Building a Home NAS...

What do we do in a time when certain component prices have gone through the roof? We make do with what we have and upgrade other aspects of our systems. Speaking of which, I've been meaning to sort out my data storage situation for a long time. So, let's take the plunge!

Re-writing the Past...

You know what they say about backing up data? Use the 3-2-1 rule:

• Make three copies
• Have two copies locally
• Have one off-site copy

Well, this isn't exactly that. I'm the perfect do as I say and not as I do role model - I don't have an off-site copy of my data* and I am putting all my eggs in one storage basket...

*I don't trust any cloud providers with my data - let's be honest, there's a high probability of it being scraped for AI training whether they admit it or not... Plus, I'm not really willing to pay a monthly fee for my data.

This carries on a long-held tradition of keeping most of my data either on my PC or on an external hard disc. The situation was temporarily improved back in 2016/17 with the purchase of a two bay Synology DS216j which I used in RAID mode 1 to ensure that the data could not be lost with a single disk failure.

Trusy, old but increasingly cantankerous...

Pre-made NAS devices like those from Synology and QNAP (though there are a few newer entrants on the consumer market nowadays) are great because they practically set themselves up and there is a self-curated app ecosystem to draw upon for the end-user. 

The primary issue with the Synology I had was that it just didn't like certain HDDs. That's when I found that there's an official compatibility list but, of course, my HDDs are on the list - it just didn't like one of them. From what I can gather, Synology decided to mess around with "compatibility" in order to push users to use their own branded HDDs to gain extra revenue. I do remember that this was a thing that was backtracked on after initial user outrage but there are still limitations listed on their website...

The problem is that I'm pretty sure that they did something in their software which caused incompatibility on purpose, resulting in the issues that I experienced:

Constant errors and "write" problems when in the Synology, no issues in PC or as a normal external drive... or in my new NAS!

What I experienced were two identical drives (purchased at the same time) behaving differently - one perfectly fine, the other throwing up a load of write "errors" in the synology software. Now, supposedly, my device wasn't affected by the issue regarding HDD limitations - I think these issues started on DSM version 7.1.1 but I had updated to version 7.2 to try and fix the issue. So, I completely lost trust with Synology and instead moved one of the drives to an external enclosure which was "floating" between PCs to store data. 

I still had the other drive in the Synology but it wasn't turned on and was becoming stale (not that I acrue much new data over time)... I was essentially an unlikely drive failure away from losing data and added to this, my 4 TB drive was getting dangerously full.

Not a great situation to be in.

So, I had the idea to make my own NAS using FreeNAS or another Linux-based OS. Unfortunately, modern PC cases don't have sufficient drive bays for 3.5" drives. In fact, any case that I was able to easily purchase (and for a reasonable price) didn't meet the requirements of being able to have multiple HDDs in a RAID array.

So my plans lay in stasis until now. With no interesting GPUs to test, RAM prices through the roof, and no desire to build an AM5 system* I decided to bite the bullet and push through with a Jonsbo system. I've had my eye on Jonsbo cases for a while but have not found any easy way to get one shipped to my country of residence. This changed just before Christmas when I found a supplier in the EU which would ship to me, so I pulled the trigger!

*I built one for my dad but I really don't need a more performant PC than the i5-14600 systems I am currently running...

Building the future...

The layout of this case is amazing!

This N4 case is amazing. It's maybe a little bigger than many people would like for an in-home NAS: certainly not a huge footprint but bigger than the average shelf that the DS216j fits on. However, I love all the little details which make this easy to use as a dedicated NAS device.

• Six bays for 3.5" drives
• Two bays for 2.5" drives
• A SATA and power distributor for the four 3.5" bays on the left hand side
• A simple rail system to easily slide the drives in and out, with a rubber handle to aid in removal
• A 140mm fan behind the left side of the storage rack
• Support for mATX and ITX motherboards
• SFX PSU compatibility
• Low profile PCI card compatibility
• Modular case design which allows specific access to required areas

I think two of the biggest points are the rail system and the modular case access. It's very convient to be able to only have to disassemble the case as much as you need, instead of having to take off big panels like you would normally need to do in a traditional tower case. Similarly, attaching little stand-off "feet" to the drives, allowing them to be slotted in and out at will, instead of futzing around with screwing drives into place is another life-saver that I really appreciated on a consumer-level device.

