Disclaimer: I am by no mean a professional. I am just doing this for fun and enjoy learning along the way (I probably still don’t know anything 🤣). These are not meant as a guide and should not be treated as such. What I am showing you here is what I did, and it worked for me and my situation but might not apply to you. Your result could be very different from mine. Heck, I could be doing or saying something entirely wrong since I’m still considering myself a newbie (Hence the name of my site “noob to networking” 😉). Please don’t take a random person’s words on the internet too seriously, and again, ALWAYS and I mean always do your own research (Well, take this one seriously, though).

Meet Ultima; this beauty is the first NAS (Network-attached storage) I built back in late 2019, early 2020. Counting the time, it has been 2 years since I started learning about networking, home-lab, and self-hosted. I felt like I learned quite a lot, but at the same time, I felt like I didn’t know anything and still had no idea what I was doing🤷‍♂️.

Truth be told, I would never have started getting into networking if it wasn’t for my decision to build my own NAS and install Unraid on it. You might be wondering, what is Unraid? Unraid is an operation system, same as Window, but this is based on the Linux operating system and is mainly used as the operating system for NAS. If you are worried about being new to Linux and afraid of command lines, I have some good news for you. Unraid is very user-friendly, and mostly, you don’t have to do much using the command lines; why else do you think I would be using it otherwise 😜. I was and still am a newbie (noob) through and through. If I have to pick between using the command line, which would be way faster, more efficient, and the GUI (graphic user interface), I would take the graphic every time without fail 😉.

Since I know some of you are just as much of a noob (no offense) as I am, I can go over the detail and explain about NAS, Unraid, and what I did to install it on my NAS. Again, this isn’t a tutorial of any kind, so please do not treat it as such. Here is the list for each section I will be going over. Why? Because I have the attention span of a goldfish so maybe breaking it up will help get the point across without me confusing myself, plus it will be a bit more organized 😲. Crazy! Right? I know, I know I’m just trying to be organized for once, okay.

• Why do I need a Network Attached Storage (NAS)?
• Why Unraid?
• How did I install Unraid? (on a new machine for demonstration purposes)
• The most important feature of Unraid that got me into networking.

Why do I need a Network Attached Storage (NAS)?

So where were we? Right, Let’s first talk about NAS or Network Attached Storage. So what exactly is a NAS, you ask? As the name suggests, it is storage that you can connect to and store data. I’m sure you have used a hard drive or SSD before, so when you installed that into your computer, you see the drive showed up. You can store data on it such as documents, movies, pictures, your 8K corn collection…. the possibility is endless…of course, within the drive capacity. A NAS is simply a computer with storage devices (hard drive, SSDs) installed and configured to act as 1 big storage drive using raid technology (Which I will not detail). It was able to share its storage with other computers in the same network to access the data on the NAS. It served the same function as a storage drive but was better because you don’t need to plug it into your computer physically. As long as your computer connects to the same private home network, you can access data on your NAS. Pretty convenient if you ask me.

So if a NAS is so convenient, why didn’t I get a NAS sooner and not wait until 2020? That is a good question, it is indeed convenient, but that might not be for everyone. I mean, not everyone would want a NAS set up to have a dedicated device to store data because most people believe they don’t have that anything important they want to save anyways. At the time, I feel like I usually don’t have anything I deem necessary enough that I have to keep. If I need to back up something, I have a trusty external hard drive for that😉. Another one of the reasons is that I was broke at the time (still am, though), well not to the point where it affects my daily life, but I do not have a lot of disposable income for something nice to have but not a need to have storage solutions. Let me tell you, NAS is not cheap.

I used my external hard drive to store some “important” files I wanted to keep, mainly some documents. I think a 2TB capacity is more than enough to hold everything an average person such as myself would need. It would probably be a solution that most people would go with. It was just a simple plug-and-play, and it served the basic function. As time goes on and my situation gets better, that can afford me some income at my disposal (not by much, though). I can afford to spend some on quality of life and what it would be nice to have. When I started to build another PC, and there was a need to transfer large files between computers, I found the task of moving back and forth took some effort. Not to mention I have to plug it back in every time I want to access some of the files (which I was starting to use more frequently), prompting me to look into another solution. I know it is a first-world problem since it doesn’t take that much time to use the external drive, but well, I just couldn’t nack of the feeling of wanting for more. That feeling kept persisting, and around December of 2019, I decided maybe it was time to retire my external hard drive and look for a NAS.

At first, my plan was going for a commercial solution, so I searched for all the ready-made NAS such as Synology or QNAP. The problem is that they are so underpowered specs-wise. I understand that NAS is supposed to be a low-power PC, so they went with that design in mind. However, as a self-proclaim “PC hardware enthusiast” (a poor one), I found it hard to swallow the underpowered specifications of the NAS for the amount of money it cost. Don’t get me wrong, I am cheap, and that is true, but I also care about bang for the buck. Sometimes I would not hesitate to spend more on a piece of hardware just because I believe I get a better value. I shall not bash the pre-made NAS’s specification, but you can take a look and draw the conclusion on your own. The only saving grace is that their software is good and has customer support. Again, because I am cheap and my time is worth next to nothing, am I right? 🤪 Therefore, why not build my own NAS? And that was precisely what I did. I had no idea where this rabbit hole would lead me, but I am glad I did.

