Building a big NAS. Need advice

[vettepk]

So I'm charged with building a RAID5 Nas with 6+ terabytes. To keep it under budget I'm going with 8 seagate sata 1tb drives plugged into an Areca 8x raid controller. My main concern though is the cpu/mobo. This NAS will only have to handle about 5 users at once. Is there any reason for me to spring for a xeon setup with FBDIMM and a 500 dollar motherboard or will a rock solid core 2 quad/g35 setup work fine for my purposes? I'll be running server 2003 32bit.

 

[RussianHAXOR]

So I'm charged with building a RAID5 Nas with 6+ terabytes. To keep it under budget I'm going with 8 seagate sata 1tb drives plugged into an Areca 8x raid controller. My main concern though is the cpu/mobo. This NAS will only have to handle about 5 users at once. Is there any reason for me to spring for a xeon setup with FBDIMM and a 500 dollar motherboard or will a rock solid core 2 quad/g35 setup work fine for my purposes? I'll be running server 2003 32bit.

5 users? dont even bother with a Xeon + FB Dimm especially since the nehalem server boards dont even use FBDimms anymore. Just regular DDR3 or ECC DDR3

You'd be fine with a Quad + p35

 

[jellyhead]

6+ TB = plenty of data, so you may wish to consider going RAID6. Can you stretch to 1.5TB drives? That way you've got plenty of capacity and you don't need to add drives (and consequently a more expensive controller). I guess it depends on the availability/performance you're looking for from the unit, and your backup/restore capabilities.

Anyway - just thought I'd throw that in there. Enjoy, that's going to be fun to put together