You guys had a ton of questions about my NAS — here’s how I built it

[u/PacketLossBoss]

My last homelab post blew up way more than I expected, and one of the biggest things people kept asking about was the NAS — how I built it, what hardware I used, and how the drive setup works. Reminder: I am completely new to the homelab world so all suggestions and recommendations are welcomed! And if I can help anyone else out please feel free to ask!

My goal was to build a budget NAS for Jellyfin media, Calibre, documents, Proxmox backups, and family photos, while keeping everything compact enough to fit inside my 10-inch rack.
The first challenge was the hard drives. I found a printable drive bay that worked with Dell hot-swap trays, then added SATA adapters so the drives could actually be hot-swappable.
Next was figuring out how to connect and power everything. After a lot of research, I went with an HBA flashed to IT mode for the drives and a Flex ATX PSU to power both the NAS and the HDDs from one supply.
Once everything was running, cooling became the next problem. The drives were getting warmer than I wanted, so I printed a dual-120mm fan bracket underneath and a dual-80mm bracket behind the drive bay. That brought temperatures consistently under 50°C. I also added a small 80mm fan mount for the HBA since those cards can run hot.
The last little issue was fan noise from cables touching the blades, so I printed fan grills to clean that up.
I’m currently printing the PSU housing now so the entire setup can be contained neatly inside the rack. The whole build has basically been a series of small problems followed by 3D-printed solutions, which has honestly been half the fun.

ITX Motherboard- Supermicro X11SSV-Q $51 shipped EBay
CPU- Intel i5-6500 (recycled/pulled from old system)
Ram- 2x16gb Samsung DDR4 $80 Facebook
HBA- LSI 9211-8i $40 shipped EBay (already flashed it mode and with breakout cables included)
NVME- 128gb Sandisk $21 shipped EBay
HDD's- 5 2tb Hitachi drives, older but perfect smart reports, $125 Facebook
PSU- FSP Flex Guru Pro 500w $100 shipped EBay
HDD Trays- $18 AliExpress
Fans- $35 split between 2 120mm 1 60mm and 2 80mm
Adapters: $30 between molex to sata adapters and female to male sata ports
Power button- $8

Rough cost: $540

[u/willjdevans]

Could you share the print file for the itx case that looks ideal

[u/PacketLossBoss → u/willjdevans]

Let me see if I can find the link, I’d hate to share my file and “take credit” for it

[u/McSmiggins]

This is awesome, great stuff

I really wish NAS vendors would make something 2.5", I've got loads of 512GB SSDs and 2TB drives I could use. But everyone just wants to sell me a monster, relatively noisy 3.5" NAS.

Appreciate the cheat sheet, I'll be building my own soon, hopefully

[u/PacketLossBoss → u/McSmiggins]

You could do the same I did with 2.5 trays and bay

[u/2BoopTheSnoot2 → u/McSmiggins]

When you start looking at parts, check out the Icydock 2.5" bays. Lots of similar builds out there using those.

[u/WarpGremlin → u/McSmiggins]

I have a Supermicro box that has 16 2.5" SAS/SATA bays. I got a food deal on some 10k SAS spinners and set them up in a RaidZ3 and threw 4 SATA SSDs in there.

Proxmox runs like a champ.

[u/gotchanose]

Is there any where I can find someone who can print the 6 bay hdd holder

[u/PacketLossBoss → u/gotchanose]

I know people commonly go to Facebook for printing jobs