My 8TB NVMe, DDR5 10Gbe HomeLab NAS Build

Phew, it’s finally here! I have spoken about building a new Homelab NAS (to store all my video content) in a few previous videos, but here is the full build and OS setup. I decided to roll a Windows 11 and Debian 12 dual boot, but Debian will be the primary OS.

Because I kept having to juggle all my media files (videos for YouTube) across a range of devices, and also kept running out of disk space, I decided to build this centralized Homelab system and do all my video editing over the network instead. This means that I need super-fast IO. As a result this build has a 10 Gigabit Ethernet card (the Intel X540-T4), and two gen 4 M.2 NVMe SSDs – both of which have 4 TB capacity.

I also debated what platform to go with a LOT for this build – I was originally planning a cheap AM4 based system with a 3200G Ryzen CPU or similar, butin the end I went with AM5/DDR5for future proofing reasons – and because DDR5-based motherboards often have more M.2 slots.

I show off the full build and NAS set-upin this video.

If you prefer text over video, please read on for the guide/transcript version of this video.

Video Transcript And Guide

Hey everyone! The wait is finally over. As I’ve mentioned in a few of my previous videos, I ran out of disk space completely due to all the video content I’m producing for you lovely people. I’m really enjoying that, but I realized that I basically need a second computer to put all my media content on. Then I can use that as a network drive on my workstation PC and my laptop (and anywhere else) and use it for my video editing. In other words, this is going to be a NAS.

I’ll put it down so you can see. I kind of need to squat down to show myself and the computer components, but I’m going to be doing the build somewhere else – I’m not going to be squatting for the entire video!

Parts Run Through

To discuss why I’ve actually chosen the components I have: I was originally going to go with a cheaper AM4-based motherboard and a cheap CPU like the 3200G, which would have cost me around £110 in total. But I realized that because I’m doing lots of video editing, I want the fastest possible home networking. So, I’ve decided to get a 10 Gb network card I bought on eBay for like £25 or something like that.

What I’m going to be doing then is putting all of my media on M.2 NVMe drives. I already have just over 1 TB of video files for this particular channel, and that’s going to grow quite quickly. So I didn’t want to just get a motherboard with one M.2 slot, as I’d only have 4 TB of usable space, which didn’t seem very sensible. That’s why I went for this particular motherboard – even though it’s Micro ATX, it contains three M.2 NVMe slots, which is going to be really good.

The CPU itself isthe Ryzen 7600,which has 6 cores. It’s pretty overkill for a home NAS build, but I might use this as a server in the future, so I wanted that future-proofing option.

The RAM itself is the cheapest possible DDR5 stick I could buy. I found it on Amazon for like £19 in a sale. It’s 4,800 MHz speed CL 40, which is super slow, but it was cheap. As I said, I don’t want to pay £100 for a RAM bundle when all I’m doing on this is storing loads of video content and then streaming it over the network.

In terms of the power supply unit, I’ve gone for the RM750e from Corsair, which is just for future-proofing really. I don’t actually need this much power – the TDP of this build is way less than what I get from the power supply unit, but at least I’ve got those future-proofing options if I do get a separate graphics card in the future.

In terms of my storage, my NVMe drive is still on back order. It should appear in the next day or two, and then I’ll put it in this build. But for now, I’ve just got this SATA SSD, which is where I’m going to put my operating systems. I’m going to probablydual-boot Debian and Windows 11to begin with, although I’llprobably roll with Debian completely at some point. That’s why I’ve got this – so that I can easily reformat it if needed and keep all my media storage and my video files untouched on my NVMe drives.

In terms of the case, it’s a really small Micro ATX case. The reason I went for it is that I have limited space in the corner of my study where I’m actually going to be putting this case. So I decided that this is probably going to be the best case to go for, just because it’s really, really small and compact.

That pretty much wraps everything up. I’ve got my computer parts, I’ve got my self-confidence (or whatever’s left of it), and I’ve got a nice cup of coffee. So, let’s just get started with the build!

Starting The Build

Okay, so I’m going to start off obviously outside of the case, and then I’ll put things inside the case, which is going to be fun because it’s such a small case. Just go off that. What these… they got all these little… Look at that! They give me the screws in each individual plastic bag. That’s awful. That’s literally one standoff. Why have they done that? So that’s five different bits of plastic. Just… I don’t know why they’ve done that.

Okay, got SATA cable, I got manual, whatever, and I’ve got the actual motherboard itself. So let’s open that up.

Okay, so quite a good amount of heat sinks actually on this particular build. It has got an M.2 armor slot for an NVMe drive. I’m just going to remove that completely because I don’t have the NVMe drive right now, but I will do in the next day or two.

So, got my RAM. I’m literally just going to be using one RAM stick as I mentioned before and put it in the second slot just slightly further away from the heat sink. It’s just the right way around, isn’t it? No, it’s not. Nope. See, if you’ve never installed RAM before, you need to make sure that the little notch lines up with a little notch here. Otherwise, things could break. Other than that, let you just make sure it’s in the slot. Push down as much you can. So… that… so here… click… yes… ready… up… there we are. I always hate the RAM stick just ’cause you see the board actually flex, but that’s a good amount of force without again too much. So that’s my RAM stick in.

