How a DIY 24TB NAS Became a Private Cloud

Summary

A DIY 24TB NAS can edit 4K footage, stream movies, organize photos, and replace recurring cloud fees—but RAID alone still cannot keep your data safe. Built around three 12TB Western Digital Red Plus drives in RAID5, the system preserves data if one drive fails and delivers approximately 125 to 150mb/s writes and 400 to 500mb/s reads. Its sub-€200 motherboard combines an Intel N150 CPU, a 10 Gbit port, two 2.5 Gbit ports, six SATA ports, and two M.2 slots, while TrueNAS provides the operating system. The build initially used 16GB of RAM, but adding an L2ARC SSD cache exhausted it. Upgrading to 32GB made cached transfers noticeably faster, with more than 17 GB used for cache, while a second SSD accelerated applications and reduced constant hard-drive activity. Moving the operating system to a SATA SSD also freed an M.2 slot. Noise, heat, and power required further tuning. The NAS consumes about 50W, parks its drives after 30 minutes of inactivity, and uses an extra fan plus an open case to lower drive temperatures from around 55 degrees to an average of 44 degrees. Remote access runs through Tailscale rather than exposing files publicly. Most importantly, RAID protects against drive failure, not fire, theft, or physical destruction; truly important data still needs an encrypted off-site backup, plus a UPS for power protection.