My almost-yearly DIY NAS builds started out as happy accident. After my first blog, I was made aware that the availability of parts became an obstacle for prospective builders about a year after the blog was published. As a result of availability problems like this one, I’ve been publishing different DIY NAS builds on a regular basis since.
However, this year, that seems to have changed a little bit!
So what’s different today?
Parts availability, especially motherboard availability! In planning the DIY NAS: 2023 Edition and the DIY NAS: EconoNAS 2023, I found a manufacturer of a variety of DIY NAS motherboards that met my ideals, Topton:
- Small form factor, preferably Mini-ITX
- Low-power system-on-a-chip
- At least 6 SATA ports
In recent years, it’s been a struggle to find motherboards that met these qualities. We’ve reached a point where the data storage needs of everyday computer users are much better met by SSDs. This paradigm shift has presented a challenge to storage enthusiasts like us! Any time after I finally found a motherboard that met my ideal specs at a good price, it wasn’t long before people were leaving comments and joining my Discord community to share that they couldn’t find the motherboard any longer.
The continued availability of the components–especially the motherboard–used in last year’s DIY NAS and EconoNAS builds reduced the necessity of unique DIY NAS build blogs in 2024. Last year’s DIY NAS builds are nearly as relevant as they were a year ago:
Two DIY NAS builds for the price of one!
While the continued availability of key components in 2024 may have decreased the necessity of DIY NAS builds, it has not diminished people’s interest in new and unique DIY NAS builds. For those interested readers, I thought I’d create parts lists for both the DIY NAS and the EconoNAS I built in 2024.
Disclaimer: I didn’t build either of these machines. By now I’ve built several machines using many of these components. I’m quite confident in making these recommendations.
DIY NAS: 2024 Edition Hardware
Motherboard and CPU
Like last year, I chose the same motherboard, the Topton N2 N5105/N6005 NAS motherboard. This year I used the variant of that motherboard with the Pentium Silver N6005 CPU.
Despite the marketing labels of “Pentium Silver” and “Celeron,” these two CPUs are really quite similar, with the N6005 getting 400MHz in burst frequency, its GPU getting a 100MHz advantage in its burst frequency, and the GPU also gets 8 additional execution units (32 total). Beyond that, the Topton N2 N6005/N5105 NAS motherboard also boasts these specifications:
- Mini-ITX form factor
- 2x M.2 NVMe slots (PCIe 3.0 x1)
- 6x SATA3 ports
- 4x 2.5Gbps Intel I226-V network interfaces
Update (11/14/24): Unfortunately, I recently found out that the Topton N2 is no longer being manufactured and I cannot order more. Yesterday, I sold my last N6005 variant of this motherboard. I still have quite a few Topton N2 with the N5105 CPU in stock. If you’re looking to build this NAS then I think that the N2 with the N5105 CPU is an excellent alternative and it saves you $20! If a CPU with more computer power intrigues you, then make sure to check out the variety of other motherboards in my eBay store!
Case
The company Jonsbo has been steadily releasing different DIY NAS cases for a couple years now. This year, I selected the Jonsbo N3 (specs) for the DIY NAS build. I’m a big fan of its the drives-under-motherboard-design. The case features a SATA backplane for 8 hot-swappable 3.5” drive bays and two internal 2.5” drive mounting positions perfect for an operating system.
My biggest complaint about the Jonsbo N3 is that it requires a SFX power supply under 105mm. This irks me because SFX power supplies usually carry a heftier price tag than their ATX counterparts.
RAM
One of my favorite features of the Topton N2 N6005/N5105 NAS motherboard is it states that it supports 32GB of RAM, which I think is a healthy amount of RAM for a DIY NAS. But even better, there are plenty of people (myself included) sharing they’ve had success with pushing that to 64GB of RAM.
For anybody who is looking to get the most out of these motherboards, I’m recommending this 64GB kit of DDR4 SO-DIMMs from Crucial (specs).
M.2 SATA PCIe Card
I owe you all an apology. Remember my disclaimer from above? The one where I said I didn’t buy or use any of this hardware? I lied!!!
In order to fully fill the Jonsbo N3 case with hard drives and the Topton N2 N6005/N5105 NAS motherboard, I needed to find a way to add some SATA ports. To do this, I picked out a SilverStone Technology ECS07 (specs). In the TrueNAS community, all SATA expansion cards are almost universally spoken poorly of. So before I recommended one, I bought one to evaluate for myself, and what I learned in that evaluation will be a likely blog topic of its own in the future!
