Small Creative office NAS Build

[Enquiries]

Hi! Small creative office here dealing with loads of large audio, video, and graphics files. Doing a DIY NAS wanting to use the Jonsbro N3 and probably 4 20tb drives. Performance is my main concern. 10G would be nice but is not necessary. Mobo+CPU throughput is what I would prioritize. Definitely want to future proof a little bit as well. Looking to spend more up front for future performance. Thanks!

[ed]

Here’s a high-performance combo that would serve your needs well:

✅ CPU + Motherboard Recommendation:
• AMD Ryzen 7 7700 or 7900 (non-X versions have lower power draw)
• ASRock X670E PG Lightning or ASUS ProArt B650-Creator
• Up to 128GB DDR5 ECC or Non-ECC RAM
• Plenty of PCIe Gen4 lanes for NVMe storage and future 10GbE upgrade
• Built-in GPU if using Ryzen G-series (for headless operation)

✅ Storage Setup:
• 4 x 20TB Seagate IronWolf Pro or WD Red Pro in RAID 5 or RAID Z1
• Add 2 x NVMe SSDs for a metadata/VM/cache tier (Crucial P5 Plus or WD SN850X)
• Optionally split data pools into SSD for projects, HDD for archive

✅ Optional but Worth It:
• Add a 10GbE PCIe NIC (like Intel X550-T2 or QNAP QXG-10G2T-X710) later if speed becomes a bottleneck
• Add a UPS for safe shutdowns

With this setup, you’ll comfortably saturate 2.5GbE today and be ready for 10GbE tomorrow. More importantly, the internal throughput (especially with NVMe cache or SSD pool) will keep read/write operations snappy, even for large project files and render exports.