Home NAS Build

I decided to repurpose my old gaming PC as a home NAS. This opens the door to lots of selfhosting projects like a media server and file storage. The B550 board’s six SATA ports make it well-suited for drive expansion, and the 5600G’s low idle power draw keeps it economical to run 24/7.

Hardware

The base system is the existing build:

Component	Part
CPU	AMD Ryzen 5 5600G
Motherboard	MSI B550 GAMING GEN3
RAM	G.Skill Ripjaws V 16GB DDR4-3600
GPU	MSI Radeon RX 6800 XT Gaming X Trio 16GB (retained for transcoding)
Boot drive	WD Blue SN550 1TB NVMe (OS drive for TrueNAS)
Case	Deepcool MACUBE 310
PSU	EVGA 650 BQ

New additions:

Component	Part	Price
NAS drive × 2	Toshiba N300 18TB 7200RPM CMR	$368.99 × 2 (Microcenter)

Storage Layout

The two 18TB drives will be configured as a mirrored ZFS pool (RAID-1 equivalent) in TrueNAS, giving:

• 18TB usable with full redundancy
• Single drive failure tolerance
• No RAID-Z1 striping risk with only two drives

The WD Blue SN550 (1TB NVMe) serves as the TrueNAS OS/boot drive and ZFS metadata/cache.

RX 6800 XT — Staying for GPU Transcoding

The RX 6800 XT is staying in the system. RDNA 2 has solid VAAPI support on Linux, which TrueNAS SCALE can expose to Docker containers. The primary use case is hardware-accelerated transcoding in Jellyfin, which makes a significant difference for on-the-fly remuxing and format conversion — the 5600G’s integrated graphics would struggle with simultaneous transcodes at 1080p or higher.

Beyond Jellyfin, having a discrete GPU available opens the door to other GPU-accelerated workloads on the NAS if needed down the road.