Building a Dedicated NAS for Your Home Lab

There comes a point in every homelab journey where you realize your storage situation has gotten out of hand. Maybe you've got drives scattered across three machines, or your Proxmox host is doubling as a file server, or you're running out of SATA ports. The answer is a dedicated NAS — a machine whose only job is storing and serving data reliably.

Building your own NAS gives you more flexibility, better performance, and lower long-term cost than buying a Synology or QNAP box. You pick the CPU, the drives, the OS, and the expansion path. The trade-off is that you're responsible for all of it. This guide walks through every decision you'll need to make.

Choosing a Case

The case determines how many drives you can fit, how loud the system will be, and how much space it takes up. For a NAS, drive capacity is the primary constraint.

Fractal Design Node 304

The Node 304 is the classic homelab NAS case. It's a Mini-ITX cube that holds six 3.5" drives in a compact, clean package. The drive cages have rubber grommets for vibration dampening, and the three included 92mm fans provide enough airflow to keep drives cool without being obnoxious.

Pros: Compact, holds 6 drives, good airflow, clean design, fits on a shelf.

Cons: Mini-ITX only (limits expansion), tight cable management, discontinued but still available from resellers and secondhand. No hot-swap bays.

Best for: A compact NAS with up to 6 drives that doesn't dominate the room.

Fractal Design Define 7 / 7 XL

If you need more than 6 drives or want room to grow, the Define 7 is the step up. The standard Define 7 holds up to 14 3.5" drives with the right cage configuration. The XL variant pushes that even further with 18 drive mounts. Both support ATX motherboards, giving you more PCIe slots for HBA cards and 10GbE NICs.

Pros: Massive drive capacity, ATX support, sound-dampened panels, modular interior, front-panel USB-C.

Cons: Large (especially the XL), overkill if you only need a few drives, more expensive.

Best for: Growing labs that need double-digit drive counts and room for expansion.

Jonsbo N3 / N4

The Jonsbo N-series cases are purpose-built NAS enclosures with hot-swap drive bays. The N3 holds 8 drives in a compact form factor, and the N4 holds 6 with a more traditional layout. Hot-swap means you can pull and replace drives without opening the case or powering down.

Pros: Hot-swap bays, purpose-built for NAS, compact, good thermals with direct drive airflow.

Cons: Mini-ITX only, can be hard to find in stock, drive trays are plastic (functional but not premium feeling).

Best for: A dedicated NAS where you want hot-swap convenience without a rackmount chassis.

Rackmount (Rosewill RSV-L4500 and Friends)

If your lab has a rack, a 4U rackmount chassis is the most practical option. The Rosewill RSV-L4500 holds 15 3.5" drives and costs under $100. It's not fancy — the drive trays are basic sleds, the build quality is adequate — but it works and it's cheap. The Inter-Tech 4U-4129 and Silverstone RM420 are more refined alternatives.

Pros: Maximum drive density, fits in a rack, cheap (for rackmount), ATX motherboard support.

Cons: Loud fans (replace them), large, ugly, rack required.

Best for: Existing rack setups where density matters more than aesthetics.

Motherboard and CPU

A NAS doesn't need a powerful CPU. What it needs is enough SATA ports (or PCIe slots for HBA cards), ECC RAM support (recommended but not required), and low power consumption.

Budget: Intel N100 / N305 Mini-ITX

The Intel N100 and N305 are embedded processors soldered onto Mini-ITX boards. They draw 6-15W, run cool enough for passive cooling, and include a decent integrated GPU for hardware transcoding (if your NAS also serves media). Boards like the ASRock N100M or CWWK N305 boards are common choices.

• N100: 4 cores, 6W TDP, around $120 for a board. Plenty for a NAS serving SMB/NFS to a handful of clients.
• N305: 8 cores, 15W TDP, around $160 for a board. Better if you'll run ZFS with deduplication or heavy Docker workloads alongside storage.

Most N100/N305 boards have 2-4 SATA ports and one or two M.2 slots. You'll likely need an HBA card for more drives.

Mid-Range: Intel Core i3 / AMD Ryzen 5

If you need more than a basic NAS — maybe it's also running VMs, or you're doing ZFS with lots of datasets and replication — a standard desktop CPU gives you headroom. An Intel i3-12100 or AMD Ryzen 5 5600G on a Micro-ATX board is a solid choice.

These CPUs support ECC memory on the right motherboards (check the specific board — not all do). They also have enough PCIe lanes for an HBA card plus a 10GbE NIC without contention.

Used Enterprise: Xeon E-2300 Series

Used Xeon workstation boards show up on eBay regularly. A Xeon E-2336 with an Intel C256 chipset board gives you ECC support, IPMI for remote management, and plenty of PCIe lanes. The downside is higher power draw (65W+ TDP) and louder cooling requirements.

Only go this route if you specifically need IPMI or validated ECC support and can handle the extra power draw.

HBA Cards — Adding More SATA Ports

Most consumer motherboards top out at 4-6 SATA ports. If you have more drives than that, you need a Host Bus Adapter (HBA) card. An HBA passes drives directly to the OS without any hardware RAID — exactly what you want for software RAID (ZFS, Unraid, etc.).

