New home NAS - are the more expensive drives worth it?

[ElT]

I was looking at a Synology NAS ( DS923+4 or DS723+2 probably) but more or less decided to just roll my own from scratch. For a couple of hundred more I can have something which is vastly more powerful. FWIW, this is my build so far:

Spoiler

My basket at OcUK:

• 1 x AMD Ryzen 5 7600 Six Core 5.10GHz (Socket AM5) Processor - Retail (SKU: CP-3DW-AM) = £229.99
• 1 x AXAGON PCEE-G25 PCIe Adapter 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet Realtek 8125, PXE, w. SP & LP (SKU: CB-03K-AX) = £28.99
• 1 x Corsair Vengeance EXPO 64GB (2X32GB) DDR5 PC5-41600C40 5200MHz Dual Channel Kit - Black (CMK64GX5M2B5200Z40) (SKU: MY-4DM-CS) = £188.99
• 1 x Asrock B650M PG Riptide (Socket AM5) DDR5 Micro-ATX Motherboard (SKU: MB-18Y-AK) = £179.99
• 1 x be quiet! Straight Power 11 550W 80 Plus Platinum Modular Power Supply (SKU: CA-140-BQ) = £109.99
• 1 x Jonsbo U4-Silver/window Mini Tower Case (SKU: CA-00W-JB) = £75.95
• 2 x WD 4TB Red Pro 7200rpm HDD 256MB Cache Internal NAS Hard Drive (WD4003FFBX) (SKU: HD-555-WD) = £119.99
• 1 x WD Black SN770 1TB SSD M.2 2280 NVME PCI-E Gen4 Solid State Drive (WDS100T3X0E) (SKU: HD-58F-WD) = £74.99

Total: £1,140.85 (includes delivery: £11.99)​

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The motherboard has 5th gen M2 but I see no value in that for this and I'm honestly tempted to just save money and use a Gen3 I have lying around. I plan to just leave this running 24/7, maybe have it go to sleep and wake on LAN depending on how quickly it wakes, and run TrueNAS on it.

My question is whether it is worth the much higher price for the NAS hard drives. I imagine I'll run ZFS and add one of my SATA SSDs in as a caching drive. I'll have 2x2.5Gb ethernet so plenty of connection. I only have about 1.5TB of data and it's growing at a fairly modest rate, so though I'd like more capacity 4TB will do. I could save myself £70 by dropping down to WD Blues instead of Red Pros.

I know answers tend to be "it depends" so I'll try to qualify the question. My budget is a little tight but I can spend the money if it actually makes a difference to reliability, longevity or performance (I don't know how easy it is to max out 2.5GB, would a pair of mirrored 7200rpm hard drives and a SATA SSD Cache actually do that?)

 

[ElT]

Thanks for both replies!

It depends !

What do you *need* it to do? If it’s just a repository of data, where is the need for 2.5g ? Or are you going to be drawing data a lot and for large amounts at a time where you need that speed. For example, I find 1g Ethernet enough to browse through RAW files, to stream video files etc. Ok , it’s not great at editing video stored on it, but I don’t have an issue with its basic speed for a general storage device.

As for the rest … to give you an idea, I use a 2400g for my Unraid nas which has a 2x data hdd, A cctv hdd for running zoneminder in a socket, and an ssd cache. As I saw it stores photos mainly which I browse through. It barely goes above 20% cpu most of the time when being used.

So self build can use lower end stuff just fine.

So I do probably want to run a couple of long-running VMs or Containers - I'm not sure. One of the things I found with my current main machine which has a VM I use on it, is that if I don't have it connected to its own ethernet port on the host (my main computer has two physical ports) and instead just piggy backing via NAT on the host, my router will always assign it a new IP address after rebooting. Which is annoying when I want to remote into that VM. When I gave it its own ethernet port, the router sees it as a recurring real machine which I can assign a fixed IP address to. I'm not too hung up about the second port as compared to the rest of the system it's not that much and I just thought it might make my life easier.

What I need it to do first of all is be a fast and responsive location for all my files and emails (which I like to keep locally). I have a laptop which I use around the house because I hate how much time I spend sitting in this one home office room. So I want to be able to fire it up and just have all the same files I have on the main desktop. Now I could just make the main desktop share its folders locally but it's a monster beast and having it running all the time or turning it on and off as needed is just annoying and takes away from the feeling of being able to just open my laptop and save things to it from the sofa downstairs on in the garden now that it's actually sunny!

Second thing I want is to be able to access it via a VPN from anywhere. And equally just a nice back-up system. I will still have offsite backup but with a good amount of hard-drive space I can do snapshots which let me look back through time if I accidentally overwrite something.

So it sounds like maybe I should just go for something lower-end. I guess it would be cheaper. I'm torn between sensible reduction in costs and wanting the newest thing. The Ryzen 5 7600 is 65W which is a lot less than my threadripper and 7900XT build. But I guess a 2400g might also be pretty low-power.

I'd say forget Synology and go for Asustor as you'll get 2.5Gb built-in. Have a look at either the Nimbustor 4 (AS5304T), Lockerstor 4 (AS6604T) or Lockerstor 4 Gen 2 (AS6704T) and you'll save more than just a couple of hundred quid over your home-brew. You really don't need that much CPU power or RAM in a NAS unless you're going to be running multiple virtual machines but if you want more RAM they all take twice as much as the specs claim.

You can also save money by going for Red Plus rather than Pro. They're both CMR; it's only the basic Reds that are SMR. I would check carefully to see if Blues are CMR or not as you really don't want SMR drives in a NAS.

You also need to think about your usage as to whether a cache will make any difference to the performance. In my case it won't as my main usage is data storage and backups.

The Asustor does look pretty slick. After the fifth attempt I finally found a review that went into more depth and apparently it uses BTRFS. The Asustors would certainly save me a lot of money. I guess I need to stop trying to have my cake and eat it and decide if I want just a NAS or if I want more of a home server with VMs.

Thanks for the input on the Red Plus. I do notice that they're 5400 against the Pro's 7200rpm. Do you think that would be noticeable - I expect to put these in a straight mirrored configuration of 2 disks.