Home NAS / Backup Server

S

Spades45

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 19, 2011
Messages
139
I have an old computer laying around that I'd like to turn into a central backup server. All I want is a PC hooked up to my router so that I can have a central place for my foobar2k library, Picasa photos, Clonezilla backups, Windows restore states etc. Obviously I'd like to access the files wirelessly. I also want RAID-5 for redundancy. I'm going to buy two SATA hard drives (to start), other than that I'm all set for hardware.

Any suggestions for an OS? All my computers run Win7 so something that plays well with Windows and won't require a whole lot of re-learning would be nice. I was originally planning on doing this with Windows Home Server back in 09 but I know it received less than stellar reviews, especially the newer version. Anything I should look at in the same vein?
 
Spades45 said:
I also want RAID-5 for redundancy. I'm going to buy two SATA hard drives (to start), other than that I'm all set for hardware.
Click to expand...
Do note that RAID-5 requires a minimum of three hard drives. In addition, it's generally recommended over in the Data Storage subforum to keep the OS on a different drive from the RAID array as that will make sure that any corruption within the OS doesn't pass on to the RAID array and vice versa.
Spades45 said:
Any suggestions for an OS? All my computers run Win7 so something that plays well with Windows and won't require a whole lot of re-learning would be nice. I was originally planning on doing this with Windows Home Server back in 09 but I know it received less than stellar reviews, especially the newer version. Anything I should look at in the same vein?
Click to expand...
FreeNAS since there's dozens upon dozens of tutorials on how to install and use it.
 
Windows Home Server is actually pretty good, but do RAID 1. WHS will create one small partition for OS. However, if you have Windows 8 and are not MBR, you need updates.
 
WHS is pretty good, FreeNAS is supposed to be very easy. If you have any linux experience it's very easy to set up any linux distro with mdadm/lvm. I run FreeBSD with a ZFS array. Kind of like FreeNAS but without the GUI. I've used FreeBSD off and on for many years though and am fairly familiar with it.

There are a couple other setups like FreeNAS out there as well.

You could always just use another Windows machine and share stuff, too. FreeNAS would probably get my vote as you get ZFS and a really simple to install/configure interface.
 
I had the WHS 1 and moved on to WHS 2011. I think it's got a bad rap mainly because they dropped the pooled drives. While that was convenient, for data security WHS 2011 has drive mirroring http://connecteddigitalworld.com/2011/02/10/windows-home-server-2011-drive-mirror-video-edition/ that I use with no problems. I also have two external 2 TB drives that alternate backups of the internal mirrored drives. It's funny that the first version was criticized for not supporting raid, and then the second version supports raid and gets criticized for dropping pooled drives. In any case, I've used both for years with no issues other than a hardware problem (bad memory stick) that caused it to blue screen. Fixed the memory and it's been on for months backing up everything every night. Restored my wife's laptop twice after hard drive crashes. The backups work wirelessly for the laptops if they are in sleep mode so WHS can wake them. And, you can access your data through the internet if you set that up. For $50 it's worth it if your hardware is stable.
 
Last edited:
change of plans, i'm going to use unRAID. i plan on using an efficient PSU (maybe picoPSU) and underclocking the CPU. anything else i should look out for?
 
I used to use FreeNAS, but I have migrated over to Nas4Free(A fork of FreeNAS) I did this a long time ago due to FreeNAS charging for ZFS28 at the time and didn't like the new system. Nas4Free is a truly non commercial system and works very well. I have never had a crash and am just waiting another six hours on a resliver to double my storage capacity with never taking the filesystem offline other than to swap drives. I can have any two drives fail and not lose data.
 
Spades45 said:
change of plans, i'm going to use unRAID. i plan on using an efficient PSU (maybe picoPSU) and underclocking the CPU. anything else i should look out for?
Click to expand...

Why underclock the CPU, modern CPUs have excellent power conservation built-in.

Great call on the unRAID, I used it for many years and it's spectacular at redundantly storing large amounts of data for a very low cost. I no longer use it because of the poor write speeds, but for media collections and non-IO intensive stuff, it is excellent. If you need the supermicro 8 port card (SUPERMICRO AOC-SASLP-MV8) that everyone uses with it, give me a shout, mine is just sitting on my desk.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top