as tech nerds and geeks we got a lot of problems in our lives like fighting for
the right to repair our technology finding the right charging cable for a
specific device or figuring out if running a raw dog Ethernet cable through
your living room is worth not having to use wi-fi on your gaming rig but none of
it even holds a candle at least in my book to trying to figure out how to
store all my freaking data without
having to add to the never-ending mess of monthly subscriptions we're all
expected to pay now you could go with a pre-built nas from someone like qnap
throw a few hard drives in there but the problem is that those things are
expensive usually not upgradeable or serviceable they're pretty much single
purpose and worst of all that would just be too easy right
what if i told you there was a better way it's stylish fully serviceable and
upgradable and you get the fun of building it yourself and best of all in
the config we're going to show you today it is actually cheaper than a pre-built
dang this is the johnsbow n1 a shoebox sized
case that can hold up to 100 terabytes of hard drive based storage
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from the outside the johnsville n1 looks like your average itx case it's small
but not crazy small with lots of venting
and minimal but still usable front i o it can be configured to lie flat or
stand upright with little feet that come included and the outside unibody shell
just slides off to give you full access
to the inside chassis look at that oh
this is such a basic approach to making a SATA backplane look there's just
discrete SATA plugs for all five of the drives
here but it's kind of elegant in its simplicity like the rest of the case
it's maybe not the nicest build quality i've ever seen in these sort of niche
small manufacturer chassis but it's only 126 bucks on aliexpress with the
included storage backplane that handles up to five hard drives if you factor
that in it's like it's a pretty darn compelling deal isn't it before we go
over the rest of our parts though let's talk budget our plan was to see if we
could build up a rig cheaper than the equivalent synology 5-bay nas the
ds-1520 plus they're currently out of stock seemingly everywhere anyway but
the price to be is 700 u.s on the dot if
we could buy it and that's totally achievable starting with our motherboard
we went rog for the motherboard yeah Jake kate itx motherboard there's not a
lot of options okay we blew 200 on our motherboard but it's for a pretty good
reason here it's got dual m.2 slots so we can put a cache SSD in one of them
and then a SATA hba so we can expand our four onboard SATA ports it's still
actually available new you know we could have said oh go buy a used board and you
could definitely shave some of your budget that way but motherboards tend to
be one of the more likely components in a system to die and when it comes to
storage we want this thing to just work we don't want to screw around it also has two and
a half gig lan and because it's AMD b550
based we're gonna start with the lower end chip but we've actually got a ton of
room for upgrades into the future now let's actually get that i o port
card installed now since we're definitely gonna need it
so oh
i've already dropped it like six times good oh geez
wow it's still it's still good i expect you to go hard on it totally fine i
might produce a hundred thousand units of something that's not good there's a
cover on the top m.2 here you can see you can install anything from a 2242 so
it's a 42 millimeter to a 60 millimeter to an 80 millimeter m.2 we are going to
use the 42 millimeter mounting look at how cute it is here one quick
thing to note is that this little daughter board once you remove the heatsink there's
nothing holding it into place here you see that so we are just going to
pop that connector back in and then we're going to take one of the screws that held the heat sink on and we're
going to take the shorter one we're going to put it right here
there you go now this daughter board is held in place so we're all good
with that out of the way we're going to flip over the board and install our
first bit of storage now it should be noted that just like if you were buying
a bare bones nas the storage is not factored into the budget so we chose a
32 gig octane SSD because these things are dirt cheap on ebay while they're not
super high bandwidth they're really low latency and really high endurance so in
a cache application they're a really cheap way to get sort of an enterprise
dna product into your very very consumer
diy solution for our CPU we've elected to go with a ryzen 3 3100 while you can
buy these brand new still we would strongly recommend trying to find one
second hand as cpus generally outlast the
vast majority of your other components and are a pretty safe bet to buy used we
got this one for 120 us dollars on ebay but they can be had for as little as a
hundred dollars if you're willing to take your time make sure if you buy it
used that it comes with the stock cooler though because that's gonna wipe out a
lot of your savings if you have to go out and buy an aftermarket cooler
as for RAM to match the synology we're trying to beat we only need eight gigs
of memory but since prices are decent right now we were able to fit 16 gigs of
3600 mega transfer per second g-skill rip jaws into our budget if you're a
hardcore user you may even want to go higher with up to 32 gigs of RAM for
even better performance since this will get used as a caching layer for our hard
drives thanks to zfs it's 64. for this
kit right now here things get a little bit complicated though the power supply
