November 26, 2025
Fans, fees, and file fights
DIY NAS: 2026 Edition
Prices up, airflow fights, and AliExpress nerves
TLDR: A new DIY home storage box lands as prices rise, with a small, low‑power board at its core. Comments explode over RAM needs, bargain drives with sketchy ratings, and case cooling drama—plus a split on buying parts from Chinese sites—making this a must‑watch showdown for budget builders.
The DIY NAS 2026 build dropped with a tiny, low‑power Topton board and an eight‑core Intel chip, but the real fireworks were in the comments. A NAS is just a shared file box for your home, and one reader fired the opening shot: “Do you even need more than 8GB of RAM?” Cue the RAM hoarders vs. minimalists brawl, as folks debated if extra memory helps or is just flexing. Meanwhile, bargain hunter dllu bragged about a 4‑drive pool using 24TB Seagate Barracudas at $10 per terabyte, turning price pain into victory laps—then others raised eyebrows at those drives’ “limited yearly use” rating, spawning jokes about “sleepy drives doing 24/7 shifts.” Airflow became its own soap opera: dbalatero dumped the pretty Jonsbo case over cooling worries and went with a sturdier Fractal Node 804, while VTimofeenko tuned the same case with a fan swap to hit chill temps and quipped it’s “full blast or nothing.” On the buy-from-China drama, WarOnPrivacy reported smooth sailing with Topton parts and linked a helpful write‑up (blog), sparking a split between deal hunters and cautious shoppers. The mood: doom‑shopping now before prices climb, while dreaming of home servers that do more than just hold files.
Key Points
- •The 2026 DIY NAS build follows longstanding criteria: small form factor, six drive bays, low-power integrated CPU, and homelab potential.
- •Component prices for HDDs, SSDs, and RAM are rising; the author expects Intel CPUs and motherboards to also increase in price with potential availability issues.
- •A Topton contact recommended stocking up on motherboards due to anticipated price hikes and dwindling inventory.
- •The chosen platform is the Topton N22 Mini‑ITX motherboard with an Intel Core 3 N355 CPU.
- •The N355 offers 8 cores/8 threads, up to 3.9 GHz turbo, 15 W TDP, and integrated GPU with Intel Quick Sync; the N22 adds extra SATA ports and a PCIe x1 slot over the N18.