I run EXOS drives in the under-stair cupboard. They’re noisy but they’re not that bad.

I think anything described as “noisy” would be too much, especially considering the savings are decent but not huge.

I’ve not heard of AMD CPUs handling this under Linux at least.

I’ll double check that then, just to be sure. Although I have noticed that, between me writing it down and now, the CPU is no longer available where I live, so I have to find a replacement either way.

You’re not using a CPU that most distributions support for hardware transcoding. You either need to use an Intel CPU with QuickSync or stick a discrete nvidia card in the box.

I see, I chose that one based on a recommendation from I believe the channel was called “Wolfgang’s Channel”. They make a lot of home lab content and showed the iGPU working fine for Plex, so I assumed it wasn’t an issue.

Are you intent on building your own box?

Yeah pretty much, I think it sounds fun

Regarding disks Seagate EXOS are often cheaper than IronWolfs and have higher MTBF than even the Pro. Don’t ask me why they’re lower cost, for more bang.

As I mentioned in my post, apparently they’re way louder since they’re made for datacenters where noise is crazy anyways, and since I am planning to have the NAS in my hallway I’d like to avoid the datacenter vibe, even if a handful of drives won’t cause quite that level of cacophony

I sadly can not. The old PC I’m scavenging from is incomplete and my current PC has a DDR5 motherboard. So the earliest point I can check them is once I’ve built the NAS since then I’d have a functioning PC here with DDR4 support.

Got it, thank you

Is noise the most important prio? Would you spend money for this goal?

Not the most important, but it is an important factor. If I am not losing much otherwise, I’d like to keep it not louder than say, an idling fridge. I would spend some more for quieter drives and fans, since those are the biggest noise concerns.

How about power usage?

Absolutely important, power prices here are some of the highest globally.

How about price limitations?

I’d very much like to stay below 2000€, preferably below 1750€. Currently it’s coming out at around 1600€.

When looking at harddisks, there is that performance issue called “CMR or SMR” (google it). Your ST8000NT001 seem fine performance-wise as the use CMR.

Yup, took that into account, but nonetheless thanks for mentioning it!

If you need really quiet ones, then maybe you want “desktop” harddisks. But many of them use SMR which limits their performance.

Doesn’t need to be super quiet, just not disruptive, I’m planning on having the NAS in the hallway.

Most guides recommend Raidz2 currently. Do you use backups?

Raidz2 means there are two entire “unused” drives which would be quite painful for my budget. I am planning on renting around 1TB of rsync storage and throwing things like Immich’s data on there. This is fine to me since I’d prefer one backup off-site anyways. Any of my jellyfin stuff can always be redownloaded as long as I keep a list of what I got somewhere else. Oh also I’m planning on getting all four drives at different stores and/or different times (at least a week or two in between) to reduce the chance of them failing all at once.

When buying SSDs, check for the “TBW” spec.

Noted

Prices fluctuate but last I checked it was around 1600€. Also, after posting this thread I re-checked the CPU and noticed that isn’t even available in my region anymore apparently, so I’ll have to find a suitable replacement there anyways.

A friend of mine had an unRAID NAS and moved that over to TrueNAS later after being bothered by the licensing costs, that’s why I was looking into the latter more. I do know how to RTFM, so I think I should be fine on that? But maybe there’s gonna be a huge negative surprise, I suppose I don’t know that yet

How come? I’ve seen those recommended quite often.

Yeah, I thought about the RAM, but since I already have two 8GB sticks I decided not to bother. Couldn’t even buy two more since I have no idea what those are exactly, there are no stickers on them, so I’d have to buy 32GB entirely which is like 80-120€.

And as you said, that can always be done later if I run into trouble :)

Ah, sorry, I should’ve specified this further. Whether this can run what I need it to isn’t the primary concern, I believe it can do so, I primarily attached my decision making basis just in case it changes anything.

I’m more concerned about things like picking the correct drives, or if limiting my motherboard selection through an ITX case was a bad idea, or if my choice of not going with ECC was a poor one, those kinds of things.

For me it’s pretty likely to replace it, at least on my laptop. Don’t get me wrong, I love Plasma, but per-screen workspaces and native window tiling are two features I never knew how much I needed before I tried out Hyprland some months back, especially on a single screen. While I’ll definitely miss the desktop panels and extensive settings menu, I’ll give those up for the other features without much of a second thought.