Building My Own NAS

[jannikscofield]

Hi everyone,
I’m Jannik. A few months ago, I decided to build my own home NAS instead of buying a prebuilt one. What started as a small weekend project has turned into a full-on obsession with drives, RAID levels, file systems, and network speeds.
Here’s what I’ve put together so far:

• Case: Fractal Design Node 304 - compact but fits 6 drives.

• Motherboard/CPU: ASUS B550 + Ryzen 5 5600G (integrated graphics is a life-saver).

• Storage: 4×4TB Seagate IronWolf drives in RAID 5 for now.

• Cache: 500GB NVMe SSD for fast transfers.

• OS: TrueNAS SCALE - after testing Unraid and OpenMediaVault, this one feels the most flexible Pips NYT.

It runs great as a media and backup server, but I’ve been reading about off-site backups and imaging the system drive to protect against hardware failure. That’s where tools like those from TeraByte come in — I’m still exploring the best setup for creating automatic drive images and syncing them to a remote location.
For those who manage their own storage systems or servers at home, what’s your strategy for imaging, redundancy, or disaster recovery?
Do you rely purely on RAID, use imaging software, or combine multiple layers of protection?