The next thing then is obviously going to be the actual CPU. Oh, this is the bit I hate. So I’ve got the little triangle, and I’m going to make sure that the little triangle matches up with the other triangle, which for some reason I can’t see. It’s up there. There we are. I couldn’t see that. It’s up there.

So here we go. Kind of makes sense. Put there. Brilliant. Okay, so that is the CPU in there. I always hate doing that bit. Put that down, put this back on, and it should cover… should come on. That’s quite a nice design. I like the fact that that cover comes off.

Quite funny looking build this. It has literally just got a single RAM stick, and then it’s got the CPU. Oh, that didn’t come out too easily. Right. Excellent. Okay, so that’s come off, and I can just put the heat sink on now.

The question is, which way should I… um… it? I think often people say to do that way, but then my cable is going to be sticking out that way. I’m wondering whether I should do it this way because… yeah, that cable is going to be easy to hide then. I think… um… probably clip it into the CPU power supply cable. Yeah, I’ll probably do that.

Okay, so let me put this on. I’m not going to screw in… anyone… screw in all the way. I’m going to actually make sure that this is in first. That’s all there is to it with the heat sink. It’s literally just that. Make sure it’s not too tight. You certainly don’t want to come along and put insane amounts of force into it or anything like that. Yeah, that’s absolutely fine.

So that’s there. I can pick up motherboard now with a heat sink. I’ll be meant to do that, but I do it ’cause I’m a mad lad. Right, so I’m going to plug that in. I can always plug this back out if needed, but that’s going to be my CPU fan going in there. How… switch… I think it might be that one, but not completely sure. So let’s try it and let’s have a look.

Initial Boot-up Test

So the power switch is over here. I’m just going to turn this on. Yes, it works! That’s a good sign. And I’m going turn on off again. Brilliant. Great. There we are. So that’s gone off again. Brilliant. That actually works, and I now know that that’s the power header. That’s good.

So now if I get HDMI cable, which I got lying around, I should see this actually boot up, which is cool. Let’s go in… are… graphics. So I can just plug it in and go from there.

So why is that not showing anything? Is it ’cause I don’t have a keyboard? No… Oh yes! Yes! Oh brilliant! There we are. So that is my… my RAM with 8 gigs super slow RAM. That is my motherboard, and that’s brilliant. That’s all I need. So now I can put this inside my super small case. Thank you very much. That’s a good milestone to reach.

Putting Inside Case

Okay, so I’m again… the motherboard in the case. As I mentioned before, it is going to be a bit of a tight fit. Um… what standoffs do I have? I’m going to need to add more standoffs, aren’t I? So I’m going to put… I got 1, 2, 3, 4… I’m going to put standoffs here and here. That’s probably going to give it the most support.

That is the final screw. So I’ve got my motherboard in there. I won’t… yeah, there we are. Picks up with that. I got my RAM. I got that. I got that. Next thing will be the PCIe Express card and then obviously the fans and the motherboard and all that.

So that bit needs to come off at the back so I can get a big card in. Okay, there’s a little bit of this like a PCI Express protector there. I’ve just lost a screw over there. So that’s come off, and now what I can do is put the card in. So this is my networking card. Let’s put that in now. I need to just screw that in. Screw… forget… yeah, that’ll work fine actually for this.

Okay, so this particular case actually has a like a PCI Express slot protector, which is kind of cool. I haven’t seen that before. So now got the card in there, whichshould give me 10 Gigabit speeds. Obviously, if there’s any issues with that though, I can always use the motherboard one for 2 and a half gig speeds, but at least that’s my… that’s that in there.

So that’s what my build looks like at the moment. Now before I put my power unit in, I’m just going to put a couple of the fans in um… and hook them up, and then I can just focus on the power supply unit.

So I’m going to… the front of this case off. There we have it. Now this isn’t the best of cases. I’ve said that before. It’s a bit annoying. All these cables are on here, but better than nothing. Okay, so I got my two fans.

Okay, so one of my cameras died. Uh… there wasn’t enough battery, but I’m back online now. Okay, so I need to screw these two fans in, which are the front fans. They decided to do… oh, this is not the best of cases in this sense because you need to actually… how am I going to do this?

Mounting Front Fans

I mentioned I was going to use white fans because the other ones very… too stock, and the color would matter, but obviously it kind of does because I realized obviously the wires themselves are white. But I think I can hide most of them. It’s… that look too bad… at… I think they tight enough. I don’t want to actually ruin the screw, so I think that’s all four of them in. Let’s have a look.

The cables is stuck. Let’s have a look. Yeah, I can lift my entire build just from the fan, so that should be an okay plan. Let’s… got my two things going in there. Let me spin… woohoo! So now I’m going to put the front of this back on.

Okay, so I got my fans back there. I’m going to put my other fan on as well before I move on. Let me just get these cables out of the way.

