I’m looking for an off-the-shelf 4 or 6 bay NAS with upgradeable RAM that runs TrueNAS (for ZFS). The QNAP TS-664 looked very nice, but the price of the 4G version (with 2 RAM slots) is currently 25% more than the 8G version (with soldered RAM). I’d like to have 16 or better 32GB of RAM.

Do you have any recommendations?

  • _brkt_@alien.topB
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    1 year ago

    No specific recommendations for off-the-shelf offerings, but I see you’re in Europe and concerned with power consumption? You may want to look at Wolfang’s Channel on youtube - he has a few NAS builds that are extremely low power, and I’ve found his videos informative. Specifically, you will want to look at his “Building a Power Efficient Home Server” video.

    Of course, the above is not useful if you’re looking for prebuilt units.

    • madcook1@alien.topOPB
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      1 year ago

      Thanks, i found Wolfgang’s video extremly useful and now decided to build one myself. The Topton N5105 looks really good with its 6 sata ports. Just need to decide if i get the bigger Fractal Node 304 or the smaller (but nicer) Jonsbo N1 case.

      The whole project is a bit of a stretch between low power, low noise (living room) and enough cpu/ram for good zfs performance.

      • _brkt_@alien.topB
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        1 year ago

        Topton N5105

        Yep, this board looks perfect for your stated use case! You give up a bit for the form factor, but just put those sweet sweet power savings towards your next upgrade.

        One last thought - I’ve watched a few reviews of the Jonsbo N1 and I think there were 2 flaws with it: loudish stock fan, and if you are using all HDD slots drives can overheat due to bad airflow (front panel is solid - not vented - for some reason!)

    • Malossi167@alien.topB
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      1 year ago

      Newer generation Intel boards should be quite a bit better than my numbers, too.

      A modern, barebones board with no extra cards, 1Gbe and an NVMe idles at 10W with an ATX PSU. A dedicated NAS can not really do a lot to lower this a lot.

      • _brkt_@alien.topB
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        1 year ago

        Sorry, I was strictly speaking newer Intel SFF mobos vs the Haswell one I quoted. I get 15-18W idle with SATA SSD, 1Gbe, no PCI card/no HBA, and an ATX Gold PSU. Two different (i3/i5) Haswell era SFF PCs I tested are both in this range. Once CPU is used at all, they both jump up to the 25-28W range.