as tech nerds and geeks we got a lot of
problems in our lives like fighting for
the right to repair our technology
finding the right charging cable for a
specific device or figuring out if
running a raw dog ethernet cable through
your living room is worth not having to
use wi-fi on your gaming rig but none of
it even holds a candle at least in my
book to trying to figure out how to
store all my freaking data without
having to add to the never-ending mess
of monthly subscriptions we're all
expected to pay now you could go with a
pre-built nas from someone like qnap
throw a few hard drives in there but the
problem is that those things are
expensive usually not upgradeable or
serviceable they're pretty much single
purpose and worst of all that would just
be too easy right
what if i told you there was a better
way it's stylish fully serviceable and
upgradable and you get the fun of
building it yourself and best of all in
the config we're going to show you today
it is actually cheaper than a pre-built
dang
this is the johnsbow n1 a shoebox sized
case that can hold up to 100 terabytes
of hard drive based storage
holy
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[Music]
from the outside the johnsville n1 looks
like your average itx case it's small
but not crazy small with lots of venting
and minimal but still usable front i o
it can be configured to lie flat or
stand upright with little feet that come
included and the outside unibody shell
just slides off to give you full access
to the inside chassis
look at that oh
this is such a basic approach to making
a sata backplane look there's just
discrete
sata plugs for all five of the drives
here but it's kind of elegant in its
simplicity like the rest of the case
it's maybe not the nicest build quality
i've ever seen in these sort of niche
small manufacturer chassis but it's only
126 bucks on aliexpress with the
included storage backplane that handles
up to five hard drives if you factor
that in it's like it's a pretty darn
compelling deal isn't it before we go
over the rest of our parts though let's
talk budget our plan was to see if we
could build up a rig cheaper than the
equivalent synology 5-bay nas the
ds-1520 plus they're currently out of
stock seemingly everywhere anyway but
the price to be is 700 u.s on the dot if
we could buy it and that's totally
achievable starting with our motherboard
we went rog for the motherboard yeah
jake kate itx motherboard there's not a
lot of options okay we blew 200 on our
motherboard but it's for a pretty good
reason here it's got dual m.2 slots so
we can put a cache ssd in one of them
and then a sata hba so we can expand our
four onboard sata ports it's still
actually available new you know we could
have said oh go buy a used board and you
could definitely shave some of your
budget that way but motherboards tend to
be one of the more likely components in
a system to die and when it comes to
storage
we want this thing to just work we don't
want to screw around it also has two and
a half gig lan and because it's amd b550
based we're gonna start with the lower
end chip but we've actually got a ton of
room for upgrades into the future
now let's actually get that i o port
card installed now since we're
definitely gonna need it
so
oh
i've already dropped it like six times
good oh geez
wow it's still it's still good i expect
you to go hard on it totally fine i
might produce a hundred thousand units
of something that's not good there's a
cover on the top m.2 here you can see
you can install anything from a 2242 so
it's a 42 millimeter to a 60 millimeter
to an 80 millimeter m.2 we are going to
use the 42 millimeter mounting
look at how cute it is here one quick
thing to note is that this little
daughter board
once you remove the heatsink there's
nothing holding it into place here you
see that so we are just going to
pop that connector back in and then
we're going to take one of the screws
that held the heat sink on and we're
going to take the shorter one we're
going to put it right here
there you go now this daughter board is
held in place so we're all good
with that out of the way we're going to
flip over the board and install our
first bit of storage now it should be
noted that just like if you were buying
a bare bones nas the storage is not
factored into the budget so we chose a
32 gig octane ssd because these things
are dirt cheap on ebay while they're not
super high bandwidth they're really low
latency and really high endurance so in
a cache application they're a really
cheap way to get sort of an enterprise
dna product into your very very consumer
diy solution for our cpu we've elected
to go with a ryzen 3 3100 while you can
buy these brand new still we would
strongly recommend trying to find one
second hand as cpus
generally outlast the
vast majority of your other components
and are a pretty safe bet to buy used we
got this one for 120 us dollars on ebay
but they can be had for as little as a
hundred dollars if you're willing to
take your time make sure if you buy it
used that it comes with the stock cooler
though because that's gonna wipe out a
lot of your savings if you have to go
out and buy an aftermarket cooler
as for ram to match the synology we're
trying to beat we only need eight gigs
of memory but since prices are decent
right now we were able to fit 16 gigs of
3600 mega transfer per second g-skill
rip jaws into our budget if you're a
hardcore user you may even want to go
higher with up to 32 gigs of ram for
even better performance since this will
get used as a caching layer for our hard
drives thanks to zfs it's 64. for this
kit right now here things get a little
