I’ve recently completed a completely new NAS replacing a Synology NAS. I chose to run Rockstor on it, since it seems to be the healthiest of the BTRFS based solutions out there while still doing a lot of work for me (like providing Rock-ons!).
The hardware I sued for the build is the following:
- AMD Ryzen 5 3600
- Corsair SF450 Platinum
- AsRock X570 Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB3
- Kingson ValueRAM Server Premier (2 sticks 16 GB DDR4-2666)
- Seagate FireCuda 520 (500GB M.2 SSD)
- Seagate IronWolf 10TB 3.5"
- Corsair H55
- Noctua NF-A12x25 PWM
- 2x Noctua NF-S12A ULN
- Silverstone NAS SST-DS380B
- Silverstone Case Dampening Mats
- 2x Silverstone SST-CP 11 Super Low Profile SATA Cables
A couple notes on the build:
- I’ve added dampening mats inside the case to reduce the reverb from the hard drives seeking
- The two ULN Noctua fans are intake fans. I’ve plugged them in with the additional speed reduction to the drive backplane. The further reduced speed should still generate enough air flow to have positive pressure with the CPU cooler running full speed
- The Nocuta A12x25 replaces the corsair fan in the CPU cooler.
- Most of the hardware was based around availability when I ordered, like RAM choice, SSD choice
- I’ve removed the shield on top of the south bridge fan of the motherboard to reduce the noise it makes when it runs
- I’m supplying the drive backplane with two sata power plugs directly from the PSU, and one adapted via molex. That molex cable also supplies the molex connector on the drive backplane.
- The ultra low profile SATA cables are required due to the intake fans being right next to the edge of the motherboard where the SATA ports are.
Next up is configuring the BIOS of the motherboard. To do so, a spare GPU is required to provide image output. The board will happily boot headless, however.
- I set the southbridge fan profile to “silent”
- I set the case fan/CPU radiator fan profile to “normal”
- I set the main CPU fan header to pump mode to match that I had the pump plugged in there
- I set the default power state after power loss to on (which leads to the NAS turning on whenever it gets power, very nice)
- I updated the BIOS because it’d be the last time I saw it…
After that I proceeded to install openSUSE LEAP (with the GPU still in there) from a USB stick to the SSD. I mostly followed the official recommendations except for disabling IPv6 - I can live with the drawbacks and actually want IPv6 on my network interface. After that I installed rockstor and removed the GPU, plugged in the hard drives and configured a RAID 1 pool with the two drives.
I’m primarily running NextCloud, but I also have funkwhale for “federated” audio and gitea for git repos. I expose my videos and pictures as a samba share to the network to be consumed by other devices.
To handle HTTPS, I’m using the nginx proxy container and I moved the rockstor UI off port 443 to get proper HTTPS on the outside.
I’m looking to moving some more stuff to this NAS, like Synapse for Matrix, but I first have to figure out how to properly migrate the data to a Synapse in a docker container, since I currently have it running on a Pi. Plus I have to see how much trouble changing the port is etc.
So far I’ve just about completely replaced my Synology NAS - it’s mostly still around in case I didn’t migrate something correctly.
One thing I haven’t quite figured out is what to use as a cross-platform backup solution. Maybe duplicati?
P.S.: I almost didn’t get Rockstor on there because it was a bit hard to find the openSUSE setup and centOS just won’t run on this hardware…