Yes, this is the most expensive case I've ever built in! Costing me €173 (not including shipping), it was over €90 more than even my SFF cases. But, as I said before, I need a NAS and plan to keep this build around for the long-haul.

The rear sections are able to be removed independently, allowing access to the different connections for the drives on each side...

What's in the box..?

For this build, I've put together the following:

• Ryzen 5 4600G (from my PS5 simulation testing!)
• ASUS Prime B450M-KII
•  PCIe to SATA riser
• 2x 8GB Orico DDR4 3200
• Silverstone SX450
• 250 GB Samsung 850 EVO
• 2x 4TB Toshiba N300 HDDs
• 2x 3TB Toshiba HGST HDDs

I had a lot of these parts on-hand from the previous NAS installations, a laptop SSD upgrade (the laptop subsequently died) and testing hardware from previous blogposts. These are not "optimal" components but also not terrible.

Specifically, the motherboard didn't come with enough SATA ports - so I had to buy the riser listed above to be able to equip all the drives. The board also lacks a USB-C header, meaning that one of the two front ports on the case is not active. There's also no wifi on the motherboard, but that's not a dealbreaker as this box will live next to the ISP's router - so a direct ethernet connection will be used.

 

One thing that I didn't really think about was the SATA port locations and this wasn't ever something I had to think about before. They are all clustered towards the lower portion of the board (this is fairly normal for most motherboards) but the cable routing in the case allows for cables to "flow" left and right, for easier reach to the drive bays. I don't know if they exist but a board with some SATA ports around the top (CPU) end would be nicer for cable management.

 

I also did not like working with the SATA cables - they're very stiff and inflexible. You can't cable tie them like most other cables in a PC. It's been such a long time that I've used more than one SATA device in the PC that I'd forgotten about that. So, overall, cable management is not very nice looking. At least the case has a distributor on the right hand side to allow a stable base for cables to connect to but I feel that the choice to not have a similar distributor on the right hand side is a big negative once you've experienced using the right hand side.

The SSD is a perfectly small size for running a lightweight Linux-based operating system, the RAM is more than sufficient for running a simple file share and the APU is perfect for saving energy by avoiding a dedicated GPU and, despite the CPU architecture being relatively old (Zen 2). 

 

I didn't have a small form factor PSU on hand, so that was new. However, given the relatively modest hardware in the system, the SFX PSU didn't need to be able to provide more Watts - 450 W is more than enough for such a system, even if I choose to add more drives at a later date. 

 

I actually would have liked a higher power PSU - around 600W as I like to be able to have flexibility in my builds (maybe I would even need it in future for another ITX build) but prices were higher than I was willing to spend, so this was the one... I didn't expect PSU prices to be higher in 2026 (actually, normal ATX PSU prices have already begun to drop but SFX are still quite expensive compared to the last few I bought in 2022-23.

 

The stand-off guides for the rail system work nicely and the flexible handles feel nice in the hands (though it's not like you'll be handling them very often!)...

What's on the box..?

I mentioned earlier that I had been looking forward to using an OS such as FreeNAS. Well, I waited so long from the inception of my dream to built a NAS to actually doing it that FreeNAS became TrueNAS* and I got really confused when visiting the website and thought that it was paid only, so I chose OpenMediaVault.

OMV is built on Debian, which is supposed to be quite good and stable for this use case. Apparently, TrueNAS CE was originally built on FreeBSD** but they migrated to Debian as well and the only difference I can see from the marketing is TrueNAS is basically promoting the use of openZFS filesystem and OMV is a bit more abivalent for users to choose from EXT4, ZFS and BTRFS.

