The mistake #
Last month my brother gave me an old pc. It had pretty decent specs. I plan to add the 2 x 4tb that I bought on black Friday and install unraid, immich and next cloud on it. Everything was perfect except for the case it came in.
It was bulky and has green RGB lights on the case fans and AIO Cooler. Totally unnecessary. I wanted something slim/small and found this Jonsbo N4 case. I bought it together with a low profile cpu cooler.
When it arrived I was totally disappointed. At myself. The motherboard I had was an ATX and the case could only fit up to micro atx.
I was thinking of ways to use the case, with another board perhaps, but in every scenario it require me to spend more money. I also learnt that the case fits only SFX PSU. :(
Shopping Again #
I spent 2 days finding an LGA 1151 compatible motherboard but many came with few SATA slots or were refurbished sets. Others were pretty pricey. I also tried to find another combo deal like the one I bought for my proxmox server but decided against it for now. I didn’t want to spend so much money in the spirit of repurposing old unused hardware. Luckily my brother had an old AM4 compatible motherboard and I have a Ryzen 5 1600 that was originally meant for my Proxmox server.
I also had to get a new SFX PSU and a video card. While at it, I also decided to get a HBA as i’ve been reading reviews that it was hard to connect the SATA cables in this case and the motherboard only has 4 SATA ports anyway. I ordered all of the items from Taobao/AliExpress. I was praying really hard that the parts arrive before my Christmas - I’m taking a long weekend off. To my delight, everything came sooner than expected. Including the 2x 4TB hard drives that I bought on Cyber Monday.
The fun begins #
I assembled everything. It wasn’t as tricky as mentioned by some Redditors. The video card i bought was pretty cool. It allowed me to split the ports to turn it in to a low profile.
Everything was great until I realized the 24pin motherboard connector was a tad too short. So I had to buy an extension for it. :( More money.
And after that, I plugged it in, and seeing the unraid login in the terminal felt so satisfying.
Final look of the internals of my first NAS.
The Damange #
- Case: 137 SGD
- Video Card (GT210): 16 SGD
- PSU: 122 SGD
- Cooler: 21 SGD
- 24 Pin Extension: 15 SGD
- HBA: 32 SGD
- Motherboard + RAM + CPU: 0 SGD
- Total: 343 SGD
In summary, because I wanted to use the Jonsbo N4, I had to spend an additional $206. Was it worth it? A 100%!
Other cost to build this NAS:
- Unraid 2 x Starter License: ~81 SGD (Black friday sale)
- 2x 4TB WD Red Plus: 235 SGD