The TL;DR of that yet-to-be written blog will be: I built a delicate pool using the SilverStone Technology ECS07, I tormented that pool trying to make it fail, and the SATA expansion card handled everything that I threw at it.
As far as I’m concerned, I’m happy with how the SilverStone Technology ECS07 M.2 to SATA Expansion card worked out. I wouldn’t hesitate to use one myself–and I’m kind of hoping someone out there uses two with this motherboard for a total of 16 different SATA drives!
OS Drive
Back when I built my very first DIY NAS in 2012, I spent around $20–$30 for a “quality” flash USB drive. Ever since, I’ve used that price as my “budget” for an OS drive.
Given the abundance of SATA ports in the DIY NAS: 2024 Edition, I opted for SATA SSDs. The remaining M.2 slot on the Topton N2 N6005/N5105 NAS motherboard remain empty for a little bit of headroom for upgrades in the future.
I picked a pair of Silicon Power S55 120GB SATA SSDs (specs) to work as the boot drives for this DIY NAS. Ultimately, the drives are oversized for their purpose, but at under $20, they’re a good value.
SATA Cables
In recent DIY NAS builds, including my own 3D-printed off-site DIY NAS, I’ve come to appreciate these bundled and sleeved thin SATA cables from ADCAUDX.
Two sets of these 6-piece SATA cable bundles are almost ideal for all of the eleven SATA ports in this year’s DIY NAS build.
Power Supply
As always, I tried to size the power supply based on what my back-of-the-napkin math says its maximum power draw would be when the DIY NAS was first powered up.
I budgeted 25 watts for each hard drive’s peak consumption when it first spins up (9 HDDs at 20–25W). Choosing the 300W SilverStone Technology ST30SF power supply (specs) meant that there’d be around 70–120 watts for everything else on the motherboard (CPU, NICs, RAM, etc.) and the two SATA SSDs.
For those of you worried about the overall power consumption of a DIY NAS, it’s important to note that once the hard drives are spun up, their power consumption drops pretty dramatically. Under normal use, each hard drive will consume around 6–12 watts of power, depending on what it is being asked to do by the DIY NAS.
DIY NAS: 2024 Edition Parts List
| Component | Part Name | Qty | Cost | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Motherboard | Topton N2 N6005 NAS Motherboard | specs | 1 | $189.99 |
| CPU | Intel Pentium Silver N6005 Processor | specs | N/A | N/A |
| Memory | Crucial 64GB DDR4 3200MHz CL22 SODIMM Kit (2x32GB) | specs | 1 | $112.75 |
| Case | JONSBO N3 | specs | 1 | $170.00 |
| Power Supply | SilverStone ST30SF V2 80 PLUS Bronze 300W SFX PSU | specs | 1 | $71.99 |
| Boot Drive | Silicon Power S55 120GB SATA SSD | specs | 2 | $19.19 |
| SATA Expansion Card | SilverStone Technology SST-ECS07 M.2 Storage Expansion Card | specs | 1 | $46.27 |
| SATA Cable | ADCAUDX 6pc sleeved SATA III Cable (.5M) | N/A | 2 | $13.50 |
| TOTAL: | $656.38 | |||
DIY NAS: EconoNAS 2024 Hardware
Motherboard, CPU, and RAM
The Topton N5105 NAS Motherboard, its Intel Celeron N5105 CPU, and 32GB Kit of DDR4 RAM are all the same components as the ones I chose for the DIY NAS: EconoNAS 2023.
Why the same? It’s economical! The prices on all of these parts have fallen since last year, which means their value proposition has increased since last year! The 2023 EconoNAS was fantastic, and if I had been starting all over from scratch in 2023, there’s a really good chance I would’ve built that NAS.
Case
Immediately after I bought the Jonsbo N1 for the DIY NAS: 2023 Edition, Jonsbo released a new case, the Jonsbo N2 (specs), and I knew that I wanted to build a NAS in it.
Admittedly, buying such a nice case is a splurge if you’re trying to be economical. If you’re interested in this EconoNAS and want to trim some fat, this would definitely be a good place to consider alternatives. If you build an economical NAS with a different case, make sure to drop a comment and let everyone know which case you picked!
