Google nagged me into this, alongside alongside all another enshittified haze provider dealer. For concerning a year, my phone warned me that the document was nearly full, so I migrated the image backups to a Nextcloud case and freed the space, at which item the nagging switched to reminding me that backups were turned off. Gmail does the identical and provides helpful "Upgrade" buttons current and there. I do not desire to rent area for my own pictures for the remainder of my life, and I certainly do not desire Google looking at them either. I wanted a location to keep the family's files, an automatic backup for years of pictures that were living on phones and ageing PCs, and a device that could download Linux ISOs about the clock without anyone noticing. I idea I wanted a NAS, so I built one.
An Old Friend
Let's be honest, it's been increasingly insane to buy computers in the final few years, GPUs especially. Fortunately, all device I always bought had a GPU (you never cognize whenever you'll need that sweet, saccharine accelerated matrix multiplication), and it turned out I had fair the device for the job.
Enter the Zotac MAGNUS EN1070K, a compact box alongside an i5 and a fine old GTX 1070. It spent a few years as the living area media centre and occasional gaming rig. I used the identical example in robot prototypes, anywhere it did great. It idles low, it transcodes video on the GPU, and it runs a small local example without complaining.
The issue is that Zotac designed it to clasp a sole 2.5" drive. So I designed an extension for its build in Onshape, printed it in glass-filled ABS, and bolted it on. Inside are an ICY Dock five-bay hot-swap cage, a printed holder for a sixth drive, a Pico PSU fed from the Zotac's upgraded 19.5 V masonry block through a DC-DC converter (six drives spinning up at formerly drag concerning 125 W for a concise moment), and Noctua fans to move the air. The six SATA ports arrive from an ASM1166 adapter in the M.2 slot, which is why the 1 TB footwear SSD lives in the 2.5" bay now.
The remainder of the upgrade came out of my junk drawers. Two DDR4 sticks from an old laptop obtain the recollection to the phase maximum of 32 GB, an SSD I had lying about boots it, and a WiFi cardstock from a former project replaces the first one. The lone parts I paid for were the cage, the adapter, and, much to my dismay, the drives.
The Hard Way
It's 2026, and I bought six difficult disk drives. I did not desire to; I idea we were former mechanically spinning storage. SSDs at this capacity, if you can discover them, volition disbursal you a brace of kidneys. For a NAS, the cost per TB matters a lot; I did my finest to keep it as low as practical. Don't get me wrong, difficult drives are not cheap either. AI data centres are purchasing all drive, all recollection chip, and all GPU the fabs can make: Western Digital's difficult run manufacturing is sold out for all of 2026, DRAM and NAND agreement prices nearly doubled in a sole quarter, and the remainder of us get what is remaining at any price. There's a fit market for second-hand NAS drives on eBay, and I was capable to snatch a matched set of 8 TB WD Red Plus at a sensible price.
They're in a sole RAIDZ2 pool: 43.7 TB raw, 29 TB usable, any two drives can die without taking data alongside them. I tested this by pulling a run out of the live pool. Reads and writes kept going, Samba kept serving, an vigilant landed in my mailbox a few seconds later, and whenever I pushed the run rear in it resilvered on its own. It's difficult to overstate how satisfying that is whenever nothing is really on fire.
Because it's me, the pond is encrypted and unlocks itself at footwear from a key server elsewhere in the house, so person stealing this would get fairly a dense paperweight: the device weighs 8.5 kg on its own, and complete 10 kg formerly you figure the 300 W masonry block that replaced the original.
Only Fans
Time for a hot topic: the thermals are bad. The customary alloy case conducts warmth out of the drives during my printed one insulates them. Five of the six bays sit at 45 °C idle, ten degrees complete the ideal, and the dashboard warns me concerning it all day. I iterated on the chamber a brace of times and added additional fans; things are a bit improved but motionless steamy. One pleasant finding is that Noctua fans are certainly quiescent and fine crafted.
Luckily, winter is coming, so I have several period to tinker alongside it.
Eye Candy
I could have stopped here, slapped an OS on it, and moved on. But I wanted more. Specifically, to test alongside engaging UIs. Given that this device is not meant to be connected to a big screen, I figured it would be a fine chance to do item radically different: I connected a small screen.
I'm too arrogant of this 1.47" contact screen on the front. It's driven by an ESP32-S3 that I soldered to the pads of among the Zotac's USB connectors (the EN1070K has no inner USB header). The NAS streams its position to it complete serial, and the firmware, written in C alongside LVGL, renders seven screens you rub through: pond health, run temperatures, app status, network throughput, and so on. It goes to sleep following a during and wakes on touch. Walking former the machine, I can see at a glance what's going on without picking up another device. Plus, it looks sleek.
The final display is a power menu, so I can close the device downward or reboot it from the forefront panel. It comes alongside the obligatory menacing countdown in case I alter my intellect at the final second.
The Truth concerning TrueNAS
Going into this, I watched a lot of YouTubers propose TrueNAS for their builds and tout its many features. Naively, I believed them and assumed I would be capable to use the apparently ideal NAS distro. What a disappointment.
The NAS lives far from the router and there's no wired association available, so it runs on WiFi (I know, shame!). This disturb me small than I expected: the WiFi 6E cardstock negotiates complete what either of the box's gigabit ports could pass, and I measured 893 Mbit/s of genuine net through it.
What this did regulation out, to my surprise, was TrueNAS. It has no wireless assistance at all, not in the UI or the console. Its latest publish additionally dropped the proprietary NVIDIA controller in favor of the open kernel modules, which do not assistance a Pascal GPU, so the 1070 would have been a deceased importance too. Beyond the two difficult blockers, I was disappointed by how small it lets you do: it's an appliance, and it wants you to remain out of the basis system. Even my display daemon, which talks complete /dev/ttyACM0, would be clumsy to run.
So the NAS runs Kubuntu 24.04 alongside ZFS, everything alternatively in Docker Compose rearward Caddy, and a dashboard I wrote myself: one page, amber on dreary to echo the box itself. It shows the complete position of the hardware and services. It's the portal to all the NAS features. The JSON that feeds the dashboard is the identical one that gets serialized and sent to the ESP32 (keeping the two UIs in accord alongside a sole origin of truth). There's additionally an Actions API to trigger things akin backups and speed tests. In the end, this far exceeds the functionality of any NAS dashboard I'm conscious of.
The apps all get their own hostname alongside TLS, and the entire item is a git repo alongside create targets that lint and test the create files, the systemd units, the Python, the C, and the docs. I'm gradually turning this into its own OS, and I'll portion it whenever it's presentable.
That Which We Call a NAS
What's in a name? NAS is an outdated one. Sure, it's retention attached to a network, but this box additionally serves media, indexes photos, runs the password manager, hosts the household's git repos, keeps the backups, and downloads the ISOs. It's the household's computer, much akin a home has a furnace and a h2o heater. This is what I really wanted; unfortunately, it doesn't have a punchy abbreviated name (yet!).
I've been moving distant from the clouds for a during now, and this is my biggest stage yet. Everything I put on this device is mine, stays anywhere I can see it, and does not depend on a subscription, a terms-of-service update, or a business deciding my photos pertain to its training set. The quota warnings have stopped, too. I anticipate family computers to rotate into the norm: they provision us ownership of our own data, permanence, and independence, and most of us already have the hardware, idle in a drawer.