Okay, so let me get my slimline fan. So as I mentioned, I’m going to have a slimline fan here. So that’s a lot nicer. You can see how much thinner that is compared to a… a standard fan. I mean, if I look… put the… sh… the width of the screwdriver there, you can see just how much thinner this other fan is.

So it’s going to come out to… SP… exhaust. It’s going to go there. In terms of the wire, where do I want it? The cable… if I have it facing downwards, that’s going to be easiest to hide, I think. So I’m going to just put that there for now.

Okay, so that is my slimline fan. As you can see, it’s a lot better. It just gives me so much more space inside the case. So the cable’s there. I’ll just get out the way really. The next thing we’re going to do is get the power supply unit in here and then start cable managing everything.

PSU And Power Cables

Okay, so this is actually a smaller power supply unit than normal, but it’s still going to be a little bit of a tight fit, I think. So cables go there. It’s going to go in that way, I think.

There we have it. So the back of the case is going to look like that with the I/O shield and obviously the power… ay… unit and my 10K card. This… be inside the case, which is tight, but you know, we do have enough room there thankfully.

The CPU cable is always going to be a bit rubbish, but again, because it’s a thin cable, I can actually tuck it. Can I? Yeah, I think I can. What I’m going to do is just going to put it down the back there for now. I’m going to pull it as much as I can to get as much slack as I can. Twist it a bit there, twist it a bit, push it down. Yeah, there we are. So you can’t see the CP… C… all that much, and then I will bring it back and plug it in.

Okay, so that’s going to be my CPU case, which is actually not too messy. The next thing I need to do will be to connect the behemoth of the motherboard cable. So I’m going to do is just do that. Bend the cable as much as I can and plug it in. Brilliant. That’s clicked. No gaps. That’s it.

So that’s going to be my motherboard cable there. The next thing I need to do is actually start plugging these particular cables in. For now, I will cable manage them in time, but for now, I’m just going to plug them in to make sure I can actually boot up my computer to make sure it all works and plug that in, which will go there. Excellent.

Next up, USB… that’s HD audio, which is next. I haven’t got much slack here at all actually. I know I’ve put it through the back there, but let me do the HD audio. I can’t even reach the HD audio. That’s unfortunate. Uh… my missing pin is all the way up there. So let’s try that. Plug it in. Is that plugged in enough? Don’t think it is. Let’s have a look. Yes, sorry, that is plugged in, which means my USB now has to go down here.

Okay, so that’s a bit of a annoyance because I really haven’t got much room with any of that. Okay, well, let’s cable manage that then. I have to look across that bridge when I go to it, but for now, let’s put that there. I’ll have to snip off these ends as well, but for now, let’s do that. So that’s going to be there. It doesn’t look great, but it’s better than nothing.

Okay, so the next are these horrible cables which will go in the corner here. So I should be able to hide this cable quite a lot. Right, reset first. Let’s put that in first. I think there’s a reason a lot of YouTubers skip this step. It’s they don’t actually want to show it because it’s a complete pain.

Checking It Boots (Again)

Okay, so at this point, it should actually start up. So I’m just going to actually test it, put it on and do that. Wait, that’s off. Going to put that on. I don’t see any par… LEDs at the moment. It’s off on the wall. Yes. Okay, so that’s on. F… flip that. Yes. Okay, so I’m immediately seeing some sort of LEDs. They’re not just flashing red, so hopefully that might be a promising sign. Let’s do that and see if I put the Power one on correctly.

That’s working. That’s working. Am I going to get output? That’s the crucial test. Is it on? Yes, it is. So I got HDMI. I’m not going to Output the moment, but hopefully I do. Let’s have a look.

So I got CPU connected. My Fan’s on… hooked up. I don’t care about that. I got my motherboard in. I got my CPU fan. I got LEDs. This should have output. Why is it not an output? Hang on. Oh, it’s not good, is it? Uh… what had I put before? Put in here. Now we don’t get output. What could have changed? I’ve got activity light there. As… an activity light there. Uh… could it just be the BIOS taking ages to start up? Let’s have a look. How long does it actually take?

No, that’s annoying. That’s very annoying. Okay, so I think what I’m going to do… I’ve waited a few minutes. Nothing showing. So… about two red LEDs though, which I didn’t have… Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait!

That was a very maniacal laugh, wasn’t it? But anyway, it is booting up! I got my BIOS! I got my six-core CPU! I got my RAM stick! My solitary RAM stick! So that is brilliant. So the next thing I’m going to do is actually put my hard drives in and go from there. But that is really promising. I’m really happy about that. It works! It’s alive!

Installing The SATA SSD

Okay, we’re almost on the home stretch now. Thankfully, the computer boots up, which is brilliant. The next step is going to be actually installing the drives and the operating systems and all that. Unfortunately, the NVMe drive that I actually ordered kept getting delayed and delayed, so I cancel that ’cause it was still on back order and it got delayed in another two weeks. So I canceled it, but luckily there’s load of Prime Day sales at the time of filming, so picked up a WD Red NVMe drive for under £200.

