Help me build NAS

L

Lugztaz

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jun 21, 2004
Messages
1,783
Right now I have two Samsung HD501LJ drives in my main desktop. One holds all my documents, pictures, iso's and pretty much everything but movies and music that are on my second drive.

I am looking to upgrade in capacity. I thought about getting two more of these 500gig drives, and doing some type of RAID or just some type of software copy. I then got to thinking that I am pretty much out of space in my desktop and would like to setup a cheap, yet reliable NAS with RAID. Something that will hold 5+ drives yet small.

So far I have had no issues with these samsung drives, and it gets amazing ratings on newegg. I will most likely end up with FreeNAS but I would like to get these out of my system and onto another.

So what I'm looking for is: (1) Case, (1) Motherboard, (1) Processor, (1) Memory, and a RAID controller I'd assume as most don't like the ones that come on motherboards. Plus input on the drives.
 
could try windows home server. i like the fact that you can add drives when you want. not the same mirroring as raid so the drives have less chance of crapping out. its not perfect but i like it so far. i bascially use mine like a huge nas drive.
 
Get a cheap Mini ITX board from VIA, a gig of ram or so, and freenas, then a RAID card with however many inputs you want, that supports RAID 5 get 3 or more drives to start, and create a RAID 5 drive out of it. If you want to spend a little more, get a RAID 5 controller that supports hotswap, and snag some cheap hotswap cages off of ebay or something, then anytime a drive goes down, you can just pull it, and slide a new one in, and it will automatically rebuild the array
 
I'd suggest against a Mini-ITX board and instead go with a good mATX board.
Reason being that you can get plenty of SATA ports on the motherboard and avoid the need for an add-in controller all-together (which if you want more than a couple ports can get expensive quickly). Additionally, since you'll be using Software RAID in FreeNAS, WHS or whatever you end up using, there's no benefit to a RAID board (and the real ones are expensive anyways).

I recommend looking at the Asus P5E-VM boards (comes in two versions, DO or HDMI). Both have 6 onboard SATA ports, which support hotswapping and are fully supported by Linux and BSD (FreeNAS). The DO version is a little cheaper, but the the layout isn't quite as good as the HDMI, and has fewer PCIe slots (in favour of PCI) as well as no DVI/HDMI output (just VGA). Both boards have GigE.

Pair it with the cheapest Intel CPU you can find (anything you can buy now will be more than enough for a NAS) and a gig of ram (don't even need that much, but at current prices you only save a couple dollars by going to 512, so not much point), toss it in whatever case you like, and you've got a powerful and expandable NAS for very little money.

Addendum: It should be noted that if you're already using some of those drives as storage, in order to put them in a new RAID set, they need to be wiped, so you'll have to be able to back it up somewhere.

Also, if you're looking to use RAID5 and expand it later on, FreeNAS doesn't support this, you may wish to look into using Linux software RAID5. Not as config-free as FreeNAS, but pretty easy to do with some googling, and RAID5 expand is fully supported.
 
The problem I am finding with the micro atx boards and cases is the number of drives it can hold. Right now I have a spare P4 2.8 W/HT, 2GB RAM and an intel mobo with only 2 SATA connectors on it but that would save me quite some money if I just needed drives, a case and a new SATA card or two.

What is a good base SATA card to use? I don't really want something really super expensive. I will most likely end up mirroring my 1 500gig to the other, and buying two more 500 gig drives and mirror them. I'm not really worried about hot swapping at this time, I can accomplish this later.

Also does anyone have reccomendations for cases that hold 5+ HDDs that is not SUPER HUGE!!!!!!!!! I could care less about 5" drive bays for a CD rom...
 
Well, any case with 3 or more 5.25" drive bays can easily hold 4 more 3.5" drives. Just get a 5.25" to 3.5" bay. I would say, just get a case with a bunch of 5.25" drive bays and switch them to 3.5s
 
mATX can go into pretty much any standard case you can find, so drive capacity shouldn't be an issue. That's not always the case with ITX boards.

As for sata cards, it largely depends on what sort of performance you're looking for and the OS you end up going with. If you don't care much about performance, you can get a $30 4 port PCI SATA card and it'll work fine in a FreeNAS box. You'll get decent performance, capable of streaming one (or maybe two in a stretch) compressed HD video (i.e. h.264 or similar), but not enough to fully saturate a GigE link.

For better performance (capable of saturating a GigE connection), the easiest and cheap way is to get a new motherboard with a bunch of SATA on board. The reasons being, you get ports with a direct link to the southbridge, avoiding any PCI bottleneck (as you would have on your older mobo); and it's cheaper than using PCIe add on cards (if you want any more than 2 ports on a PCIe card, you'll end up paying $100, for which you can get a good motherboard with 6 ports easily). With a new Celeron the upfront costs get a little higher, but it's still pretty cheap, and you're likely going to save some money on power by using a modern CPU and mobo vs. a power hungry P4 (which won't give you any performance benefit for software RAID).

If you want to use a mini tower case, get one of these: http://www.servercase.com/miva/miva...ode=SC&Product_Code=BR2U19&Category_Code=Acce
Turns your CD bays into hard drive storage. You can get nice hotswap units too, they cost more, but are pretty handy.
 
+1 for Windows Home Server

I have one and have used it since it was in beta over a year ago. I have never experienced any type of problem with it. It has saved my ass several times i had a raid5 on my desktop and i had a drive fail, well i pulled the wrong drive and lost everything, so I thought, I then rebuilt the array and restored everything on all the partitions using the WHS restore CD, because WHS backed up my entire comp every night.

It is the best windows product I have ever used. I swear by this thing, and it lets you easily connect to your shares, and computer through TSGateway over the internet.

In additon to all that my drives in my WHS consist of a 80gb dell oem raptor, WD400gb, Seagate400gb, external 250gb samsung. It is in no sort of raid it just used WHS drive entender and i get 70-80MB/s sustained write speeds over Gbe network.

All i can say grab on old comp throw some drives in it and install WHS.
 
I get Windows Server 2003 & 2008 from school for free, so I'd rather not pay for WHS. I think I'm looking more my linux, my windows sharing experiances have been crappy (although not through windows server) I just wish to let linux handle it.

OS asside, I think I just need to find a case and a few RAID cards or a new mobo/cpu combo. Can't decide at this time

Edit: I really want to save some money here, by keeping my current old setup but with the SATA and Gig Network cards being on PCI it sounds as I will have a pretty big bottle neck...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top