Old Shuttle PC as NAS/File Server

[timtim86]

Hi everyone,

I have an old Shuttle ST20G5 lying around that I'm considering using as NAS. I believe it has an Athlon 64 3200+, 768mb RAM (!) and GeForce 8400 video card, and I've got a couple of 1TB hard drives to put in it.

Would this be viable as a NAS? And if so, what would be the best setup in terms of OS? Really looking for low power consumption ... would it be far off a proper NAS box?

Cheers for any help (and apologies if any of that sounds stupid)

Tim

[tfboy]

I don't see why not. Although I have no experience of shuttles, you could put a small NAS-friendly OS on it and be up and running quickly.

As far as power consumption goes, I'd probably change the GeForce GPU for something a lot lighter. Does the shuttle have onboard graphics? If you wanted real low power, you could even consider removing the graphics card once it's set up.

As far as OS goes, you can go for any form of Linux, or something like FreeNAS which is basic but will serve you perfectly as a simple NAS file server.

I got a cheap copy of Windows Home Server (v1) for my HP Microserver as I wanted the convenience of a full Windows OS. The kind of OS you chose won't have much impact on the power consumption.

You can always get a power consumption meter and see what it's like. My Microserver is around 20-25W with 2x 2TB HDDs installed. IF the current idle power consumption is a lot higher, say about 40W, then you might want to consider a different platform altogether.

A compromise is to use standby / power off with WOL to bring it back up when you need it.

[timtim86]

I don't see why not. Although I have no experience of shuttles, you could put a small NAS-friendly OS on it and be up and running quickly.

As far as power consumption goes, I'd probably change the GeForce GPU for something a lot lighter. Does the shuttle have onboard graphics? If you wanted real low power, you could even consider removing the graphics card once it's set up.

As far as OS goes, you can go for any form of Linux, or something like FreeNAS which is basic but will serve you perfectly as a simple NAS file server.

I got a cheap copy of Windows Home Server (v1) for my HP Microserver as I wanted the convenience of a full Windows OS. The kind of OS you chose won't have much impact on the power consumption.

You can always get a power consumption meter and see what it's like. My Microserver is around 20-25W with 2x 2TB HDDs installed. IF the current idle power consumption is a lot higher, say about 40W, then you might want to consider a different platform altogether.

A compromise is to use standby / power off with WOL to bring it back up when you need it.

Thanks for the response. The GPU in my main desktop has incidently just (literally 2 hours ago) failed (completely randomly), so I've stolen the GeForce from the Shuttle to use as a temporary replacement. The Shuttle does indeed have a built in GPU so I'll just use that.

The motherboard only has 2 SATA slots so I think I'll be getting a PCI or PCI-e SATA card - any suggestions as to which one? Planning on turning the 5.25" bay to 3.5" so it needs 3 internal ports.

Finally- do you think it'll need any more RAM?

[tfboy]

I just looked up the specs (conveniently, there's a review of the shuttle on Hexus!) and it looks like there's only a standard PCI slot, so only PCI, not PCI-e.

You can probably get a standard PCI SATA card although I think the majority are PCIe today. The onboard Broadcom NIC appears to be GbE so that's fine.

It also looks like there's a standard IDE port so don't discount that. If you have an old IDE drive lying around, you can always use that. Most NAS-capable OSes will allow you to mix and match different drives / buses and have one large logical drive. Of course you won't get any benefit of RAID or redundancy, but I'd argue you shouldn't rely on RAID as a form of backup, it's not! But it does mean that if the data you want to put on the NAS is critical, you do need to have it secured or backed up somewhere else.

I doubt you need more RAM - whether you do or not will depend on the OS you put on there. Something like FreeNAS will be fine. If you were to put WS2008R2 (not that I'd suggest it!), you'd need more really.

[timtim86]

Thanks again for your response. It definitely does have PCI-e- as I mentioned, I just nicked the GPU out of it to put in my main box (even though it's pretty rubbish, but it'll do for now).

You're right though, I could use the IDE slot. The only reason I wasn't going to was because I don't have an IDE drive. You can get an adapter IDE -> SATA I, could just get that I suppose?