Here is the breakdown cost for Ultima:

• Motherboard: ASRock Faltal1ty B450 ITX motherboard. I got this one at a microcenter for pretty decent price ($70). Amazon affiliated link HERE
• CPU: I went with Ryzen 3 3200G, it is a 4 cores 4 threads. This is a fairly budget CPU at around $85 but it still way more powerful than all the commercial solution. Amazon affiliated link HERE . Though I don’t know why the price for this CPU is crazy on amazon so if you want an alternative you can go with the AMD Athlon 3000G, less powerful but still able to served the purpose and you can always upgrade it down the line. Amazon affiliated link HERE.
• RAM: Of course I wouln’t want to settle for low memory so I spend about $65 on 16GB of Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4. Amazon affiliated link HERE
• Storage: I deicded to go with 256GB of Silicon Power NVME SSD mainly because the price is not too bad at only $35. Amazon affiliated link HERE. Of course, the main function of a NAS is a connect all the hard drives. But hard drive isn’t cheap, especially for a high capacity one so I bite the bullet and bought 2 of 6TB Seagate Ironwoft NAS drive for the total of $300. Crazy right? the drives themself could cost more that the PC portion. Amazon affiliated link HERE
• Chassis: I managed to find a NAS case for around $110 that included the power supply. It is a ChenBro SR301 that has 4 bays for 4 3.5 inches hard drives. and it is hot-swapable. For the price I feel this case is good choice. It hard to find it right now but there is a Newegg link HERE
• Graphic card: This is the latter upgrade once I got used to the NAS and the application. I got the Quadro P400 from a seller on Ebay for $65. I use it for Plex transcoding, of course at the time I don’t even know what Plex or anything networking related 😅. Amazion affiliated link HERE
• Operating system: I went with Unraid operating system. At first I just want to try out since I am totally new to NAS and I read some reviews about the operating system. I decided to get the trial version and did not expect I would love it so much that I purchased the basic licenese for it for $59. It totally changed how I view computer and networking and spark my interested into the home-lab route. Link for Unraid is on their website at Unraid.net or HERE (if you are too lazy to even type it the URL)
• USB flash drive: If you don’t know, Unraid does not installed on an internal drives like most operating system, it is in fact installed on a USB flash drive and the license is linked to the USB flash drive ID. Since this will always be plug into the NAS, I want it to be small so I decided to go with SanDisk Ultra Fit 32GB. This cost me around $10. Amazon affiliated link HERE

This is how the built to come out to be:

Due to the configuration of my NAS, I have selected to use one of my 6TB drives to be a parity drive. What is a parity drive, you ask? One of the Unraid features allows you to set aside a drive to act as a checker and ensure your data integrity. So as long as only 1 drive happens to die (at one time), you will be able to recover your data if you want to read more about it. I will have the link to Unraid’s wiki right HERE. So in total, my NAS capacity is around 14TB (6 + 4 + 4), and it cost me about $480 on just the drives alone. That is crazy, huh? Who knows, hard drives would cost that much. The good thing about Unraid is that you can slowly add more drives (within the license limit) as time go on, so you don’t need to shell out tons of money in one go.

The total cost to build Ultima comes to around $500, not including the hard drives. This is relatively competitive on how much you would be spending on a ready-made solution. I would even say you probably get more power for the amount you spend, so it is a win in my book. Of course, you must understand what you are doing and don’t mind tinkering around with the hardware. Still, it is fun in a way, and you learned a lot more about your system and developed valuable skills. However, I also understand that not anyone is interested in tech or has the time to build the system yourself and just wants something that works right out of the box. With that being said, I am glad that I started on this and built my own NAS. As I look back now, I still feel that it was one of the best decisions I had made that changed the course of my life. It brought me a lot of fun when everything worked out and frustrations when something did not work or was just straight-up broken. But overall, it has been a delightful journey, one I would hope for any beginner interested in tech, computers, and networking to experience as we learn along the way.

Since I am running out of time and this post has to be up by today somehow (I created a rule for myself to publish a post by Monday). I blamed my procrastination 😁. I have decided to split the posts into multiple parts (not sure how many, but it would probably be 2). I will have a button at the bottom of the page to link to Part 2 (when I get around to doing it)

I shall make some fun challenges for you guys in the post as an apology. I hid a $5 Amazon gift card somewhere in this short post. It should be effortless for you to find it. However, you might want to decode it since I wouldn’t want to make things too easy now, am I 😈. Here is the hint:

Look out for the bold since they aren’t afraid of taking risks

The numbers remain while the alpha making the move

XMAS is coming and it would be JYME

Fourteen is the number you should found 😉

Laz, Second challenge.

Good luck and have fun.