The LSI (Broadcom) Standard

The LSI SAS 9211-8i is the gold standard for homelab HBA cards. It provides 8 SAS/SATA ports via two SFF-8087 connectors. You'll need SFF-8087 to SATA breakout cables (each cable provides 4 SATA connections). These cards are widely available used on eBay for $15-30.

Important: Flash the card to IT mode (Initiator Target mode). Many used cards come in IR mode (Integrated RAID), which adds a hardware RAID layer you don't want. Flashing to IT mode passes drives through directly. There are plenty of guides for this — search for "LSI 9211-8i flash IT mode."

Newer alternatives:

• LSI 9207-8i: Slightly newer, same functionality, often the same price used.
• LSI 9300-8i / 9305-8i: 12Gb/s SAS (vs 6Gb/s on the 9211). Overkill for spinning disks, useful if you're also connecting SAS SSDs.
• Dell H310 / IBM M1015: Rebranded LSI cards that can be cross-flashed to IT mode. Often cheaper than the LSI-branded versions.

How Many Cards Do You Need?

Each 8-port HBA gives you 8 drives. Combined with 4-6 onboard SATA ports, a single HBA gets you to 12-14 drives — enough for most homelab NAS builds. If you need more, add a second HBA, but make sure your motherboard has enough PCIe slots and lanes.

Drive Selection

This is where most of the money goes. Choosing the right drives means balancing cost, reliability, warranty, and performance.

Seagate Ironwolf (NAS Drives)

The Ironwolf line is Seagate's consumer NAS drive. Available in capacities from 1TB to 20TB+, with a 3-year warranty. They include rotational vibration sensors (useful in multi-drive enclosures) and are rated for 180TB/year workload.

When to buy: New NAS builds where warranty matters and you want a known-good drive from a retailer.

Price: Moderate. Typically $15-20 per TB at common capacities (8-16TB).

Seagate Exos (Enterprise)

Exos drives are enterprise-grade: 5-year warranty, 550TB/year workload rating, and built for 24/7 operation. They're louder and draw more power than Ironwolf drives, but they're also more reliable over long service lives.

When to buy: When you find them on sale, or when you need drives rated for heavier workloads. The Exos X16 (16TB) and X18 (18TB) frequently go on sale at prices competitive with Ironwolf.

Price: Similar to Ironwolf when on sale, slightly more at list price. The better warranty makes them worth it.

WD Red Plus / Red Pro

Western Digital's NAS line. The Red Plus uses CMR (Conventional Magnetic Recording), which is what you want. Avoid the plain "WD Red" (non-Plus), which uses SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) — SMR drives have terrible write performance under sustained loads and are a poor choice for RAID arrays.

When to buy: When the price is right. WD and Seagate trade blows on reliability — pick whichever is cheaper.

Used Enterprise Drives (The Budget Option)

Buying used enterprise drives from eBay or serverpartdeals.com is the cheapest way to fill a NAS. Used HGST Ultrastar or Seagate Exos drives with 20,000-40,000 power-on hours are commonly available at $8-12 per TB.

The honest trade-off: These drives have already used a chunk of their service life. They have no warranty. Some will fail sooner than new drives. But if you're running a redundant array (RAIDZ2 or mirrors), you can tolerate drive failures — that's the whole point. The economics work out: you can buy twice the capacity for the same money and replace individual drives as they fail.

When to buy: When budget is the primary constraint and you're running a redundant array with good monitoring. Always run a full badblocks test on used drives before adding them to your array:

# Full destructive read-write test (erases all data on the drive)
sudo badblocks -wsvb 4096 /dev/sdX

# Non-destructive read-only test
sudo badblocks -svb 4096 /dev/sdX

A full test on a large drive takes 24-48 hours. If it passes with zero bad blocks, the drive is good to use. If it reports any bad blocks, return it.

Drive Sizing Strategy

Buy the largest drives your budget allows. The reason: a 4-drive RAIDZ1 with 16TB drives gives you 48TB usable. Getting the same capacity with 8TB drives would need 8 drives in RAIDZ2, requiring a bigger case, more SATA ports, and more power. Fewer large drives is almost always better than many small drives.

The sweet spot in terms of cost per TB tends to be whatever capacity has been on the market for a year or two. As of early 2026, that's 16-18TB drives.

Choosing a NAS Operating System

TrueNAS (Scale or Core)

TrueNAS is the heavyweight. TrueNAS SCALE (Linux-based) is the current recommended version. It runs ZFS natively, provides a polished web UI for managing pools, datasets, shares, snapshots, and replication. It also supports Docker containers and VMs.

Pros: Best ZFS integration, enterprise-grade features, excellent web UI, active development, strong community.

Cons: Opinionated about how things should be done, less flexible than rolling your own Linux setup, minimum 8GB RAM (16GB+ recommended for ZFS).

Best for: Dedicated NAS appliances where ZFS is the storage layer and you want a batteries-included experience.