Breaking news: I’m an idiot. My second order also fell through because I didn’t want to order it from Amazon, so I ordered from some random UK company that I never heard of whose prices were just too good to be true, and they didn’t sell my order, and I had to get PayPal refund. Go me! But basically, in the end, I got fed up, and I just ordered directly from Amazon. I ordered two of thefastest possible NVMe drives, which are Gen 4 ones. Anyway, there are slightly faster Gen 5 ones, but these are some of the fastest Gen 4 ones on the market.

Now you might be asking why I all went for two instead of just one. You know, what happened to my 4 terabyte build? Well, firstly, because I got fed up with having two cancelled orders, and I could get both of these for a really good price. I just thought, why not? Let’s treat myself. But of course, for this next bit of the video, these hadn’t arrived yet. So let’s go back in time and see what I was doing.

What I’m going to do right now is just install the SSD, the SATA SSD for the operating systems. I’m going to do Debian and Windows 11 as a dual boot. I’m mainly going to be running with Debian, but the Windows 11 will be for benchmarking and and doing some gaming performance tests and things like that for future videos. Uh… let’s get cracking.

What I usually do, if I’m honest, with SATA SSDs is I usually just leave them lying around the case aimlessly because there’s not much point. You know, they’re really light. You can do what you want with them. However, this particular case has got… if I can actually show it… don’t know if that’s viewable, but basically has got little screw holes in the bottom like many cases, I guess. Um… and actually, the position of it is quite convenient because if I screw it in there, which I can do, that’s actually an absolutely perfect position to actually plug it all in. So that’s what I’m going to do. So let’s plug that in. SATA… six… done.

Al… got… add SATA power as well. That’s the only downside of having a SATA drive is then all of a sudden I’ve got the bulky SATA PCI Express cable, which is a bit of a faff, but it’s  not the end of the world. I can cable manage it fairly easily and get out of the way… fa… easily, but let’s just add that cable in as well.

I’m going to use the furthest possible end so that I can hide the rest of the cable as much as possible. So I’m just going to hook this in there that way. Then I will pop this back out here where all the bundle of cables is, and I’ll plug that into the PSU. Going to spin that around a second there. Well, before I do that though, I want to actually connect up the SATA cable. As I mentioned before, I’ve got some ports up here, so I’m just going to put it in. It doesn’t really matter, does it? I’m going to have to try and screw this in a little bit now. Let’s have a look. Yeah, there we are. There’s a screw. Do it a bit tighter. Yeah, okay.

So I’m only going to do two screws, I think, just because I don’t need any more. You can see the drive is there. It works absolutely fine. I thought I could crack on with the operating system because I was finished, but I’m not because I haven’t actually connected any of the case fans up. I just realized that.

Finishing The Fans

Okay, what I might just do as a test – I’ve got an old Phanteks fan controller which runs the four-pin cable to the actual motherboard. So this, in theory – I know from an old PC build that this actually will work with PWM control and things like that. You can power it with SATA, but in my case, because I’m only doing three fans, I’m not actually going to need any extra SATA power. Just give it a shot. Let’s see what happens with this one.

So fan one – and this accepts three-pin fans, so it’s not really the best fan controller. But if this works, I’ll probably upgrade to something like the Arctic case fan hub, which I actually used in my other computer build. This does give a little bit of extra flexibility in terms of how you control all your fans. But right now, let me just try this.

It’s going a bit silly here now in terms of how many cables there are just for a simple PC build, but that’s the nature of it sometimes. It would be less if I didn’t go with the SATA SSD because I’ve got this big cable here as a result. Equally, I’m using this fan hub right now, but I’m probably going to have to put this in the actual case because there’s not going to be enough room to actually hide this and put the case back on. But I just want to check that I’ve got PWM control before I cable manage everything and put the cover back on.

Finally, we have output. Okay, so let’s have a look. I’ve got my monitor. Yes, I’ve now got chassis fan speed 707. So for now, I’m going to keep that fan hub in the build, which means I’ll probably bring it back inside the case, inside the front of it. Otherwise, I won’t get this on, but at least now I know that this can be my final build for now. When the NVMe drive comes, I’ll load that in, and you know, that can be a final thing I do. For now, I just want to get Debian and Windows 11 dual-booted on here, and then I can go from there. Good, it’s coming together. Woohoo!

Cable Managing

Where are we going to put this? That’s the question. It would kind of make sense to put it at the bottom and just leave it there, but I don’t know. I don’t know if I can make it look better. Let’s have a look. Yeah, down there in the bottom is best. I’m wondering whether I just have it hidden up here, almost dangling, because you’re not really going to see it. So that could work, just up here dangling.

I do need this particular pigtail end. I’ll leave that for the back of the case, but you know, certainly I want to obviously plug in the rest of it. So where are we? There. So let me just turn around. So I’m holding those cables and I’m turning around. Yes, there we are. Okay, quick. This one. Oh, let’s have a look. One, two, three, four. At the end, what I can actually do now is cable manage some of this a little bit. It’s not going to be easy or pretty because I haven’t got much room here. This is a very small case, but for now, let me firstly do that. There you go, you little pigtail ends, whatever they’re called. There we are.