*Specifically, "TrueNAS Community" but that wasn't clear when I was reviewing the website and searching for recommendations online... they push heavily to the paid enterprise version.

**When it was called FreeNAS and then, later, TrueNAS Core...

And thus began my first steps into Linux...

 

 

In the Belly of the Beast...

 

I'll give a bit of a report on my experience with the software in this section in case anyone searching for answers in the future needs this help, so feel free to skip! 

 

Creation of a boot drive and subsequent installation was very easy. I used Rufus to perform the former action and the installation mostly went as explained in the OMV installation guide - which I fully recommend following step by step. 

 

Yes, this guide is for version 7 and the current version is 8 but the guide suffices as there appears to be no changes here.

The first issue I had was that I experienced graphical corruption onwards on the second install screen and couldn't progress because I couldn't understand what was on screen. It turns out that I just needed to update the BIOS. For whatever reason, though this BIOS was not "old" (I think it was from 2023), I needed to update to the latest 2025 version. Once this was performed, everything was fine.

Next up, I had was that I chosen to set up the system "offline" - or more accurately, without network connection, since I was doing something else in parallel and decided not to put the box in its intended location. This meant that I didn't have a spare ethernet cable near me that I didn't want to disconnect from another device. While this isn't an issue for the inital setup (and the wording on screen indicated I could perform the network setup later), there's not too much setup to perform without network connection so I made things more difficult for myself in the long run.

The first problem was me trying to understand how to skip the network setup step - it took me a while to see how to do it. Unfortunately, I didn't write down what option I chose, but in the end I managed. The next issue I experienced was delayed in effect but thoroughly intertwined with the network setup and a lack of beginner's knowledge of Linux. 

Following the wording on screen (which I unfortunately did not take a photo of!) the installation setup advises the user that it's not necessary to set up a root account and instead your user account will be assigned as the administrator account. So, I followed this advice (thinking it would simplify things*) and proceeded to set up the user account and password then choose the installation drive and wrapped things up.

*In the end, it did - but it did feed into the confusion that is to follow...

Since I hadn't connected to the network, this was the point where I had to move the box into position and start it up properly.

Just a note: for command line instructions, I will be inserting it in angled brackets < > for clarity...

My first real use of "AI" (at least in Google search) where I needed to rely on the Gemini summary... Twitter

First boot...

Because I hadn't set up the network connection, once the server was turned on the first time, it didn't draw from the DHCP table and run with things like a PC normally would. Taking a look at the beginner's guide, I saw that this could be a common problem but no issue - log in with the root account (aka my user account) and query what IP address the system had assigned itself, then either manually set an IP address and network gateway via command line or perform the command <omv-firstaid> to re-enter into the setup interface.

The problem was that these commands would not work when typed in.

This is where the installation went a little off the rails - because the beginner's guide doesn't address this scenario and instead jumps straight to web console management (which, of course, I couldn't do because the system had set its own domain).

It took quite a bit of Googling, searching random forum posts, checking through the OMV Wiki pages but the Gemini AI summaries were the most helpful guides in this process since they provided step by step processes by which I was able to tease out what I was doing wrong and what steps were needed to be performed to fix the situation.

Please be aware that my knowledge of Linux is essentially zero and my memory of some of these things may be out of order. So, if something isn't making sense, this will be why.

My first level of criticism of the OMV guide is that it does gloss over this situation and there are no links to underlying Debian or other documentation that might have been able to help. Visiting a lot of forums is also not very productive. Often, users are (or were) not helpful for people asking questions. I feel like there's an air of "I suffered to find out information. Therefore, the people who come after me must also suffer in the same fashion or they won't be as pure as me." It's a feeling I get when reading replies to posts like this. It's generic advice that the user has obviously already tried and it's advice that is defeating on purpose. It's not meant to educate or pass on knowledge.

This is a well-known historical problem in FOSS (Free, Open Source Software) and one of the reasons I've never gotten into it (aside from my lack of ability to programme). However, I'm part of the wave of people that are causing the decline in traffic to sites like Stack Overflow to occur.

