I needed centralized storage for the home lab, somewhere to land backups from every other machine AND all of my parents' laptops.
I also need to serve media to Jellyfin and hold NFS shares for Docker volumes. The options were: buy a Synology, repurpose an old machine, or build something properly.
I built Nasir.
The hardware
Case: Jonsbo N1: a Mini-ITX SFF tower designed for NAS builds. Five 3.5" drive bays, an SFX PSU slot, and barely bigger than a shoebox. It's the rare case where form factor and function actually align.
Motherboard: Gigabyte AORUS B660I Pro DDR4 Mini-ITX: needs a BIOS update before Intel 12th gen CPUs post. That's the gotcha that'll cost you an afternoon if you don't know about it.
CPU: Intel i5-12400: 6 cores, 12 threads, T-dp of 65W. Plenty for Proxmox + TrueNAS VM + whatever else needs to run on it. Also, it has an integrated GPU, very useful for transcoding.
RAM: G.Skill RipJaws 64GB DDR4 3600: probably overkill for a NAS, but ZFS loves RAM for the ARC cache and I didn't want to think about memory pressure later. I did not opt for ECC RAM because I was just out of college and didn't want to spend the extra cash and now I can't afford ECC RAM because everyone and their mother wants some :).
Storage:
- OS SSD: Samsung 500 Gigs (Proxmox + TrueNAS VM land here)
- Data: WD Red Plus 8TB × 4 (SATA 6Gb/s, 5640 RPM)
- PCIe SATA card: MZHOU 2-port PCIe 3.0 GEN3 JMB582, adding the two extra SATA ports the motherboard doesn't have natively
PSU: Corsair SF600 SFX 80+ Platinum: the N1 takes SFX form factor, and this is the gold standard pick for SFX builds.
The PCIe SATA card gotcha
The B660I board has strict PCIe compatibility. The SATA expansion card must be PCIe 3.0 GEN3. I found out the hard way that cards using earlier JMicron chips (JMB58x without the 3.0 spec) cause intermittent drive detection failures. The MZHOU JMB582 works.
Why TrueNAS inside Proxmox instead of bare metal
Running TrueNAS as a VM on Proxmox means the NAS function is isolated from everything else the machine might do. If I want to run a small service on the same hardware, I spin up another VM.
The tradeoff: PCI passthrough. For ZFS to work properly with TrueNAS, the SATA controller needs to be passed through to the TrueNAS VM directly (not emulated). This requires IOMMU enabled in BIOS and the right kernel flags. With systemd-boot (UEFI install) rather than GRUB, the flag goes in a different config file than most guides assume, something to watch for.
^ That entire sentence above felt like black magic when I first did it. Pass-through and the niche configurations around it could be a whole different entry on this portfolio website. It is both the most frustrating part of this setup, but also teaches me the most. A recurring theme.
ZFS: RAID-Z or RAID 10?
With four drives, the options are:
- RAID-Z1: one parity drive, ~24TB usable, survives one drive failure
- RAID-Z2: two parity drives, ~16TB usable, survives two failures
- RAID 10: mirrored pairs, ~16TB usable, better random read/write performance
I went with RAID-10. For a home backup, 1 failure is enough buffer. Technically, RAID-10 can handle two failures. However, there is no guarantee that two failures come from different mirrored pairs.
If I have a failed drive and another fails within 2 days, I have a bigger problem. Odds are the second I have a failed drive notification, I will swap in a new drive ASAP (or with current prices, take out a loan to buy another one...).
Airflow in the Jonsbo N1
The N1's default front panel is a solid metal piece with a mesh layer behind it. Pull the solid panel off and use just the mesh. It's removable and makes a meaningful difference to airflow. The HDDs sit directly behind it.
The default 80mm fan that ships with the case is adequate but loud under load. The NAS sits in the same room that I sleep in. I'd rather it be quiet if I have it on while going to sleep. A 140mm PWM fan (Noctua A14, zip-tied to the front mount) brings temperatures down and noise with it.
What runs on NASIR
- TrueNAS VM with SATA passthrough: ZFS pool, NFS shares, snapshots, SMART tests
- NFS shares mounted on every other machine in the lab for rsync backup targets
- Backblaze B2 off-site sync via rclone with client-side encryption