Brilliant. Okay, do not hit the power cable. Just… oh gosh, I just accidentally sliced the case, but I didn’t slice any cables, so that’s good. I will cable manage that more, but for now, I’m just going to check if I can get the back of the case on. Well, there’s potential to get the back of the case on there. You know, it’s a bit of a tight fit when you’ve got to actually physically be on top of it, but there we are. That’s done anyway. You know what I mean?

Do that there and do that there, and let’s pretend that there are no cables in the back there and it’s super neat. I did add a few more cable ties to it, but it is what it is. We’re basically done because, as I mentioned before, I’m not going to put this Streamline fan on yet until I actually get my NVMe drive in there. So it’s not perfect, but it’s actually better than nothing. We’ve got some decent cable management. It’s a very simple build. Obviously, right now it’s just one 8-gig stick of RAM, so the slowest DDR5 stick I could find, but consequently the cheapest. I’ve got my SATA SSD, which will be for the operating systems – Debian and Windows – and that’s about it. So I’m going to boot up, install Debian, install Windows, and then we’ll go from there.

Where I’ll Put This NAS

Okay, so this ismy networking cornerthat I refer to quite a lot. At the moment, what you’ve got is a single CAT cable coming into my Eero router from the wall. That then runs an ethernet cable to a Netgear switch at the back. I’m going to block the view if I show it too much, but at the back there, that then connects to a PoE switch. There’s a bunch of cables that go up into my attic for the PoE switches that I’ve mentioned before.

I’ve also got a Synology NAS, which I’m kind of replacing with this actual build. Well, not completely replacing, but this is going to go back to just having personal files and being a CCTV surveillance station. It’s not going to have any video content for Tech Overwrite on it. This contains Debian (Debian? However you say it – Debian, Debian). It contains that, so let’s get the computer in here.

Let’s get started. Let’s put that in. Click “Start” in there. I will be hooking this up. God, right, so I’ve got 2.5 Gig Ethernet pulled there, but I’m actually going to put it into my 10 Gig card. That’ll also be a good test to actually make sure the Debian does support it as expected, and I don’t get any issues. Obviously, if I’m getting loads of issues with ethernet connectivity, I’ll have to look into that more. Or, worst case, just go to the 2.5 Gig port, but hopefully, I don’t need to do that.

This goes up there. Slide that in. I might just have… I have enough slack. Yes, I do. Oh, look at that! Okay, so obviously this new NAS is a little bit bigger than my old NAS, as you can see, but overall, it does the job. This is actually a lot smaller than a lot of other computers. The fact that it can sit on this little £10 IKEA desk, I think, is actually pretty nice.

Okay, so that’s there. That’s the thing there. That cable’s in. Okay, so the next thing I want to do is just… actually, for now, I’m going to get this here as well. So basically, down here I’ve got a UPS, which is great, and it’s got one battery slot left. What that means is if there’s a power outage, all of this actually stays on for a certain amount of time. Obviously, this is going to drain a decent amount of power, so one of the things I’ll be doing in a future video is reducing the power consumption of this build as much as I can.

But right now, I should have a few minutes before, you know, power outage battery cover before any of this dies, which is pretty good. It actually means my CCTV setup, for example, keeps running even if there’s a power outage because it’s all Power over Ethernet, and that’s all backed by UPS. So that’s pretty sweet.

Let’s get this set up first. Once this is all set up, I’m not going to need to monitor here 24/7 because obviously I can just SSH into this box from my workstation PC. But what I might do in time is actually set up a KVM switch. That’ll be quite a nice way of dealing with this because, you know, over on my workstation PC, I can just press a button and my monitor over there will actually switch to the output from here. But right now, I’m just going to use this monitor to set things up and then just run SSH for now.

Installing Debian

Okay, so let’s plug that in. Okay, brilliant. So we’re starting to get output now. Put on the monitor, so that’s great. It’s gone straight into Debian. More Debian… Please let me know which it is down in the comments. I’m going to say Debian. No, not… I’m going to say Debian. I’m just going to stick to that – Debian. But if you know what it is, please let me know.

Right, so graphical install? Yeah, why not? I’m a Linux noob. Config failed. Hub doesn’t have any ports. That’s a good start, isn’t it? What’s that mean? Oh, config failed, doesn’t have any ports, and then it’s gone into the config. Okay, let’s just pretend that didn’t happen.

Right, so continue. It’s detecting network hardware. Fingers crossed… Yes! Yes, it’s detected it. Great! Okay, it’s detected an Intel ethernet controller. That’s brilliant. It’s obviously also detected my 2.5 Gig controller. Great! Obviously, with the network card, it’s got two ports, so as a result, it’s got two entries here. I don’t know which one I’ve plugged into, so… A look. Your system has multiple… Which one is the primary? Ah, if possible, the first connected network interface found has been selected. Okay, great. So let’s hope that that’s the right one.

