DIY NAS: 2026 Edition
22 comments
·November 27, 2025VTimofeenko
Built a NAS last winter using the same case. Temps for HDDs used to be in mid-50s C with no fan and about 40 with the stock fan. The case-native backplane thingamajig does not provide any sort of pwm control if the fan is plugged in, so it's either full blast or nothing. I swapped the fan for a Thermalright TL-B12 and the HDDs are now happily chugging along at about 37 with the fan barely perceptible. Hddfancontrol ramps it up based on the output of smartctl.
Case can actually fit a low-profile discrete GPU, there's about half height worth of space.
speff
Q - assuming the NAS was strictly used as NAS and not as a server with VMs, is there a point in having a large amount of RAM? (large as in >8GB)
I'm not sure what the benefit would be since all it's doing is moving information from the drives over to the network.
mewse-hn
ZFS uses a large amount of ram, i think the old rule of thumb was 1GB ram per 1TB of storage
yjftsjthsd-h
That's only for deduplication.
Lammy
I do like to deduplicate my BitTorrent downloads/seeding directory with my media directories so I can edit metadata to my heart's content while still seeding forever without having to incur 2x storage usage. I tune the `recordsize` to 1MiB so it has vastly fewer blocks to keep track of compared to the default 128K, at the cost of any modification wasting very slightly more space. Really not a big deal though when talking about multi-gibibyte media containers, multi-megapixel art embeds, etc.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF
Huh. More than just the normal page cache on other filesystems?
WarOnPrivacy
Yes. Parent's comment matches everything I've heard. 32GB is a common recommendation for home lab setups. I run 32 in my TrueNAS builds (36TB and 60TB).
tekla
ZFS will eat up as much RAM as you give it as it caches files in memory as accessed.
loloquwowndueo
Caching files in ram means they can be moved to the network faster - right?
ac29
Depends on the network speed. At 1Gbps a single HDD can easily saturate the network with sequential reads. A pair of HDD could do the same at 2.5Gbps. At 10Gbps or more, you would definitely see the benefits of caching in memory.
butvacuum
Not as much as expected. I have several toy ZFS pools out of ancient 3tb wd reds, and anything remotely home-grade (stripped mirrors, 4,6,8 wide raidz1/2) saturates the disks before 10gig networking. As long as it's sequential, 8gb or 128gb doesn't matter.
speff
Makes sense. I didn't know if the FS used RAM for this purpose without some specialized software. PikachuEXE and Mewse mentioned ZFS. Looks like it has native support for caching frequent reads [0]. Good to know
PikachuEXE
If you use ZFS you might need more RAM for performance?
justsomehnguy
As the other said already if you have more RAM you can have more cache.
Honestly it's not that needed but if you would really use the 10Gbit+ networking then 1 second is ~125Mbytes. So depending on your usage you can never even more than 15% utilization or have it almost all if you constantly running something on it ie torrents or using it a SAN/NAS for VM on some other machine.
But for a rare occasional home usage nor 32Gb nor this monstrosity and complexity doesn't make sense - just buy some 1-2 bay Synology and forget about it.
dbalatero
I researched a bunch of cases recently and the Jonsbo, while it looked good, came up as having a ton of issues with airflow to cool the drives. Because of this, I ended up buying the Fractal Node 804 case, which seemed to have a better overall quality level and didn't require digging around AliExpress for a vendor.
dllu
Very sad that HDDs, SSDs, and RAM are all increasing in price now, but I just made a 4 x 24 TB ZFS pool with Seagate Barracudas on sale at $10 / TB [1]. This seems like a pretty decent price even though the Barracudas are rated for 2400 hours per year [2] but this is the same spec that the refurbished Exos drives are rated for.
By the way, interesting to see that OP has no qualms about buying cheap Chinese motherboards, but splurged for an expensive Noctua fan when the cheaper Thermalright TL-B12 perform just as well for a lot cheaper (although the Thermalright could be slightly louder and perhaps be a slightly more annoying spectrum).
Also, it is mildly sad that there aren't many cheap low power (< 500 W) power supplies for SFX form factor. The SilverStone Technology SX500-G 500W SFX that was mentioned retails for the same price as 750 W and 850 W SFX PSUs on Amazon! I heard good things about getting Delta flex 400 W PSUs from Chinese websites --- some companies (e.g. YTC) mod them to be fully modular, and they are supposedly quite efficient (80 Plus Gold/Platinum) and quiet, but I haven't tested them out yet. On Taobao, those are like $30.
[1] https://www.newegg.com/seagate-barracuda-st24000dm001-24tb-f...
[2] https://www.seagate.com/content/dam/seagate/en/content-fragm...
WarOnPrivacy
> $10 / TB
That's a remarkably good price. If I had $1.5k handy I'd be sorely tempted (even tho it's Seagate).
rubatuga
I've recently shucked some Seagate HAMR 26Tb drives hopefully they last
ghthor
Not surprised by the fan, once I went noctua I didn’t go back.
WarOnPrivacy
I have built 2 NAS that borrow ideas from his blogs. One uses the Silverstone CS382 case (6x 6TB SAS) and the other uses a Topton N5105 Mini-ITX board (6x 10TB SATA). I'm quite happy with both.
ref: https://blog.briancmoses.com/2024/07/migrating-my-diy-nas-in...
Are there any NAS solutions for 3.5" drives, homebrew or purchased, that are slim enough to stash away in a wall enclosure? (This sort of thing: https://www.legrand.us/audio-visual/racks-and-enclosures/in-... , though not that particular model or height.) I'd like to really stash something away and forget about it. Height is the major constraint, you can only be ~3.5" tall. And before anyone says anything about 19" rack stuff, don't bother. It's close but just doesn't go, especially if it's not the only thing in the enclosure.