Build a Complete Home NAS for Under $300: Beelink N100 + Shucked Drives

A Synology DS223j two-bay NAS without any drives costs about $300. The DS423+ costs $500. By the time you populate either with drives, you’re looking at $600–900 for a complete setup. This guide builds a functionally equivalent — and in some ways superior — home NAS for under $300 total, using a Beelink N100 mini PC, shucked drives, and TrueNAS SCALE. The mini PC approach gives you more processing power, hardware transcoding for Plex, and the ability to run Docker containers alongside your storage — features the entry-level Synology boxes can’t match at this price.

Complete Parts List

This gives you a complete NAS with 16TB of raw storage (8TB usable in RAID 1 / mirror, or 16TB with no redundancy). Adding larger shucked drives scales the storage linearly — swap to 12TB drives and you have 24TB raw for about $100 more.

Why These Specific Components

Beelink Mini S12 Pro (N100)

The Intel N100’s 6W TDP makes this the most power-efficient option for an always-on NAS. Running 24/7, it costs under $15/year in electricity. The included 16GB of DDR4 RAM is sufficient for TrueNAS SCALE’s ZFS requirements. The 500GB NVMe SSD serves as a high-speed boot and app drive. Intel Quick Sync provides hardware transcoding if you add Plex.

ORICO 2-Bay Dock

Self-powered (has its own power adapter — critical, the drives can’t draw from USB alone), reliable Asmedia bridge chip, and supports drives up to 20TB per bay. Connects via USB 3.0 — more than fast enough for spinning HDDs which max out at ~200MB/s sequential anyway.

WD Elements 8TB (Shucked)

WD Elements 8TB drives consistently contain WD80EMAZ white label drives — CMR, 7200RPM equivalent spinup, fully compatible with TrueNAS and OpenMediaVault. They require the 3.3V pin modification (Kapton tape over pin 3 of the SATA power connector), but the dock handles power delivery — you apply the tape to the drive’s SATA connector, not to the dock’s USB cable.

Step 1: Shuck the Drives

Before connecting anything, shuck both drives per the shucking guide and apply Kapton tape to pin 3 on each drive’s SATA power connector. Connect the dock to the Beelink via USB 3.0. Connect the dock’s power adapter. Power on the dock. The drives should spin up (you’ll hear them) and show up in whatever OS you boot.

Step 2: Install TrueNAS SCALE

Download the TrueNAS SCALE ISO from truenas.com/truenas-scale. Flash it to a USB drive using Balena Etcher. Boot the Beelink from the USB (press F7 at the Beelink splash screen to get the boot menu, select your USB drive).

The TrueNAS installer presents a clean graphical interface. Select your target drive — install TrueNAS to the 500GB internal NVMe, not to the dock drives. TrueNAS reserves the boot drive for the OS and uses separate drives for storage pools. Complete the installation, set your admin password, and reboot. Remove the USB installer drive when prompted.

Step 3: First TrueNAS Login and Storage Pool Setup

After reboot, the Beelink displays its IP address on screen (or connect a monitor/keyboard to see it). On another computer on your network, open a browser and navigate to http://[IP address]. Log in with the credentials you set during installation.

Navigate to Storage → Create Pool. Name your pool (e.g., “tank” or “naspool”). Add both dock drives to the pool. Choose your redundancy:

• Mirror (RAID 1): 8TB usable, full redundancy — one drive can fail without data loss. Recommended for important data.
• Stripe (RAID 0): 16TB usable, no redundancy — if either drive fails, all data is lost. Not recommended unless you have full backups elsewhere.

For most home users: choose Mirror. You’re halving your usable storage, but the data protection is worth it. If you want more storage, buy a 4-bay dock and add two more shucked drives in RAIDZ1 — three drives with one parity, giving you 16TB usable.

Step 4: Create a Network Share

In TrueNAS: navigate to Shares → Windows (SMB) Shares → Add. Point the path to your storage pool (e.g., /mnt/tank). Enable the share and configure user access. Every computer on your network can now access this as a mapped network drive — on Windows, open File Explorer → This PC → Map Network Drive → type \[TrueNAS-IP] ank.

Step 5: Add Plex (Optional)

TrueNAS SCALE supports app installation from the Apps section. Search for Plex, install it, and configure your library to point to the NAS storage pool. The N100’s Intel Quick Sync is accessible from within TrueNAS and enables hardware transcoding — you’ll need Plex Pass to unlock it, but it works natively on this hardware.

What You Can Run on This Build

This $280–300 build handles all of the following simultaneously:

• SMB/NFS file sharing to all devices on your network
• Plex Media Server with hardware transcoding (1–2 simultaneous streams)
• Automatic backups from Macs (Time Machine) and Windows (via SMB share)
• Pi-hole DNS filtering via a TrueNAS SCALE Docker container
• Nextcloud for personal cloud storage
• SMART monitoring and scheduled drive health checks

Annual electricity cost for this setup (Beelink at 9W + dock with 2 drives at ~14W = ~23W total average): approximately $34/year at $0.17/kWh. Cheaper than a Synology subscription service, and you own all the hardware outright.

Upgrading This Build Over Time

The beauty of this architecture is incremental expandability. When you need more storage: swap to a 4-bay dock ($60), add two more shucked drives, expand your pool in TrueNAS. When you need more performance: replace the Beelink with a Ryzen-based mini PC — the TrueNAS installation moves with the drives (reimport the existing pool on the new hardware). No proprietary hardware lock-in.