I don't want, nor need, to suffer for no reason. When I frequent subreddits on building PCs, I'm there to help people, not belittle them or offer null advice.

On a more positive note, I have heard from Dual Boot Diaries, that people are more helpful, these days. But that may also just be the type of people who are interacting with the two hosts of that show...

So, anyway - onto the solutions:

You need to escalate your admin account into the "real" admin account to do virtually anything.

Yep, that's right. A concept so simple that anyone experienced with the OS likely took it for granted and didn't even think to explain it. So, sure, here I am typing things like:

<sudo ip addr add 192.168.0.XX dev enp7s0>

 <sudo ip route add default> or <omv-salt deploy run systemd-netword>

<omv-firstaid> 

...and nothing is happening and the feedback from the command line is not helping me understand the issue.

Of course, in my mind I have an administrator account - that's how I set up the OS and the problem then becomes that I'm trying to then use the default account - which doesn't work because it doesn't exist*.

*Yeah, I'll come back to that because, eh... it sort of does!?

You must elevate your permissions to do anything useful. Yes, I logged in as an admin account but I need to first initiate

<sudo su>

To get into the elevated security state and then begin issuing all these commands. Commands which, I'm afraid to say, had to all be Googled because discovering the available commands in Linux is really hard.

I remember back in the DOS/Win 3.1 days, we had a big thick manual to be able to read through the commands that could be used and what they did. Nowadays, it's online and a bit less usable in terms of discoverability. But I also remember that you could search for available commands in the interface and it would work (at least for whatever I was doing). Tabbed auto fill or auto list for partially written commands also worked, IIRC!

This doesn't work the same in Debian/OMV and -help, etc. would only bring up a subset of commands that weren't useful for my current predicament. Maybe that's a familiarity thing but I feel like it's a general oversight in this ecosystem.

Once I was able to access the firstaid menu (i.e. finish the setup) I was able to properly select the network adapter, and force IPv4, which allowed my router to assign the static IP I had given the device.

Yes! The OMV package defaults to IPv6 and my router has nothing set for this protocol within the internal network and I didn't want to also have to read and understand the protocol for this little escapade in order to get the network working for this one device. (I seriously cannot grok the IPv6 address structure! It's in hexadecimal, for crying out loud!)

Once that was out of the way, it was time to manage the device through the web interface, as god intended... Only, not quite.

The dashboard, once configured with some paraphernalia...

See, the whole "no root account, my user is the admin" thing tripped me up again. My user is not an admin on the web interface. I could log in but had no ability to change anything and set up the file/folder systems. Nope! 

This is still quite confusing to me. This is a third account which is seemingly not related to managing the OS. So, to actually manage the device, I log in with the default "admin" account - with default password "openmediavault". Only, I couldn't. I'd locked my accounts because of trying too many variations on passwords (I think it was one or two tries!) and had to return to the physical device to unlock the accounts.

Back to:

<omv-firstaid> and "Reset failed login attempt"

So, in summary, I have two accounts, one for the physical device (which is replicated as a user on the web interface) and an admin account for managing the device through the web interface. I think that if I hadn't skipped the root admin account creation, then I would have had three accounts.... totally unnecessary!

Anyway, from this point, the setup was relatively straight forward. 

I logged in as "admin", changed default password, and tried to follow the guide to create a file system volume in which to make shared folders. However, I was unable to make the file system. I couldn't select the disks to form the volume. I couldn't format/wipe the HDDs in the system through the web interface, either. It brought up an error:

Failed to execute command 'export PATH=/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin; export LANG=C.UTF-8; export LANGUAGE=; blockdev --rereadpt '/dev/sdg' 2>&1' with exit code '1': blockdev: ioctl error on BLKRRPART: Device or resource busy

There appears to have been no way to fix this in the web interface, so I Googled once more and managed to find an obscure (to me) way to force it in the command prompt. So, back to the device:

<sgdisk -Z> This only works on unmounted disks!

...and this command needed to be followed by a reboot (incidentally, I couldn't find a way to reboot the system from the command line, only log out? Still didn't work that out yet).

