Update: budget(200-600), the reason for the build is I found cheap 4tb drives for almost $10/Terabyte. So I want to use as much of them as I can
I am trying to build my final NAS build as a beginner.
I have a 6x4tb dell server, but it’s not enough.
I am currently trying to build the final boss of my nasses. 4x16tb with truenas with raid
I am unsure of what parts to buy as I am a complete beginner.
I found a case that can hold all 14 drives.
I need a motherboard, CPU, ram, PSU
I am on a budget, kind of.
What motherboard do you recommend? Pulled from a workstations with CPU and ram? A server board? Normal consumer with normal consumer CPU? Motherboard should have some pcie slots for 2 sata cards and one 2.5 GB card.
What CPU to run all these drives?
What ram and how much? 16? 32? Ecc, non ecc? Ddr4? Ddr3?
Power supply: 850w or more?
All parts should be able to support the 16 drives with headroom…
I would appreciate any help on this build, I want to build this as soon as possible.
Thanks



ABSOLUTELY ECC memory, 32gb or higher if you can afford it these days as TrueNAS does benefit from a decent cache space, especially with so many drives to spread data slices across.
Realistically unless you expect multiple concurrent users, any 4 core or higher CPU from 2015-on will be plenty of power to manage the array. No need for dedicated server hardware unless the price is right
I have a Dell PowerEdge t3 SOHO/small business server tower that I gutted and turned into a 5x8tb config. It only has a middling 4 core Xeon 1225v5 and I never get above 50% CPU usage when maxing the drives out. More CPU is needed if you’re doing filesystem compression or need multiple concurrent users.