we spec was evga's gm 550 watt sfx which
we had for 80 at the time of filming unfortunately evga didn't have stock so
our stand in is the 650 watt version of the same power supply it's fully modular
it fits in the case and is a really great value however
it's a bit overkill when it's not on sale so i'd recommend shopping around to
see if there's a cheaper option if you're planning to replicate our build
now it's pretty much build time the first thing we're going to do is plug in the power to our backplane odds are that
it would actually run with just one of these molex connectors in it that that
would be like out of spec probably so what i think i'm gonna do is i'm gonna
take the first one in the chain of four plug that in there
then i'm gonna damn the rest of it in there and then take the last one and go
right here and the reason for this is that this has to stay super low profile
because this right here is the rail that lets this inner piece slide into the
outer shell so you can't just have a bunch of extra bulk sitting here this is
a really important note because of that same issue where we want to make sure that we don't have any clearance
problems while we're sliding this into the outer case we only want to use
90 degree or a right angle SATA cables
in the back plane here otherwise you've got a high profile straight
connector coming out of here you're going to rip this connector right off the pcb and
see you later back please not warranty oh does it say right on the sticker yeah
we are not liable get wrecked that is a
nice looking fan i like that definitely got some static
pressure behind that bad boy i mean i guess you need it if you're gonna have just one fan cooling the entire
column of computer behind it oh i guess i need to put this SATA SSD
in place look at that it's so cute it just goes right there for those of you
wondering why we even need this drive it's for our operating system and we've
chosen to go with truenets which is a free solution not to say that it's the
only solution unraid would be another valid one it's got some advantages i'd
say it's easier to handle virtualization easier to handle docker containers GPU
passthrough is really easy you could mix and match your drives but for us because
we're getting all new drives and we're populating the whole thing today
it didn't make sense your mileage may vary as for why we used this drive
it was cheap um many storage os's actually both trunaz
and unraid included are not going to go out of their way to hit your os drive
because there's no reason for them to so it basically is like read only media
almost now time to put our hard drives in and Jake
claims this is going to be really hard
yeah it's too bad you completely skipped the part you were supposed to do what
happened there's sliders for them why is that not going in there's sliders no i
don't believe you oh good it's in oh oh my god they don't warranty the
backplane damn it all right you're right these do look like a bit of a chore
those bars are like the top handles i get it and then you're supposed to put
two of the little dots on the bottom yeah and then sliders on the top i see
it i see it that's a pretty
see it slides in even if they're tight pretty nice mount i i didn't put them in
all the way i left them a little bit here i'll put mine in all the way and you can try it sure
i'm gonna put this one backwards this part's a little bit tricky
no so you see if you've if you run your cables
across here you can see there's a bit of a clearance issue you're just jamming it
down there right damn it yeah just send it button that's pretty
borderline oh oh what was that that was
a good um good noise yeah you told me to send it i mean it sent hold on it's
gonna light up the thing i just got it oh geez oh geez oh geez okay and we got
to do this tick tock so what is it i gotta put it in and say
oh my god i can't i can't hold it okay it's too heavy
let's go oh my god oh wait why isn't it going in oh oh can
you get the other side for me please let's go oh did i do it too late why
didn't it close all the way oh because there's a cable in there hard drives in
there too oh crap i can't run the eight pin here
oh shoot it interferes oh yeah um oh balls you have to put it around the side
yeah i see that i could have told you that ah well you didn't
this thing is freaking so cool
the key night amongst you might have already realized we're gonna have a bit of a problem when we go to install our
os because we don't have a display output this is not an apu now there's a
couple of options we could have built this system up on a box first like the
motherboard box and slotted in an extra GPU we had and installed the os that
probably is the best option for most people if you have a riser laying around
you could also just kind of slap that in there and put the GPU in that way but if
you don't have that what you probably have is an extra computer so we're going
to take our boot drive and just throw it in this test bench acting as our other
computer and install the os on there setup process is pretty easy hit install
we're going to select our 120-ish gig kingston drive hit okay proceed with
install yes ah it's done we don't even need that much
movie magic it only took a few minutes okay it says to remove the usb so let's
just do that yeah okay i'll put the drive back in properly with my handy
dandy screwdriver
oh there we go beauty since we did the installing the other computer we're not
going to immediately get the ip of what the system is going to get assigned
we're going to have to go into our router's dhcp reservation list to figure