bit complicated though the power supply
we spec was evga's gm 550 watt sfx which
we had for 80 at the time of filming
unfortunately evga didn't have stock so
our stand in is the 650 watt version of
the same power supply it's fully modular
it fits in the case and is a really
great value however
it's a bit overkill when it's not on
sale so i'd recommend shopping around to
see if there's a cheaper option if
you're planning to replicate our build
now it's pretty much build time the
first thing we're going to do is plug in
the power to our backplane odds are that
it would actually run with just one of
these molex connectors in it that that
would be like out of spec probably so
what i think i'm gonna do is i'm gonna
take the first one in the chain of four
plug that in there
then i'm gonna damn the rest of it in
there and then take the last one and go
right here and the reason for this is
that this has to stay super low profile
because this right here is the rail that
lets this inner piece slide into the
outer shell so you can't just have a
bunch of extra bulk sitting here this is
a really important note because of that
same issue where we want to make sure
that we don't have any clearance
problems while we're sliding this into
the outer case we only want to use
90 degree or a right angle sata cables
in the back plane here otherwise
you've got a high profile straight
connector coming out of here you're
going to rip this connector right off
the pcb and
see you later back please not warranty
oh does it say right on the sticker yeah
we are not liable get wrecked that is a
nice looking fan
i like that definitely got some static
pressure behind that bad boy i mean i
guess you need it if you're gonna have
just one fan cooling the entire
column of computer behind it
oh i guess i need to put this sata ssd
in place look at that it's so cute it
just goes right there for those of you
wondering why we even need this drive
it's for our operating system and we've
chosen to go with truenets which is a
free solution not to say that it's the
only solution unraid would be another
valid one it's got some advantages i'd
say it's easier to handle virtualization
easier to handle docker containers gpu
passthrough is really easy you could mix
and match your drives but for us because
we're getting all new drives and we're
populating the whole thing today
it didn't make sense your mileage may
vary as for why we used this drive
it was cheap
um
many storage os's actually both trunaz
and unraid included are not going to go
out of their way to hit your os drive
because there's no reason for them to so
it basically is like read only media
almost
now
time to put our hard drives in and jake
claims this is going to be really hard
yeah it's too bad you completely skipped
the part you were supposed to do what
happened there's sliders for them why is
that not going in there's sliders no i
don't believe you oh good it's in oh
oh my god they don't warranty the
backplane damn it all right you're right
these do look like a bit of a chore
those bars are like the top handles i
get it and then you're supposed to put
two of the little dots on the bottom
yeah and then sliders on the top i see
it i see it
that's a pretty
see it slides in even if they're tight
pretty nice mount i i didn't put them in
all the way i left them a little bit
here i'll put mine in all the way and
you can try it sure
i'm gonna put this one backwards this
part's a little bit tricky
no so you see if you've if you run your
cables
across here you can see there's a bit of
a clearance issue you're just jamming it
down there right damn it
yeah just send it button that's pretty
borderline oh oh what was that that was
a good um good noise yeah you told me to
send it i mean it sent hold on it's
gonna light up the thing i just got it
oh geez oh geez oh geez okay and we got
to do this tick tock
so what is it i gotta put it in and say
oh my god i can't i can't hold it okay
it's too heavy
let's go oh my god
oh wait why isn't it going in oh oh can
you get the other side for me please
let's go oh did i do it too late why
didn't it close all the way oh because
there's a cable in there hard drives in
there too
oh crap i can't run the eight pin here
oh shoot it interferes oh yeah um oh
balls you have to put it around the side
yeah i see that i could have told you
that ah well you didn't
this thing is freaking so cool
the key night amongst you might have
already realized we're gonna have a bit
of a problem when we go to install our
os because we don't have a display
output this is not an apu now there's a
couple of options we could have built
this system up on a box first like the
motherboard box and slotted in an extra
gpu we had and installed the os that
probably is the best option for most
people if you have a riser laying around
you could also just kind of slap that in
there and put the gpu in that way but if
you don't have that what you probably
have is an extra computer so we're going
to take our boot drive and just throw it
in this test bench acting as our other
computer and install the os on there
setup process is pretty easy hit install
we're going to select our 120-ish gig
kingston drive hit okay proceed with
install yes
ah
it's done we don't even need that much
movie magic it only took a few minutes
okay it says to remove the usb so let's
just do that yeah okay i'll put the
drive back in properly with my handy
dandy screwdriver
oh there we go beauty since we did the
installing the other computer we're not
going to immediately get the ip of what
the system is going to get assigned
we're going to have to go into our
router's dhcp reservation list to figure