Great! Detecting link. Please work, please work… Yes! That’s good. Yes! Yeah, that’s great. So that is a really old… That’s a secondhand network card on eBay. I think I paid around £30 for it, which is really cheap for a, you know,10 Gig networkcard, and it works. So that’s brilliant.

Configure the hostname: Tech Overwrite NAS. Tech Overwrite NAS. I like that name. I’m getting too excited about this. I’m assuming I can change this in the future, but for now, Tech Overwrite NAS is the name. Okay, so if you don’t know… blah, blah, blah. I’ve spelled it all correctly. I’d be embarrassed if I didn’t. Continue.

Configure the domain name. I don’t know… Well, I actually do have a domain name: TechOverwrite.com, where I literally just post all my videos. So let’s do that. Configuring the network… Okay, get a clock. Brilliant.

So yeah, the only thing with this build, as I’ve said a few times now, is the fan in the be quiet! cooler is quite noisy. So I am going to have to fix that at some point. That’s probably going to be my first purchase, actually changing that. But for now, I won’t worry about that.

Okay, so this is all getting installed. I mentioned I’m going to dual boot Debian and Windows on this particular SSD. Partition? Yes. So I do want a partition. I’m not actually going to show me installing Windows and all that ’cause it gets a bit boring. You know, Debian is the main thing I’m going to be using here. The only reason I’m going to have Windows is for benchmarking and things like that. For example, when I change the CPU cooler, I’ll probably do a video where I compare the two of them, and Windows usually has some slightly better benchmarking tools for that.

Okay, so that’s the 60 gigs done. I need to set up swap as well. I’ve learned my lesson from that previously. So I also need to do… Oh, how do I do this now? Free space, continue, create a new partition. I’m going to give it 10 gigs of swap. That seems a lot, but whatever. Logical? Yes, whatever. I need to use it as swap. Primary bootable flag? No. So I’m done setting that up.

This is not the most user-friendly, but essentially, I think I might be done. I don’t know. There we are. So I got my installer. Got that. Finish changes and… Right. Yes, I want that. I want that. Write the changes to the disc? Yes. Yes, great.

So there we go. That’s actually really good. So that is now installing Debian 12 with 60 gigs of primary storage and then the 10 gigs for swap. It’s a little bit more clunky and less user-friendly than Ubuntu, which I’ve installed a bunch of times. This is the first time I’ve done Debian, but I got there in the end. The main thing is you need, you know, your main install. Optionally, you need extra logical volumes for your home, although I haven’t done that, and then you need swap space in most cases. And especially since I’ve only got an 8-gig stick of RAM, I do need that swap space. So that is installing.

Okay, this is really good. And as I said, although I’m doing everything on the screen now, that’s kind of ’cause I have to, but I’m actually then going to move over to my workstation PC when I just want to set this up. So for example, once I put an NVMe drive in here, I’ll then SSH into this box from my workstation PC to install Samba and actually expose, you know, all of my media files over the home network so I can do video editing.

As discussed previously as to why I’ve chosen Debian and Samba as opposed to TrueNAS or Unraid, I’ll discuss that in another video, which probably won’t be out for like one or two months ’cause I haven’t filmed it yet. But that will be somewhere here when that video is out.

Okay, so it’s almost done. It’s just doing the GRUB loader stuff. So that’s done. Yes, that’s fine. We need to make the newly installed system bootable. So I don’t want to mess on this Ultra, obviously, ’cause that’s my USB. I want it on my Team Group SSD. Never heard of you guys, but bless you, you were cheap.

Verifying The OS Install

So there we have it. Finishing it, setting the hardware clock. Yay! It’s time to boot into the new system. Please make sure you remove the install… Yeah, obviously. Please continue to reboot. I’m going to yank this as fast as I can. Well, that’s okay.

So now, let’s look. So after waiting longer than I would like for it to boot up, it works! Finally, I get “Enter Debian.” Brilliant. Or Debian.

So I did all the standard install stuff you need to do, which is a lot less convoluted than Windows 11, which is good to know. The next thing I did then was just secure my SSH server. So I set it to only accept local connections, and I changed the port. And then I moved on over to my workstation PC and just verified that I could log in, which I could. Woo! Well, once I’d typed the password, that is.

And the good thing with that, as I mentioned, is that now I can control my home lab server from my workstation computer, which is great. I will also get a KVM switch. It’s nice to just be able to control it in the normal way like you would with any other server. So that’s brilliant.

NVMe Install

So now is finally the time to install my two NVMe drives. I finally received them. In terms of the motherboard, as you know, it’s got three slots. One of them is a Gen 5 x4 slot, but obviously, the two drives I’ve bought are just Gen 4. But that’s fine. I mean, this goes up to 10 Gbit network, and I don’t need Gen 5 speeds.

Okay, so in terms of the speeds, the Samsung drive is slightly faster, so I’ll put it in the Gen 5 slot. Not that it’s actually going to make any difference, but I’m going to put it there. It’s got the little rubber, doesn’t it? Stand off. Yes. I’ve also drunk absolutely loads of coffee before this, which is always good. So I’ve got shaky hands. Let’s put the M.2 armor on. Seems a weird way of doing it, but whatever.

