Infinite Expandable NAS?

[holygamer]

I do a lot of video and audio editing so I use up a lot of hard drives. So I'm looking for a NAS which allows me to add as many hard drives as I want and I would like the drives to show as 1 volume (hard drive) instead of many hard drives. This should be as cheap as possible. I've seen NAS's on the market but they all seem pointless as they only seem to support about 4 drives. Or am I incorrect and many more hard drives can be added to a NAS via USB 3.0?

I don't really understand RAID and I don't know anything about NAS's, hence all my questions. I read that a type of RAID only uses half your hard drive capacity and the other as a backup or something - I don't want that type. I want to be able to use all my storage space. Also I should be able to remove a hard drive from the NAS and plug the hard drive into another computer and all the data should still be accessible on that hard drive.

Is USB 3.0 or gigabit the best option? To complicate things further, I would like to get a PC in future which has 4 Bluray writer drives. Each drive will be burning a different ISO to disc from the NAS at the same time presumably at full burning speed as USB 3.0 can handle that (at the moment I can only burn 1 disc at a time with USB 2.0).

So if a purpose built NAS or a home built NAS can offer all of that then please let me know. I'm looking for the cheapest option.

[blueball]

how much do you want to spend? Synology do the 1812+

http://www.synology.com/products/pro...812%2B&lang=uk

[holygamer]

Yeah that was the kind of thing I was hoping to avoid as it costs over £800 and again it's limited to 8 or so drives.

Isn't there any way I can just add as many drives as I want to a cheap PC which I can use for a NAS? Or is there a cheap NAS which I could just add as many USB 3.0 drives to as I want?

[blueball]

I "think" it will be limited by the drive controller you can fit. If you want an infinite number of drives you would want an infinite number of connectors. USB can cascade up to 127 devices but these would each appear as a separate drive not as an extended volume

[holygamer]

So basically no matter what type of NAS I get or make, if I use USB then each drive would appear as a separate drive not as an extended volume. Is that correct?

[blueball]

To the best of my understanding, yes. However, there is always someone with more knowledge so I'm on standby to be proved wrong

[holygamer]

OK then so USB isn't an option. So I need a NAS that supports SATA III hard drives of any size. I noticed that most only support drives under 3TB. I would also like it to be energy efficient and not consume lots of power. At the moment I've got several USB drives connected to my PC so it's using a lot of power with each drive having it's own power supply.

I'm looking for a NAS which allows me to add as many drives as I want which will show them as an extended volume (not seperate drives).

By the way what is the maximum number of SATA III drives that can be added to a NAS?, USB 3.0 supports 127.

NAS's you buy seem to be really expensive considering that they are just basic PC's with room for multiple hard drives and you don't even get any hard drives with them!

Could I just buy a basic PC with room for lots of internal hard drives and use that as a NAS? If so, what PC should I buy? From what I've read you only need a low-spec PC to power a NAS.

However a PC case can only hold so many drives. How would I add more drives outside of the case?

What NAS software should I use so I can show the hard drives as an extended volume (not seperate drives)?

[Disturbedguy]

You should also post questions like this in other parts of the forum, such as the hardware section.

[g8ina]

Moved

[peterb]

There will be ,imitations to the number of drives you can add to any system, either by the number of SATA ports on a motherboard or drive controller. You can of course add multiple controller cards to a motherboard, the limitations then become the bandwidth of the motherboard bus.

The other solution is to use multiple SAS controller boards which are more expandable. SATA drives will work in SAS controllers.

Thunderbolt may be a lower cost option in future, as the specification allows for daisy-chaining, so you could daisy-chain multiple devices. However Thunderbolt has been limited to Apple PCs, and is only now becoming available on higher end motherboards. Thunderbolt peripherals such as hard drive enclosures are also very rare at the moment.

[abaxas]

First.. LOL at infinity on the cheap

Providing your nas (which will be running linux) mounts USB drives to a directory currently in your share, you can do whatever you like. Each drive will be separate but also one 'drive letter'.

Personally the infinite idea is silly. Buy what you need for now + reasonable expansion.

[IronWarrior]

Buy an Fractal Design XL case.

You can stick 14 HDD's in there. (Get a USB DVD drive if you need to use one) then get a really cheap motherboard bundle and PSU to make a "NAS" Shouldn't cost no more then £250. If you want a really good HDD controller card, then that would cost a lot.

I believe this is the cheapest way you going to be doing this, there is no real cheap and nasty way to make a infinite expandable nas drive.

Unless you want to do some DIY? You could build some shelving units that hold 3.5 HDD's like convert a book case, cut holes in the back to poke some extra long cables and run them to a cheap Motherboard and PSU to power it all.

[Ross1]

Windows 8 has storage pooling/ "spaces", up to something like 50TB a volume. Or just use ZFS, unraid, flexraid, or something else im not thinking of. Certainly an off the shelf NAS is going to hinder your expandability.

Hardware is fairly simple. Main thing worth thinking about is whether you go for a cheap mobo with limited sata ports, or a larger mobo with 10+ sata ports, so you only need worry about extra sata controllers after filling up all of those.

[jim]

The big question is what you're going to connect all of the drives to. Realistically you'll need a RAID card and they're not cheap. Not if you want a half-decent one (and you do).

[b0redom]

Why do you need that much space anyway? Even something like a MicroServer running RAID-6, you'd be able to squeeze 12TB usable in there with 6x 3TB drives.

If you need more, buy another server. It makes sense in terms of scalability in any case.

[Ross1]

You can get 8 ports for less than £100, with something like the AOC-SASLP-MV8. You can get Mobos with 8 sata ports for £80. That should give you 15 (reserve one for the OS) without having to use expanders or anything. You can use more pci-e cards like the AOC-SASLP-MV8 to add more after that.

As for a case, some people go for full tower cases. Sometimes using cases that have a lot of 5.25 inch bays isnt so bad, because 4in3 converters are pretty good, or if you are in real need of more you can use 5in3 converters (however, the lack of space and ∴ airflow around the drives isnt ideal). The other option is buying a big server case, which can have up to 24 bays (or double height of those with like 50 bays..... but those are a bit mental.