OS Drive
The boot drive is the first component that the DIY NAS: 2024 Edition and EconoNAS 2024 wind up having in common. Using a Silicon Power S55 120GB SATA SSD (specs) for the boot drive made sense for the EconoNAS too.
In the case of the EconoNAS, I opted to forego the luxury of redundancy for the boot drive. If you wanted to do a two-drive boot pool, then a pair of M.2 NVMe SSDs like the Silicon Power 128GB A55 (specs) would be a good choice. Redundancy in the OS drive is a luxury because of how easy it is to recover TrueNAS SCALE from a backup of your configuration database.
SATA Cables
The second identical component that the EconoNAS shares with its bigger sibling is the six piece bundled and sleeved SATA cable.
If you were hyper-focused on saving money, choosing some plain SATA cables instead would be a decent way to save an additional $6–$7.
Power Supply
Regardless of what kind of computer you’re building, buying a quality power supply is one of my favorite suggested best practices, and building a DIY NAS is no exception to this rule. But building an economical DIY NAS often requires the bending of some best practices. Last year, that had me buying an inexpensive Flex ATX power supply from a company named Apevia that I found suspiciously inexpensive. My good experience with that power supply led me to select the Apevia SFX-AP400W (specs) for this year’s EconoNAS.
I’m pretty confident this Apevia power supply will work fine, but I wouldn’t blame anyone for splurging on a nicer power supply. The 300W SilverStone Technology ST30SF power supply (specs) that I recommended in the DIY NAS: 2024 Edition would be a great alternative!
DIY NAS: EconoNAS 2024 Parts List
| Component | Part Name | Qty | Cost | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Motherboard | Topton N2 N5105 NAS Motherboard | specs | 1 | $169.99 |
| CPU | Intel Celeron N5105 | specs | N/A | N/A |
| Memory | Crucial 16GB DDR4 3200MHz CL22 SODIMM Kit (2x8GB) | specs | 1 | $32.00 |
| Case | JONSBO N2 | specs | 1 | $149.98 |
| Power Supply | APEVIA SFX-AP400W 400W SFX PSU | specs | 1 | $31.99 |
| Boot Drive | Silicon Power S55 120GB SATA SSD | specs | 1 | $19.19 |
| SATA Cable | ADCAUDX 6pc sleeved SATA III Cable (.5M) | N/A | 1 | $13.50 |
| TOTAL: | $416.65 | |||
TrueNAS SCALE
As with prior years’ builds, I strongly recommend using TrueNAS SCALE for your DIY NAS. The minute the first beta version of TrueNAS SCALE was available, I switched over to it in excitement.
Right now, iXsystems is on the verge of an incredibly exciting TrueNAS SCALE release, Electric Eel. This version of TrueNAS SCALE promises two features that I’m personally excited about:
- RAIDZ expansion, which allows the expansion of a vdev (raidz1, raidz2, or raidz3) simply by adding a disk to the vdev.
- An overhaul of the TrueNAS apps platform to transition from Kubernetes to Docker.
According to the TrueNAS SCALE Electric Eel version notes, the expected release date of Electric Eel should be toward the end of October.
For those of you building something similar to one of my two DIY NAS builds and planning to use TrueNAS SCALE, I have a few recommendations:
- Consider adding an NVMe SSD to store your apps and/or VMs.
- Keep in mind that the M.2 slots on the motherboard are PCIe 3.0 x1 slots. A high-performance NVMe SSD will be bottlenecked by the M.2 slots.
- Use your storage pools to store all the data used by your apps and the apps’ configuration.
- If you lack redundancy on your boot pool, set up an automated backup of the TrueNAS SCALE configuration database and store that backup on your pool with the most redundancy.
- The TrueCommand app includes an automated backup of the configuration database
- Start planning some kind of backup; it’d be awesome if it could be off-site.
- One 3D-printed NAS wasn’t enough, so I printed two more!
- Using the Buddy System For Off-Site Hosting and Storage
- I spent $420 building a 20TB DIY NAS to use as an off-site backup
There’s a lot of tribal knowledge on the Internet which you may find disagrees vehemently with pairing consumer-grade hardware with TrueNAS. While I believe some of that tribal knowledge is well-intentioned, that has snowballed into some absolutism that is flawed and incorrect. I encourage everyone to reject the notion that a NAS—even one running TrueNAS—requires enterprise-grade hardware.