Okay, there we have it. So that is going on quite nicely. Okay, so that’s the first one on with the NVMe drive and the slots. And now I put the second one on, which is the WD Black SSD. I actually love how good the technology is. You know, just that with no extra cables compared to, you know, SATA SSDs from the past, which needed two cables and were a lot slower. It’s amazing how much things have improved.

Right, so let’s put that there. Move those cables out of the way. Okay, so that’s the second NVMe drive. This is unprotected, no heat sink at the moment. I will probably get a third-party heat sink at some point, but right now, I’m just going to leave it be.

So I’ve got those two in there. The next thing to do is just boot it up and format them and go from there.

Okay, it’s logging in. What I did notice with this is by default, it turns off after 5 minutes, which is quite annoying. So I think that’s to do with the power-saving mode, so I’m just going to turn that off. And the settings… Settings… Power… Screen blank: never. Automatic suspend: never. There we are. Done. Power button behavior should power off. So if I do press that, it should power off. That kind of makes sense.

NVMe Drive Config In Debian

Okay, so now I can actually look at my new drives. I can’t remember how to do this, and it doesn’t look like you can easily do it from the command… from the UI, which is fine. So I’ll just do it on the command line. So I need to run the fdisk -l command. Let’s just clear that. So fdisk -l. Let me grep for disk. Just see a bit easier.

Okay, so I’ve got my WD Black drive, which is great. I’ve also got my Samsung drive, which is brilliant. They’re both showing up. They haven’t like exploded or something, and I didn’t get a dodgy Amazon version. Okay, so it’s great they both show up.

What I’m going to be doing is formatting them next. I’m going to use the NTFS file system mode because, although this is Debian and I’m mainly going to be using Debian, I will sometimes be booted into Windows to actually do benchmarking and things like that. And that’s going to make things easier. From what I’ve read as well, I’m going to be using Samba to actually expose the data on these drives to my network as a network drive. I think the NTFS file system should work fine for that, but we’ll soon find out.

Okay, so that’s going to be my command, I think. Yay! It’s completed. “Have a nice day.” It actually tells me “have a nice day.” I like that. It makes me happy. And if I look at this now, there we are: NTFS. So that’s actually formatted. It’s not mounted yet. I’ll look at that soon. But the next one I need to do is this one. So that is /dev/nvme0n1. Thank you. You have a nice day too.

Okay, so they are both formatted but not mounted. So now I need to mount them. I’ve got a folder already called /media/techoverwrite, so I’m probably going to mount everything in there. So I need to nano /etc/fstab. This basically shows all the different drives and partitions that I have. So I’m going to need to put an entry in there and give it the UUID, which is the unique ID… The UUID, I guess, for the two drives. And then it should start up automatically and mount automatically.

Configuring Samba

And then once that’s done, I should be able to set up Samba and expose it via the network, test it out on my workstation PC over there. So let’s just do that. Permissions, locale=en_US.UTF-8. I don’t know if you… I could probably do en_GB, but I’m just going to do the en_US, just because that’s what the tutorial says. NVMe Samsung UUID equals /media/techoverwrite/drv2 ntfs-3g. That’s what I end up with. So my UUIDs… I got them. Looks correct to me.

Reload. Great. Okay, so now… Yes, brilliant. Oh, what’s happening? No, it’s crashed. Wait, please… Okay, I don’t know why that’s actually… Yeah, there we are. Yeah, there we are. No, it’s working now. It took a while, but these are now actually mounted. So I got two volumes. They both automatically mounted, as you can see. They are a bit slow. I’m assuming that’s just because… Yeah, there we are. It’s worked now. Yeah, there we are. Okay, bit slow, but they are now actually mounted.

I think the reason they were a bit slow is it’s 4 terabytes of drive, and that’s quite a lot of space. And as a result, the actual, you know, system check… This utility has to check them when opening them.

Does Samba Network Drive Work?

So the next thing to now do is look at Samba. So apt install… Gosh, just lots of packages. Yes, do it all. It’s fine. So that’s finished now. That actually wasn’t as slow as I thought it would be. It went really quickly. Okay, is that Samba?

So I need to create an account for Samba access. Tech Overwrite… The password… Okay, so that’s the password. Added the user. Brilliant. So that is the Samba user.

So now if I nano the Samba file, this should be able to config… Okay, so ideally what I want to do is actually expose /media/techoverwrite as a network drive, as a single network drive. Then I can go to my workstation computer, and I should get really fast access to all the data on these NVMe drives. Equally, when I come to video edit on my laptop, the same thing will be possible there too.

So the path will be “/media/techoverwrite/drv1”. Available? Yes, obviously that’s kind of the goal of this. Write out? Yes. I always like to see the file after I’ve done something with it. SMB. See, at the very end of my file, I’ve got “Linux media” without any slash at the end. Yes, Tech Overwrite browsable. Let’s have a look.

