Build your own NAS

If you’re looking to build your own NAS from scratch, then there are two key considerations: chassis size, and power draw. A NAS is designed to be run 24-7, so a low-powered CPU like Intel’s Atom range seems a logical choice. But if you want to use your NAS as a Plex or Jellyfin media server, you need a processor with decent hardware transcoding support. This is where Intel’s Pentium Silver J5040 chip comes into its own: quad-core, with onboard Intel UDH Graphic 605 ensures that the hardware transcoding produces watchable streams, while its miniscule power draw means the chip can be cooled by heatsink alone.

Our server was built around the Asrock J5040-ITX motherboard (pictured above), which comes with the J5040 chip onboard with heatsink. It technically supports up to 8GB RAM, but we successfully installed 16GB, and comes with four SATA ports, one PCIe slot (to which we added a further two SATA ports), and plenty of USB connectors too. We paired this with an InWin IW-MS04 server case ($250) – it has four removable drive bays, plus two internal drive slots, and we placed our 1TB WD Red SSD drive into one of these for running the OS and key services. We then populated two of the four drive bays with existing 6TB and 3TB WD Red drives, which is where our data files – including media collection – is stored.

The build was relatively simple, and we’ll be showcasing this in a future issue.