Homebrew NAS?

[cyclone3d]

I am looking to setup a NAS mainly for photo storage.

I shoot everything in RAW. With my current camera, the images end up being about 10-12MB each.

What I am looking for:

1. Quick - able to fully use a 1Gb network so none of these cheapy 10-12MB/s home NAS units will work.

2. low power draw and quiet.

3. Expandable

4. Not super expensive - already have 2x 1TB drives that should handle my space requirements for quite a while. Also don't need any type of redundant RAID - backup everything with Carbonite.

I have done some looking around and it looks like I may need to go with either a low power server type box or a small box and an external eSata or similiar enclosure.

I would also most likely be running FreeNAS provided it supports the hardware I will be using... maybe Server 2008 R2 since I already own a legal copy.

Anybody have any recommendations?

 

[mwroobel]

I am looking to setup a NAS mainly for photo storage.

I shoot everything in RAW. With my current camera, the images end up being about 10-12MB each.

What I am looking for:

1. Quick - able to fully use a 1Gb network so none of these cheapy 10-12MB/s home NAS units will work.

2. low power draw and quiet.

3. Expandable

4. Not super expensive - already have 2x 1TB drives that should handle my space requirements for quite a while. Also don't need any type of redundant RAID - backup everything with Carbonite.

I have done some looking around and it looks like I may need to go with either a low power server type box or a small box and an external eSata or similiar enclosure.

I would also most likely be running FreeNAS provided it supports the hardware I will be using... maybe Server 2008 R2 since I already own a legal copy.

Anybody have any recommendations?

Since you are dealing with a relatively small amount of data, you would be well served by spending a few extra dollars on an external local drive to back up your data seperate from Carbonite. As a number of incidents in the past few days alone show, it is always better to have an offline local backup at your place than something in the cloud that can just disappear with something as simple as a warrant, as severe as an explosion or as malicious as a hacker. As to the NAS, there are quite a number of options all dependent on your checkbook. What is the maximum you would spend for a quality unit?

 

[pjkenned]

With something like that, get an Atom D525 (or better board.) Personally the Supermicro X7SPE-HF-D525 or X7SPA-HF-D525 will be good bets (E v. A is just size depending on the chassis you use.)

Low power, dual NICs, you can put 8GB of DDR3 in there relatively inexpensively and you can throw it out of the way with IPMI which gives you KVM over IP.

Another (bigger) option is a Sandy Bridge Pentium (e.g. G630) with a X9SCM-iiF which will be overkill for what you need.

Big things:
1. Get Intel NIC(s)
2. Make sure you buy at least a little over what you need. You may want to do something like use ESXi and have a pfSense gateway appliance plus either FreeNAS or something similar. Also, it is a pain to re-build so better to do once.
3. For this, there are less expensive Atom options, but you want the ICH southbridge not the NM10. Six 3.0gbps ports are good enough for a few mechanical drives.
4. Redundancy is good. Spend a few dollars so that if a drive fails, you do not have to go to the cloud for backup (I look at that as either an ease of access play for individual files or a disaster recovery type setup since editing RAW over broadband is still not great.)
5. Clean power - get a UPS because bad power can kill your NAS.

 

[af22]

I am looking to setup a NAS mainly for photo storage.

1. Quick - able to fully use a 1Gb network so none of these cheapy 10-12MB/s home NAS units will work.

Those don't really exist anymore with current gen NAS units.

Even FreeNAS now has ZFS support and much better performance.

The best bang for the buck would be the AMD Zacate E350, as it out performs Intel Atom and has 6 sata with 6gpbs ports. You could go with an ez distro such as FreeNAS. Or go hardcore with a full unix os such as solaris.

 

[cyclone3d]

Thanks for the tips. Been thinking about it and I may just get an external 4 or 5 bay eSata enclosure and use my wife's computer as the server since it is usually already powered on when I am wanting to do anything.

Then if I decide I want a seperate NAS server at some point, I can just use the external enclosure with it.

 

[blurp]

I just built an affordable yet expandable FreeNAS server with those parts for less than 280$

Coolermaster Elite 343 (cheap)
Intel Pentium G630 (more than enough CPU power, low power usage)
Kingston HyperX 2x4GB
Antec Basiq VP350
Intel DH77EB mATX (6 SATA ports and intel NIC)

I put 3 x 2 TB HDs in RAIDz1. This setup works great. I installed a miniDLNA plugin to stream music and movies to all devices (WDTV live, iPad, iPodtouch, laptop, desktop)aound the house. Works great. FreeNAS8 is getting more and more polished.

The advantage of a NAS is Sharing between multiple devices. If you don't need that feature, you're better of with 1 or 2 USB3 external exclosures.

 

[Vengance_01]

Look at the HP Microservers. They go on sale from time to time. It makes a perfect ZFS Nas. I use one with 4 1TB drives.

 

[x509]

I just built an affordable yet expandable FreeNAS server with those parts for less than 280$

I have an old system in an Antec P180 case. The motherboard is an ASUS A7M-266D. That's a dual processor board from about 2002. There are two AMD CPUs running in MP mode (with the pencil trick to enable multi-processor operation). This box has 4 GB of RAM and runs Win XP. There are a gigabit LAN and an Adaptec SATA II cards installed.

My question is: Does this system have enough power to run a homebrew LAN? Only cost might be the OS, if I'm not running FreeNAS?

If yes, do I need to buy anything else? Or is this a NAS for $zero?

 

[cyclone3d]

Should handle being a file server just fine I would think.

If the NIC is running in a PCI slot, you will not get full gigabit throughput though.

As long as you don't mind the somewhat high power draw that that system will draw compared to what is currently available I would say go ahead and use it.

And if you just run XP on it, you can just share out the drive and then map it with the other computers.

 

[bbenz33]

I recently built a FreeNAS box using an Asus E35M-i (might not be quite right) with 8Gb of ram. For the OS I use a 4Gb thumb drive which leaves me with 6 Sata3 ports for drives. I simply connected a spare USB header and left it dangling inside my case with the thumbdrive attached. It has a Gbit NIC which using iPerf tested quite well (currently my drives are holding me back). I already had the case and PSU, so my cost was roughly $135 (after MIR) for the MB, Ram and USB drive (Christmas tree shape on sale).

The system you described above should be more than ample to run FreeNAS. It might suck a little extra power, but like I me you can start with it and make sure you like it before you plunk down money on additional H/W. The above setup with 4 drives (2x 500Gb and 2x 250Gb) runs around 60-70 Watts.