• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Building a NAS, need some help

P

plaus

n00b
Joined
Mar 11, 2008
Messages
20
I need some help speccing my NAS. Case will be the Norco RPC-4224. Wanna put 3TB Hitachi Deskstars in there. I want it to be silent as possible which might not be so easy but in order to try to keep it quiet I will get Nexus fans and probably the Thermalright Silver Arrow as heatsink+fans for my CPU.
The main thing I have a problem with deciding upon are the CPU and the motherboard.
I am still deciding on whether I want to use a hardware RAID controller (would get an Areca ARC) or go with software raid or a HBA. So CPU recommendations for both setups might be nice.
I intend to mostly use it as the NAS for serving data to HTPC and as a seedbox, so it doesn't need to be very powerful, but I also want it to be pretty futureproof, and for software RAID I definitely would want something that is powerful enough. I might wanna use it at times to run encodes on so a decent CPU is required.
Main thing I have no clue about is the motherboard or which form factor to go with.
RAM I think I will stick 8gb of DDR3 Crucial in there just for the sake of it.
Let me know what you think of it and which CPU and motherboard is a good buy at the moment. Network card should be very good, maybe 2xgbit ethernet would be nice tho I dont yet know what I would do with it. And how loud would these 3TB 4 platter babies get/? I am going to buy 8 off the bat.
 
If hardware RAID route:
$240 - Intel Xeon X3440 CPU
$180 - Supermicro X8SIL-F
$51- Kingston 2 x 2GB ECC Unbuffered DDR3 1333 RAM
$300 - HP SAS Expander - PM Synergy Dustin for exact Price
$90 - 6 x 3ware SFF-8087 to Multi-lane SATA Forward Break-out Cable
---
Total: $861

If software RAID route:
$240 - Intel Xeon X3440 CPU
$270 - Supermicro X8SI6-F
$51- Kingston 2 x 2GB ECC Unbuffered DDR3 1333 RAM
$300 - HP SAS Expander - PM Synergy Dustin for exact Price
$90 - 6 x 3ware SFF-8087 to Multi-lane SATA Forward Break-out Cable
---
Total: $951 plus tax and shipping.

For both setups, you should get the specified RAM: Both mobo do not play well with consumer grade RAM and that Kingston ECC RAM is the only RAM I'm aware of that works just fine with both motherboards.
 
Thanks for taking the time to list these parts, they look good. I might go with the AMD equivalent though, gonna link some things I stumbled upon tonight.
Which PSU should I get for this? I want either the Seasonic X-650 or X-850. I guess the X-850 might be needed for futureproofness, but i actually really have no idea how many HDDs I should expect to spin up at the same time. Would 650W be enough for max 24 HDDs in RAID?
 
plaus said:
Thanks for taking the time to list these parts, they look good. I might go with the AMD equivalent though, gonna link some things I stumbled upon tonight.
Click to expand...
Yeah link it and we'll see if it's just as good as the Intel setups I posted above.

plaus said:
Which PSU should I get for this? I want either the Seasonic X-650 or X-850. I guess the X-850 might be needed for futureproofness, but i actually really have no idea how many HDDs I should expect to spin up at the same time. Would 650W be enough for max 24 HDDs in RAID?
Click to expand...

If the true hardware RAID controller you're using supports staggered spin-up, the yes the X-650 will be enough. However for the software RAID route, I would recommend at least a 750W PSU with at least 60A on the +12V rail. I.e the Seasonic X-750.
 
Doesn't staggered powerup depend on the power connectors to have a certain pin disconnected so the drives don't spin up immediately?

@OP: i'm missing your operating system? That's the first thing you should decide and it pretty much decides what hardware you need for that platform. Building a Linux or ZFS fileserver is much different than building a Windows based server with hardware RAID.
 
sub.mesa said:
Doesn't staggered powerup depend on the power connectors to have a certain pin disconnected so the drives don't spin up immediately?
Click to expand...

AFAIK, no. But I could be wrong about that.
 
Ahh. Hmm, definitely a large PSU for those just in case situations then.
 
Yes, i've wrestled with this problem in the past. I ended up with a switch that switches on half of my drives to allow using my passively cooled power supply at 400W. The drives used 33W spinup current so you don't that many to start causing problems already.

Probably the best would be a power supply with a single +12V rail with lots of amps. I can remember a Corsair 850W being very good at this, with 60+amps on +12V. That would allow spinning up quite a few drives.

Recent harddrives appear to demand less current when spinning up; some as low as 14W. That's a big difference with my older 7200rpm drives that spin up at 33W!

Problems with your PSU are not fun though, so having a bit of a margin is good. Just take note to pick a PSU that's still very efficient at low loads, since as soon as the drives are running you should be under 100W load. Generally the lowest load percentage that is tested is 20%, where efficiency tends to drop considerably while approaching towards 0% load.
 
sub.mesa said:
Problems with your PSU are not fun though, so having a bit of a margin is good. Just take note to pick a PSU that's still very efficient at low loads, since as soon as the drives are running you should be under 100W load. Generally the lowest load percentage that is tested is 20%, where efficiency tends to drop considerably while approaching towards 0% load.
Click to expand...

Agreed here. I had a Thermaltake Toughpower 750XT that would not power on under a load of less than 50W. Granted it was going to power an atom board but at very low loads (<10%) of the total PSU capacity you need to make sure the PSU will stay powered on let alone efficiency.
 
J-Will said:
He wont need the SAS Expander for only 8 drives though will he?
Click to expand...

No he won't for just 8 drives but he will need it later on since he has the Norco 4224 case which can fit 24 drives. I figured might as well recommend it early on so that he gets an idea of what he's gonna need for 24 drives.
 
plaus said:
I will be running Debian as OS.
Click to expand...

In that case, the hardware I recommended should be fine. Since you're using Debian, I highly recommend looking at the Linux software RAID route since it does provide pretty decent performance.
 
Danny Bui said:
In that case, the hardware I recommended should be fine. Since you're using Debian, I highly recommend looking at the Linux software RAID route since it does provide pretty decent performance.
Click to expand...
Yeah, I intend to use mdadm.
Anyways, I have kind of switched my goal with this NAS. I don't intend to keep on living at my current location and might just leave my continent so then I would put my NAS in Leaseweb datacenter and use it there as fileserver and seedbox. But I would then also like host jabber, mail, IRC, oauth server etc. and do all kinds of virtualization. So for futureproofness I looked up dual cpu motherboards. Might be overkill for now but in future when these cpus will be cheaper then I can just add another one.


CPU AMD Opteron 6128 Magny-Cours 2.0GHz 8 x 512KB L2 Cache 12MB L3 Cache Socket G34 115W 8-Core Server Processor OS6128WKT8EGOWOF
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819105266&cm_re=opteron-_-19-105-266-_-Product
275$

Mobo Tyan S8230WGM4NR System Board S8230 2-Way Opteron 6100 Socket G34 12-Core DDR3 SAS2/SATA2 RAID IPMI 4xGbE PCIe eATX Retail
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...cm_re=Tyan_S8230WGM4NR-_-13-151-214-_-Product
570$

It ain't the cheapest option but I have chance to buy shit at US prices as a EU citizen atm so it ends up being acceptable.
 
unless you are expecting heavy user loads and traffic, or plan on virtualizing several machines at once, the setups that Danny Bui suggested would be great
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top