out what that is you can also use tools
like angry ip scanner and you can look
for trunas if you don't have that many
devices on your network or if you know
the mac address of the ethernet port on
the board you can actually just look it
up that way too it looks like it's
booting though we're in truenast now so
you're going to be logging in with the
root user and whatever password you set
in the install you can see we got our
it's loading there we go we got our four
core processor 16 gigabytes of ram let's
make sure all our storage is detected if
you didn't slide in the drives properly
or one of your sata cables came loose or
something like that but it looks like we
got one two three four five
and then our 32 gig nvme now that we've
verified all of our storage is working
we can go ahead and set up an array now
depending on the hardware you have what
you do here is going to change if you
only have like two hard drives for now
you might want to set it up as a mirror
and that basically is kind of like a
raid one if you have anything more than
two hard drives you're going to be
moving up to raid z which depending on
the amount of drives you might only be
able to use a specific type but there's
raid z1 2 and 3 and those give you one
two three respective drives worth of
failure before you lose data since we
have five drives we could do any of
these options but i'm going to stick
with braid z1 because that's going to
give us the most capacity because
remember if you go to raid z2 or 3
you're losing two or three drives worth
of capacity respectively dev it's
actually recommending by default we do a
z2 but i'm going to do
z1 since we have an nvme drive in there
we're also going to create a cache vdev
and we can just click it and bring it
down there this type of cache vdf acts
kind of like a read cache to expand the
ram cache that we have with zfs which is
called arc so this is level two arc
let's put a name on here i'm going to
call it lambo and look at that
43.65 tippy bites if you use these discs
for anything else they're getting wiped
right now so make sure you don't have
anything on them
we got a z pool look at that i'm gonna
check the status just really quick let's
see we got one two three four five and
our cash drive everything looks to be
working now to make this storage
accessible on other computers your phone
whatever we're going to have to first
set up a data set it's kind of like a
folder but a folder that you can set
custom settings on and then we're also
going to set up an smb share that's the
protocol that microsoft uses to share
files over the network it's pretty easy
to do that we'll just click under our z
pool and go
add a data set i'm going to call it
zumba or goomba
zedfast has a built-in compression
system that basically just automatically
compresses anything you write and
decompresses anything you read from the
array which
depending on which option you select and
what you're writing can actually make
your storage speeds faster if you have
enough cpu now with the quad core
hard to say but i'm just going to leave
it on the default lz4 compression which
is very fast and then we're just going
to set the share type to smb because
it's going to be an smb share
if you're using oh time machine you
might want apple specific settings but
we're just going to hit save
and then go to shares click add
select the path lambo goomba
and hit save it's going to prompt you to
start the service that's actually like
the smb server it's not running by
default so just hit ok on that i
actually forgot a step here we need to
create a user to be able to access it i
think by default it won't let you use
the root user just for security reasons
so we'll add a user we'll just call it
jake
jake and we can set the password to one
two three four
cool
type in our ip again here
and then jake and one two three four
and look at that storage okay i'm
actually going to map this as a network
drive so we can see how much storage and
just like that 43.4 terabytes we've got
our 2.5 gig unified switch this thing's
pretty sick we've got our share set up
we're all connected i've verified that
it is actually running at 2.5 gig and
we've got a little test file here
280 megabytes per second that's sick and
to think that this is still cheaper than
an off-the-shelf nas and you've got
upgrade ability you can slot a 10 gig
card in there you still have the nvme
port
you could do anything you want with this
thing you could put a 16 core cpu in it
and it would still work just as good you
could put vms on it whatever you want i
think this is seriously one of the
coolest little like server storage
things we've done in a long time i just
wanted to take a quick look at the array
now that we've copied something to it
and you can see our compression ratio
right there is 1.02 that means we've
saved two percent of this storage space
of this whatever 11 and a half gigabyte
file doing nothing let's say you were to
copy over a bunch of photos and
documents that you had on your computer
like you're using this as a backup you
could easily expect to save 10 20 30
of that capacity automatically and
completely transparently to you if we
even look on this file you can actually
see look
size 10.9 gigabytes size on disk 10.7 so
we've saved 200 megabytes doing
literally nothing
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if you like this video and you like
servery true nasty stuff maybe check out
the new delta 5 new new vault
vault 3 build that we just did that's a
pretty good one you could also maybe
check out the video about how we're lost
some data
how we're lost some data did you just
lose some words i lost some words