Thoughts on both of the 2024 DIY NAS Builds
The very first thought that pops into my head is that both of these machines are incrementally better than last year’s DIY NAS and last year’s EconoNAS. I could see why some might think it was disappointing, but I’m actually pretty excited about what this means for prospective DIY NAS builders.
If you checked out my roundup of other DIY NAS motherboards from Topton, I’m sure you’ll notice there are newer CPU options out there. I think that many of those motherboards are interesting, but ultimately I didn’t think they were compelling enough for the following reasons:
- DDR4 is cheaper (for now) than DDR5.
- A lot of the motherboards that take DDR5 RAM only have one SO-DIMM slot.
- DDR5 SO-DIMM sizes are currently limited to 48GB.
- DDR5 is more expensive than DDR4.
- The newer generation of CPUs (and their iGPUs) are incrementally more powerful and consume less power, but not enough.
While I like the improvement from the Jasper Lake CPUs (N5105/N6005), I don’t feel like those improvements were worth the extra cost and lower RAM capacity (for now) that accompany the comparable Alder Lake CPUs.
DIY NAS: 2024 Edition
The DIY NAS: 2024 Edition is ultimately the best DIY NAS that you’re going to be able to build with the Topton N2 N6005/N5105 NAS Motherboards. You might be able to add some more drives with a second M.2 PCI-e SATA controller, but that’s really about it. Compared to last the DIY NAS: 2023 Edition, it has:
- A more powerful CPU (and iGPU), the Intel Pentium Silver N6005 (comparison).
- Twice the RAM (64GB vs 32GB).
- Room for ten total drives: 8x external 3.5” bays and 2x internal 2.5” bays. This is 4 more total drive bays (1x internal 2.5” and 3x external 3.5”) compared to last year.
The good news is that this is a fantastic compact NAS, and it’s at an incredibly tempting price. An off-the-shelf solution, like the QNAP TS-832PX-4G is more expensive, has a weaker CPU, less RAM (4GB), and less maximum RAM (16GB). And all of that mostly applies to other 8-bay NAS servers too:
- Synology DiskStation DS1821+: $1,000
- Asustor Lockerstor 8 AS6508T: $1,069
- Synology DiskStation DS1823xs+: $1,800
DIY NAS: EconoNAS 2024
The DIY NAS: EconoNAS 2024 is incredibly similar to the prior year’s EconoNAS. The cost is a tiny bit more expensive thanks to the Jonsbo N2 Case, but I am confident that it’s still a great value at its price.
- Room for 6 total drives: 5x external 3.5” bays and 1x internal 2.5” bay (one extra of each compared to the EconoNAS in 2023)
The extra drive bays themselves are worth the price premium of the added case. In fact, the 5-bay EconoNAS is a better price than similar 4-bay off-the-shelf systems:
- TERRAMASTER F4-423: $460
- QNAP TS-464-8G-US: $565
- Synology DiskStation DS923+: $598
- Asustor Lockerstor 4 Gen2 AS6704T: $609
Brian’s Final Thoughts
As you can tell, I still really like the Topton N6005/N5105 NAS motherboard. I think it’s been a fantastic motherboard to build a DIY NAS around. I especially like that they have continued to be available years after I first saw them.
For people who have been coming back and reading these DIY NAS blogs each year, I’m certain some of you might be disappointed to already be familiar with this year’s DIY NAS builds. I hope to have the 2025 DIY NAS published and available for you in early 2025. Thanks for being patient, and make sure you leave comments about what you’re hoping to see in the next DIY NAS build!
So which one are you going to build?!
I like both of these builds for different reasons, but if I had to pick a favorite, I think it’d be the DIY NAS: 2024 Edition over the DIY NAS: EconoNAS 2024. It’s $264 (58%, yikes!) more expensive than the EconoNAS, but consider that it has:
- A more powerful CPU (and iGPU!)
- Quadruple the RAM (64GB vs 16GB)
- Room for more drives (2x 3.5” and 1x 2.5”)
Then you can easily see that the extra money you spend gets you a healthy amount of value.
And the great thing about these two builds is that the parts are all interchangeable with each other. Pick the parts from these two builds that suit you best and get your best value, instead of what I think the best value is!
If you do wind up finding inspiration from either of these DIY NAS builds, share some details down in the comments below, or join our #diynas-and-homelab channel in Discord and tell us all about what you built and why!