out what that is you can also use tools like angry ip scanner and you can look
for trunas if you don't have that many devices on your network or if you know
the Mac Address of the Ethernet port on the board you can actually just look it up that way too it looks like it's
booting though we're in truenast now so you're going to be logging in with the
root user and whatever password you set in the install you can see we got our
it's loading there we go we got our four core processor 16 gigabytes of RAM let's
make sure all our storage is detected if you didn't slide in the drives properly
or one of your SATA cables came loose or something like that but it looks like we
got one two three four five
and then our 32 gig NVMe now that we've verified all of our storage is working
we can go ahead and set up an array now depending on the hardware you have what
you do here is going to change if you only have like two hard drives for now
you might want to set it up as a mirror and that basically is kind of like a
raid one if you have anything more than two hard drives you're going to be
moving up to raid z which depending on the amount of drives you might only be
able to use a specific type but there's raid z1 2 and 3 and those give you one
two three respective drives worth of failure before you lose data since we
have five drives we could do any of these options but i'm going to stick with braid z1 because that's going to
give us the most capacity because remember if you go to raid z2 or 3
you're losing two or three drives worth of capacity respectively dev it's
actually recommending by default we do a z2 but i'm going to do
z1 since we have an NVMe drive in there we're also going to create a cache vdev
and we can just click it and bring it down there this type of cache vdf acts
kind of like a read cache to expand the RAM cache that we have with zfs which is
called arc so this is level two arc let's put a name on here i'm going to
call it lambo and look at that 43.65 tippy bites if you use these discs
for anything else they're getting wiped right now so make sure you don't have anything on them
we got a z pool look at that i'm gonna check the status just really quick let's
see we got one two three four five and our cash drive everything looks to be
working now to make this storage accessible on other computers your phone
whatever we're going to have to first set up a data set it's kind of like a
folder but a folder that you can set custom settings on and then we're also
going to set up an smb share that's the protocol that microsoft uses to share
files over the network it's pretty easy to do that we'll just click under our z
pool and go add a data set i'm going to call it
zumba or goomba zedfast has a built-in compression
system that basically just automatically compresses anything you write and
decompresses anything you read from the array which
depending on which option you select and what you're writing can actually make
your storage speeds faster if you have enough CPU now with the quad core
hard to say but i'm just going to leave it on the default lz4 compression which
is very fast and then we're just going to set the share type to smb because
it's going to be an smb share if you're using oh time machine you
might want apple specific settings but we're just going to hit save
and then go to shares click add select the path lambo goomba
and hit save it's going to prompt you to start the service that's actually like
the smb server it's not running by default so just hit ok on that i
actually forgot a step here we need to create a user to be able to access it i
think by default it won't let you use the root user just for security reasons
so we'll add a user we'll just call it Jake
Jake and we can set the password to one two three four
cool type in our ip again here
and then Jake and one two three four
and look at that storage okay i'm actually going to map this as a network
drive so we can see how much storage and just like that 43.4 terabytes we've got
our 2.5 gig unified switch this thing's pretty sick we've got our share set up
we're all connected i've verified that it is actually running at 2.5 gig and
we've got a little test file here
280 megabytes per second that's sick and
to think that this is still cheaper than an off-the-shelf nas and you've got
upgrade ability you can slot a 10 gig card in there you still have the NVMe
port you could do anything you want with this thing you could put a 16 core CPU in it
and it would still work just as good you could put vms on it whatever you want i
think this is seriously one of the coolest little like server storage
things we've done in a long time i just wanted to take a quick look at the array
now that we've copied something to it and you can see our compression ratio
right there is 1.02 that means we've
saved two percent of this storage space of this whatever 11 and a half Gigabyte
file doing nothing let's say you were to copy over a bunch of photos and
documents that you had on your computer like you're using this as a backup you
could easily expect to save 10 20 30
of that capacity automatically and completely transparently to you if we
even look on this file you can actually see look size 10.9 gigabytes size on disk 10.7 so
we've saved 200 megabytes doing literally nothing it's pretty freaking cool but not as
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if you like this video and you like servery true nasty stuff maybe check out
the new delta 5 new new vault
vault 3 build that we just did that's a pretty good one you could also maybe
check out the video about how we're lost some data
how we're lost some data did you just lose some words i lost some words