When I was planning out my Homelab NAS build, I was originally going to go with a budget AM4 CPU and motherboard – costing around £100-110 in total. But I ended up going for a £120 DDR5 AM5 motherboard and £165 CPU.

I explain WHY my reasoning in this video, along with covering when it’s also fine to just go with a 10 year old NAS build. I also cover whether ‘old school’ mechanical hard drives, SATA SSDs or NVMe SSDs is the right choice for a Homelab NAS build.

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

Video Transcript And Guide

Hey everyone, I’m a pragmatic kind of person. I don’t like spending loads of money on things that I don’t need. So when I started planning out my new Homelab NAS build, I was originally planning on buying a £60 B450 motherboard and a CPU like the Ryzen 3200G – for a total cost of £120.

A cheap AM4 CPU and motherboard combo

So… why did I end up spending almost 3 times as much for a DDR5 based system? Well it’s because I think that if you’re serious about building a FAST NAS, AM4 or Intel LGA1200 probably isn’t good enough anymore.

Why Not 10 Year Old Hardware?

I’m actually REALLY happy that I paid £120 just for this ASRock B650M Pro RS motherboard and I’ll explain why in a minute, but I should add a quick “disclaimer”. First, if all you want from a NAS is a place to store LOTS of files that you won’t regularly access, and maybe you have no reason to go above Gigabit networking, then you won’t actually need DDR5 and AM5 or LGA1700. Even many mechanical hard drives run at fast enough speeds that they can max out a gigabit connection. For example a Seagate Ironwolf drive can support up to 180 MegaBYTE speeds, which would equate to 1,440 MegaBITS per second.

My 4 terabyte Synology NAS actually runs “old school” hard drives and this is fast enough to store all our personal files, and also act as our CCTV surveillance station.

Installing two PoE Annke cameras

So if you’re planning a simple Homelab NAS build, and you’re not going to be streaming 4K or 6K video files, you could probably get by with a 10 year old motherboard and CPU combo and then stack your case full of 3 and a half inch drives.

What Is A ‘Fast’ NAS?

My ongoing HomeLab NAS build with a 10Gbe network PCIe card

HOWEVER in my case, I’m going to be using my new NAS build as a media base for this channel (for the video content I’ll produce). I’ll be mounting the NAS’ media drives as a network drive on my workstation PC and also my laptop, and THEN I’ll be doing all my video editing over the network. I discuss WHY I do this in another video but essentially it boils down to me wanting all my media files in a single location, instead of having the extra complexity of having some video files on my PC, some on a laptop and some on my Synology NAS – which hasn’t been working out very well for me.

This brings me onto WHY I think that a DDR5 based platform like AM5 or LGA1700 is the best option here. When I say a “fast Homelab NAS”, I mean one with super fast storage – in other words, M.2 NVMe drives. YES you can go for SATA SSDs, and their 500 plus Megabyte speeds mean that you get close to 5 Gigabits per second of speeds out of them. That’s pretty awesome but many SATA SSDs cost the same as NVMe drives nowadays, so I figure NVMe drives are the way to go – considering they’re often 6 to 10 times faster than SATA SSDs.

DDR5 Platform Benefits For A Homelab NAS

New DDR5 RAM in a box with no heatsink on them

So, why DDR5? Well, many DDR4 based motherboards only have one or two M.2 slots. Yes you could also buy PCIe to M.2 cards to get extra M.2 drives, but you’re still sort of limited – especially due to PCIe lane limitations with consumer CPUs. That’s where the DDR5 platform is seriously impressive. There are loads of motherboards that have three M.2 slots, for example, including my ASRock Pro RS board: that’s why I bought it. And some motherboards have four or even five M.2 slots. If you purchased 4 terabyte drives then you could easily get 20 terabytes or more of super fast storage, which seems like an epic position to be in compared to just a decade ago, for example.

That’s pretty cool and since NVMe prices are very similar to SATA SSD prices, if you want the fastest possible NAS speeds (and plan on having a 10 Gigabit uplink) then going with a DDR5 build seems a no brainer to me.

I should say that I kinda see the irony in starting my video and being all like “Look at me, I’m so pragmatic” and then immediately suggesting that everyone pays the DDR5 tax and does some expensive build. However if you DO need a super fast NAS (or you think you might need one in the future) then THIS seems to make sense to me, but please let me know your thoughts either way, down in the comments.