Building A NAS and AI Server - Part 1
Upgrades to Help Supplement the Home Lab
Recently I’ve documented on X my journey towards building a NAS and AI Rig and that ended up with me building two computers to support those workflows more optimally. My brand new NAS I built is now running UnRaid with 40TBs of storage and multiple services such as an RDP server, SMB storage, Jellyfin, and more to bring control my into my life with these services all on my own hardware. It has automated backups and SSDs to speed up storage before moving to Disk. My AI server was just a modest upgrade, keeping the 3090 GPU but upgrading all the other 7+ year old equipment, new motherboard, CPU, power supply, RAM, and fan. Both are now working well enough to share out the results.
Recently I was able to tie both servers together and I felt a great joy in building my home lab that I wanted to share with everyone here to give people ideas on how local hardware is a great alternative to invest in and avoid privacy invasive SaaS companies and high prices of storage and services.
Defining the Problem and Constraints
Initially the decision I was leaning on was to build a new AI server and also combine a NAS into it. I had a poorman’s NAS with just a Window Drive network shared over the network residing on my AI Server. It work for some basic file sharing, however this PC had consistency issues. It would often randomly restart and get stuck on the BIOS before needing a manual push button restart. This was immensely annoying since I would often RDP in at random times only to find out I had to restart the PC. Also I noticed as I started getting into AI code and tensor code that build times were pretty bad. I was rocking an intel 6700-K and the age was really showing itself when compiling software. This demotivated me from working on AI as much since a slow compile is a frustrating experience (don’t tell Rust people this). A golden rule for Servers is that they should always be highly available since you never know when you’ll need to use them, and you need to have the trust that a service running on them will always be there when you need it. The PC was also headless, meaning there was no monitor or keyboard attached to it. So any non trivial level of troubleshooting required me to find a monitor and peripherals to attach to it. Since my AI server resided on this hardware it often meant my GPU was unavailable too, causing more issues. Overall it was a bad experience that was getting worse.
My initial thought on this was to save money and just combine the hardware upgrades into one computer as I had done previously. Pop a new motherboard, RAM, CPU, and be done with it. But after some research I quickly realized this was a mistake. But like most things, being cheap often causes more pain in the future.