The Best CPU+Motherboard Combo for Your NAS Build (2024

I went with a G ryzen and a b550m VC from msi-only new part- board has 2xnvme pcie3x4-this cuz the G ryzen-, 8 EIGHT sata ports by the way sata and nvme can all work at same time, a couple pcie slots for any future whatevers. Now for my use case, 1G lan is more than enough, Id say but still have them pcie slots justin! 6x hdds now and an os ssd, no cache drive, dont think ill need it, at least not now, and i read that most ssds will have not a good time being cache, since their lifetime is on the amount written. Wanted to get one of them X99 setups though, but this was quicker and less power, all on an old PC case with hdd mounting spaces with a couple extra fans thrown in there

If you haven't a problem with second hand things. I have picked up an i5 8500t with an Asus z390 ATX mobo with Asus hyper M.2 card, 64GB ddr 4 2666, ATX Gold powersupply all in an old case with lots of 3.5 and 2.5 inch bays. Still have a lot of PCIE and Sata ports free for the future. Power draw <40W. All for around €200, storage not included

AliExpress for European buyers is awful. Months for delivery and often non-functioning then weeks of return delay.

While I see the appeal of MOBO+CPU options, I think the lack of serviceability makes them simply not worth it. I recently bought a 4650G because of the ECC support and okay CPU performance (and because it was dirt cheap, $110). Just slot it into any AM4 Gigabyte/ASUS board and UDIMM ECC is fully supported for a total of $200 MOBO+CPU. Still thinking about if I should do an ITX build with Jonsbo N1 or an ATX building with a Define R7.

The n305 board sharing the pcie late between the m.2 and the 3.0×1 slot was the reason the went with the n100 green board. Those lanes are not shared. Of course, after I ordered it, About a month ago Topton released a new version of the n305 board that does not share this lane.

i had a fealing, that no one car in nas community about synology anymore. does you feel the same?

The N-series of Intel chips, especially not of the 8-core variant, are pretty weak, so if you plan to use them with dockerised apps, not so good… Intel's i* H-series and now Ultras are the way to go for efficiency and because they have iGPUs with well supported hardware accelerated transcoding for the media serving use-cases – some apps/platforms may require extra cost for supporting Nvidia or AMD encoders – they make good basis for such builds. Newer gen may also be seated in TB3/TB4 enabled board, so device extension is quite possible…
However, one could venture experiments with Epyc Siena. Why? Most boards for Siena come with 2 or 4 NICs, 2 of which often are RJ45 ports, with the other 2 for SFP28, so up to 52Gbps trunked output… enough to feed a quadruple of 10Gbps clients. Of course, those optical ports need connecting to a good switch. MikroTik has one with 16 SFP28 ports, if I recall correctly. SFP28 ports and transceivers can work at 10Gbps speed, basically being supported in SFP+ cages… Then, those Siena boards can be paired with Siena chips… starting from an 8 core 16 thread units you can scale now or in the future, depending on workloads, up to 64 core 128 thread design of Zen 4c chips, granted running at the efficiency oriented part of the bell curve. Add to that DDR5 RDIMMs support and 6 to 8 slots of those, and you can start small, then bump your platform as needed or as promos happen… Same for the storage and extensions… MCIO or slimSAS ports on boards are great for cable routing, after all most boards support splitting of signals into 4x or 8x SATA or SAS devices. Still, with a couple of MCIOs, you can easily use one or two split to cover spinning rust devices and still have some for bifurcation for NVMe U.2 drives to get better speed out of the NAS. Why is that a great thing? If you ever wanted to do a SATA SSD NAS, you'd be looking into 4TB+ models. Currently, at those capacities, SATA devices cost roughly the same as many cheaper enterprise PCIe3 or PCIe4, often around $20 of difference… for max throughput and iops nearly 5 times higher than the average SATA units… Once those U.2/U.3 drives drop in prices for high capacities, they may become defacto first choice even for homelab and NAS uses. Then, having a board that can easily already support those devices would be great and far easier to sell the idea to your spouses, so the wife-approval factor may be a benefit here as well.
So building NAS on your own you need to differentiate between those with minimal usage scenarios needing something as efficient as possible and those willing to have a platform they can expand in the future per the needs or promos…

Ali Express?, goodbye.

Greetings and thank you for the video! I enjoy your channel.

Looking forward to your video on NAS with ECC memory. I bought a used Lenovo P520 that included 128gb ecc memory and a 2135 XEON for $300 US. The internals are fantastic. The power – ouch – it has a 900 Watt power supply. I bought 6 used 10TB HDD and 2 1TB NVMe drives. I've installed TrueNAS Scale just to play around with it (I'm an old pro on building PCs but a newbie on building NAS and VMs). Wish me luck…and any feedback would be greatly appreciated!

Hey, I have been really struggling to find a NAS to upgrade to. I want to run mostly 4k HDR HEVC content. I play it mostly on my LG G1. And I don't understand HEVC thing, some of that content doesn't run when I play it on the TV off my Plex Server ( currently using a Synology 216+). I have watched quite a few videos but I still can't make an educated purchase.

Can point me to a product? I really want good performance in a small box. A small pc sounds like a good choice but I kind of prefer a NAS, somethign that runs at home 24/7.

Gosh I’ve been looking for weeks now for that N305. It’s a purple unicorn!

Just yesterday I finished building & setting up my first NAS. Went with Gigabyte B550i Aorus Pro paired with Ryzen 7 PRO 4750G, 2x 32 gb ECC, 4x Exos 18X and SN850X, built in Node 304. I think it's quite well balanced home NAS for 2.5 Gbit network.

Power consumpion on Erying? 🤯

@5:44 Ok, that sound is trippy

Since ECC is one of the most important things in a NAS if you value data integrity (which most NAS builders do), maybe you could bring out more prominently which ones support ECC and which ones don't?
And for a list of "best NAS CPU+mobos for NAS" there's very little ECC support among the suggested alternatives.

I’ve been hesitating clicking the buy now on that e612 Xeon board with the 2.5g ports