Now, I could manage the disks properly.

Finally!

I chose the file system (BTRFS), RAID 1+0 and allocated the disks and the OS took care of everything else. It even intelligently set up the mirroring of the drives so I didn't need to worry about that.

From this point onwards, the guide was very good and helped walk the newbie through the various steps to create, share, and manage the folders for the user and network. Setting up the SMB (Samba) share, etc.

That was all relatively painless and logical!

I did have a little issue later on, after restarting the NAS to find that I couldn't browse any of the folders, but it seems to have been a bug and a second restart fixed the issue. Otherwise, you could enable SMBv1 protocol in Windows as this was a recommendation I found online.

Nicely set up and available on the network...

Optimising...

One thing I didn't want, was a NAS with a huge power draw constantly operating in the background, 24/7. The synology devices are known to be very power efficient and I am pretty sure it was pulling between 6 - 20 W from idle to load. I knew that it was unlikely that I could achieve that level of efficiency on this home-made device with more disks but I figured it was worth a shot.

At this point, I realised there wasn't a very robust power management configuration in my cheap motherboard's BIOS and OMV/Debian don't appear to have very good options, either. I set up the drive sleep options for the HDDs but aside from that, I was going to need to manually tweak everything.

First thing I did was set the DDR4 to 2133 MHz (below the stock 2400 MHz profile that was loaded onto the modules). This would be good for added stability and also a little power saving. Next up, I sequentially undervolted the CPU with a negative offset. I've currently settled on -0.05 V and everything seems stable and I got a nice little power reduction, to boot. I could probably take this further but was in the process of transferring lots of files so didn't want to push my luck at this stage of operation.

Next up, I put a power limit on the APU (PPT 25 W) which I drew down in steps, ensuring stability each time. I've read that you won't get good savings below this level on a desktop APU but I may try a little more later on.

Finally, I didn't need my CPU to be operating at such extreme clock speeds as the base clock of 3.7 GHz, so I cut that in steps, too. All the way down to 2.0 GHz. This seems stable and I've not noticed any performance degradation, so far. I might cut this down further, along with another undervolt to see if I can save any more power.

So, what did that get me? Well, I didn't have any way of monitoring the system but I figure that at stock, I was probably pulling close to 100 W but I went and picked up a Watt meter to see how things had panned out. (Yes, I know people are going to complain I didn't do a proper before and after measurement but I don't feel like undoing all the settings just to see that I dropped it 40 W instead of 50 W. I might come back and update this post if and when I actually do this).

Apologies for the terrible photos, the design of the meter is such that the power chord interferes with reading the screen! This was the only one I could find at short notice...

• 26 W draw from the wall in sleep
• 37 W draw when active but not under load (i.e. browsing the folders, logging into the web interface)
• 51 W draw under load (moving files, streaming data etc)

I think this is a good result considering HDDs typically draw 6 - 10 W under load and 4 - 6 W idle. The SSD should be drawing around 0.5 W when idle and 2 - 4 W during load.

Bearing in mind that this is power draw including conversion losses in the PSU. That means my system is doing very well, in terms of efficiency!

Let's say that, active load calculation looks like this:

50.7 W - (4x 8 W) + (1x 3 W) = AC/DC conv. + APU + motherboard

15.7 W = AC/DC conv. + APU + motherboard

Idle looks something like:

25.6 W - (4x 5 W) + (1x 0.5 W) = AC/DC conv. + APU + motherboard

5.1 W = AC/DC conv. + APU + motherboard 

I'm pretty happy with that! If you have any ideas that could further save energy, let me know below or in the Twitter/Bluesky threads.

And that about wraps things up for now. Hopefully, this post will get nicely indexed for other beginners to find if they encounter similar issues to myself and that it might help/inspire some other readers to delve into making their own NAS!

Overall, the project was pretty fun and also vastly increased my storage space and I'm able to keep my 2.05 TB* of game installers on-site and on-demand!

I had never actually measured the full size of all of these, before now!