Unraid

Unraid takes a fundamentally different approach. Instead of traditional RAID, it uses a parity-based system where each drive is an independent filesystem. You can mix drive sizes, add drives one at a time, and read individual drives even if the array is degraded. It also includes a polished Docker and VM manager.

Pros: Flexible drive management, mix and match sizes, great Docker/VM support, large community app ecosystem, beginner-friendly UI.

Cons: Costs money ($59-$129 license), parity writes are slower than ZFS, no checksumming (no protection against bit rot), not open source.

Best for: Media servers, mixed-use NAS/Docker hosts, users who want simplicity and flexibility over raw data integrity.

OpenMediaVault (OMV)

OMV is Debian-based with a web UI for managing storage, shares, and services. It's lighter than TrueNAS, supports both traditional RAID (mdadm) and ZFS via plugin, and runs well on low-powered hardware.

Pros: Lightweight, Debian-based (familiar, flexible), runs on modest hardware, free and open source, plugin system.

Cons: Less polished UI than TrueNAS or Unraid, ZFS is a plugin (not as deeply integrated), smaller community.

Best for: Users who want a simple NAS with a web UI but don't need ZFS's full feature set, or who are running on limited hardware (Raspberry Pi, old laptop).

Plain Linux (DIY)

You can always install Debian or Ubuntu Server, set up ZFS or mdadm manually, configure Samba/NFS shares, and manage everything via SSH. This gives you maximum control but requires the most knowledge and maintenance.

Best for: Experienced Linux users who want total control and don't mind managing things by hand.

Initial Setup Checklist

Once you've assembled the hardware and installed your OS, walk through this checklist:

1. Test All Drives

Before adding drives to your array, test each one individually:

# Check SMART health
sudo smartctl -a /dev/sdX

# Run a long SMART self-test
sudo smartctl -t long /dev/sdX

# For used drives, run badblocks
sudo badblocks -wsvb 4096 /dev/sdX

2. Create Your Storage Pool

The exact steps depend on your OS, but the key decisions are:

• RAIDZ1 for 3-4 drives (single parity — tolerates 1 drive failure)
• RAIDZ2 for 5+ drives (double parity — tolerates 2 failures, recommended for large drives)
• Mirrors for maximum performance and simplicity (50% storage efficiency)

# Example: ZFS RAIDZ2 with 6 drives
zpool create -o ashift=12 tank raidz2 \
  /dev/disk/by-id/ata-DRIVE1 \
  /dev/disk/by-id/ata-DRIVE2 \
  /dev/disk/by-id/ata-DRIVE3 \
  /dev/disk/by-id/ata-DRIVE4 \
  /dev/disk/by-id/ata-DRIVE5 \
  /dev/disk/by-id/ata-DRIVE6

3. Configure Shares

Set up SMB (for Windows/Mac) and/or NFS (for Linux) shares:

# TrueNAS: Use the web UI — it handles Samba config automatically

# Manual Samba setup on Linux:
sudo apt install samba

# Add a share to /etc/samba/smb.conf
# [media]
#   path = /tank/media
#   browseable = yes
#   read only = no
#   valid users = @nas-users

sudo systemctl restart smbd

4. Set Up Monitoring

At minimum, monitor drive health with SMART:

# Install smartmontools
sudo apt install smartmontools

# Enable automatic SMART monitoring
sudo systemctl enable --now smartd

Configure email alerts or integrate with your Prometheus/Grafana stack for drive temperature, SMART attributes, and pool health.

5. Configure Snapshots and Backups

Storage is not backup. Set up:

• Automated ZFS snapshots with sanoid for point-in-time recovery
• Off-site replication with syncoid to a second ZFS system (a friend's NAS, a VPS, a cloud target)
• 3-2-1 backup strategy: 3 copies of data, on 2 different media, with 1 off-site

6. UPS Protection

A UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) is essential for a NAS. Power failures during writes can corrupt data — even on ZFS (which handles it better than most, but still benefits from clean shutdowns).

Connect a UPS via USB and configure automatic shutdown:

# Install NUT (Network UPS Tools)
sudo apt install nut

# Configure /etc/nut/ups.conf with your UPS model
# Configure /etc/nut/upsmon.conf for automatic shutdown
# Set SHUTDOWNCMD "/sbin/shutdown -h now"

Sample Builds

Budget Build (~$400 + drives)

Add 4-8 drives of your choice. This build runs TrueNAS or OMV comfortably, draws under 50W idle (plus drives), and handles 1GbE network speeds without breaking a sweat.

Mid-Range Build (~$700 + drives)

This build handles ZFS with 32GB of ARC cache, runs Docker containers alongside storage, and has room for a 10GbE NIC when you're ready to upgrade your network.

Final Thoughts

Building a NAS is one of the most satisfying homelab projects. It's a machine with a clear purpose, and once it's set up, it runs quietly in the background keeping your data safe. The key decisions — case, drives, and OS — are all about understanding your priorities and picking the trade-offs that make sense for your situation.

Start with what you need now, but leave room to grow. Buy a case with more bays than you currently need. Pick a motherboard with a free PCIe slot. Choose an OS that can expand with you. Your future self will appreciate the foresight.