capable CPU you're getting more RAM and the satisfaction of reusing older Hardware which is good for the environment and it's Hardware that is pretty low powered so it's not going to be using much in the way of electricity especially if you do what I do and shut it down when you're not using it when it comes to volume I find it's not that loud the loudest noise coming from the case is the spinning discs I think the P20 is a really nice chassis to work with you can still find documentation for it on Dell's website and I just love the schematics that are stuck to the door of course there are lots of other options in older Hardware that are well worth checking out because you just don't need the latest and greatest CPU and motherboard for a Nas system like this these older chips will still comfortably outperform the cerons and embedded chips that you usually find in offthe shelf Nas systems when it comes to the OS I've got to say that true Nas is excellent it's got a really useful and easy to use web interface and it was pretty easy to set up and it's been completely reliable but that's probably a deeper dive subject for another video so finally how does this homebuilt Nas perform well the answer is really well transfer speeds are excellent as you can see you can also see the effect of that Ram cache on the larger transfers just have a look at this screenshot you can see the slight dip in performance as the cache fills up and then takes a moment to clear and I'm guessing that as you transfer data the ram cach is immediately flushed out to the drives whilst fresh data is still coming into the cache obviously the data comes in faster than it can flush out to the spinning disc So eventually you hit this bottleneck and it dips in performance for a moment but in the meantime the nas continues to accept data at a decent speed and that keeps overall speeds up hopefully that makes sense I've thoroughly tested this machine in the year since doing the build and I have to say it's been brilliant I'm really happy that we took this route and I hope the experience has been useful to you in some way um if you've got any questions incidentally please leave a comment I'll do my best to answer as many as I can but if you've done a build like this yourself please also share your experience because I'm by no means an expert with true Na and probably made a mistake somewhere now as always you can support the channel by using the Amazon links in the description I've done a link to everything we featured uh you could also give us a thumbs up a thumbs down and please consider subscribing to the channel thank you for spending a bit of time with me today I'll see you again soon for some more geek\n"