So, service SMB. Then man restart, and let’s see if it actually works. So if I get my IP address, I should now be able to go over to my Windows machine and I’ll see what happens over there. Can I switch this camera? Let’s have a look. Oh yeah, on. Let’s put it on here. Will that work? Yeah, why not? The lighting might be quite bad, so let me just… Oh, it’s a live demo!

We’re also going to put this webcam on me just in case, just in case this doesn’t work. But this is going to see whether it works. OBS display with a webcam that is way too big. Put that down there. Hello all! Let’s see if this works.

Oh, that’s a lot of tabs. Um, what am I doing? I need to connect a system drive. So this is my old media. Come here. I’m actually nervous for some reason. I don’t know why. Map a network drive. So for my network-attached media, I’m going to go for… I don’t actually know. Do I just put the IP address? What’s the name of the share? I don’t know how this works.

Oh yes, wait. No, don’t like that. What’s that now? Media? Yes. So I need to put my username and password. Let’s try that. Go. Is it? Remember my credentials? Yes. Okay, so I got Linux media. Oh, that’s interesting. It gives me the… Oh, wait. Oh, that’s a bit crap. So the name… Okay, when I say “Linux media,” that’s actually the name, which I don’t like. So I’m going to change that.

Let’s come back over here. Hello, it’s me again! Right, so let me just change that. History. Quick tip: history is brilliant because what you can do is, if you want to run a particular command, you can literally just type like the number of that command and then it’ll run it. So I want to rerun the smb config. So 60, that’s that command. Go to the end of this file.

Okay, so I don’t want it to be called that. I want it to be called… Tech Overwrite? No. Hang on. Network media. That sounds like a good name. So write that out. Done. And then I want to restart the service.

Okay, so if we browse… Network media. Excellent! Done. So reconnect to sign in? Yes. Definitely. Real Al. Okay.

Obviously, one of the downsides is I’ve got drv1 and drv2, which isn’t really ideal. I need to think how I’m actually going to… You know, now I’ve got these two drives. That’s a good thing because I got terabytes of drives, but at the same time, that’s a bad thing because how do I actually split my files up?

What I’m probably going to do right now is put all of my tech overwrite content, you know, like all my previous videos, on drv1. And then on drv2, I’m just going to have common stuff. So if I got a sound effect like a “whoa” or a pop-up sound, I’ll put that on drv2, and then everything else, my actual real stuff, will go on drv1. So that’s probably what I’m going to do. But at least I know that that works.

Um, that’s brilliant! That’s brilliant! It does say the total size is just 80 gigabytes. I’m going to have to look into that, but I’ll do that offline. But for now, I know that this is actually going to work.

Um, just as a complete proof of concept, let’s just put some files on there and let’s see how quickly it goes. Okay, my computer is actually going to be limited to 1 GB speeds because it’s going to a 1 Gbit switch. So this won’t go any faster than that, but hopefully, this will max out the full 1 GB connection because I’m going to be copying a file from the NVMe drive here to one over there. So it should go at 1 GB speed. Let’s have a look.

Yes, 113 megabytes per second. Times that by 8, and that’s… Yeah, that is 1 GB, which is brilliant! So in another video, which when it’s ready will appear here somewhere, I’m actually going to be upgrading my network so that it’ll be running at, well, 10 Gigabit speeds, which is the whole point of this. Just because otherwise, things will be a little bit slow, and I’ll be permanently limited to gigabit speeds, which is the whole point of this project. I’m not limited to that, but right now, that’s actually brilliant!

Future Networking Changes

I’ve got my drives installed on my NAS, and now I can actually connect to it over the network and use that, and that’s really, really good. It works! It’s alive! This… Plus, it literally… That is the entire point of this video. I’m really excited about it!

So from scratch, I’ve built an entire homelab NAS. I’ve exposed it over the network with Samba. I’ve got 8 Terabytes of usable space, and it’s super fast NVMe space, probably the fastest, you know, drives you can actually get. The other ones over there… After getting ripped off twice and having orders fallen through and stuff, I finally got two really super fast drives. So that’s awesome!

So that’s it, really. So in the next few videos, I’m going to be upgrading the network so that I’m not limited to gigabit speeds, which sounds fast, but it’s really not when you’re dealing with, like, the file I just transferred is almost 7 gigabytes, and that took quite a long time to transfer.

Equally, when I’m doing video editing over the network, I want that to be super fast. I don’t want there to be any slowness because I’m limited to just gigabit speeds. Equally, when I come to render a video, it’s going to be slow again if I’m capped to gigabit speeds. So I keep saying the word “gigabit,” but I do need to upgrade that at a minimum to 2.5 gigabit, but hopefully 10 gigabit because that’s what my NAS supports.

But that wraps up this video, and I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please click the thumbs up button and please subscribe to see more videos like this. Thanks for watching!

Tristan has been interested in computer hardware and software since he was 10 years old. He has built loads of computers over the years, along with installing, modifying and writing software (he’s a backend software developer ‘by trade’).Tristan also has an academic background in technology (in Math and Computer Science), so he enjoys drilling into the deeper aspects of technology.Tristan is also an avid PC gamer, with FFX and Rocket League being his favorite games.