Afternoon all, I was very happy with the advice and guidance you gave me for my desktop build (still tweaking but should be my October project!). I still need to build a reliable NAS and an HTPC, this post is regarding the NAS.
I was going to just whack a load of old disks into an old desktop and run FreeNAS or something on there. But I'd rather build something specifically for the task. Below are the requirements and some thoughts on components. Any thoughts or recommendations are welcome.
The main uses for the NAS will be:
+ Media storage/streaming (HD video to XBMC etc., shouldn't require transcoding)
+ File/Backup storage
These are, for me, the important characteristics of the build:
+ Decent redundancy (RAIDZ2)
+ 24/7 availablity (although the option to schedule shutdown/WOL would be nice)
+ Low power consumption and low noise
+ Fast throughput to (potentially) multiple clients
+ Plenty of capacity (8TB+)
Motherboard/CPU/RAM
I've seen a few fanless motherboards with embedded Atom processors running between 1.6 and 2,0ghz. These seem ideal but also seem to have a lot of features that I won't need in a NAS (WiFi, Audio, GPU etc). There also seem to be about a million different versions of Atom chips available.
Ideally I'd like a basic board, with Gbit ethernet and 6+SATA ports for drives. Ideally, it would spin down the drives when not in use and maybe stagger the drive spin up on boot to avoid overwhelming the psu. Most of the atom board sI've seen only have 2 SATA ports, would I just need a PCI SATA card to add the extra ports?
I've seen boards with dual ethernet ports - would this make any difference to performance on my network? The house is fully Cat6 with Gigabit router and switches.
Note that I don't NEED it to be Atom based, happy to consider all alternatives if the price is good and can have fanless cooling.
RAM doesn't have to be spectacular, Ideally 4-8Gb and cheap.
Graphics/Audio
Basic on-board graphics that I can hook a screen up to for basic setup and diagnostics will be fine, but the machine will be run headless 99.99% of the time.
Storage
My current storage requirements are about 6-7TB. It'll increase gradually, but most of it is just media that I can move to optical storage once I'm bored of it. I see Amazon are doing WD Red 3TB drives for £104 delivered, designed for NAS and 3 yr warranty. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Western-Digi...dp/B008JJLW4M/ any thoughts on these?
I'd like some redundancy, RAIDZ1 seems to be optimal with 5 drives (1 for redundancy), giving me 12Tb of storage if I bought 3TB disks. If I went RAIDZ2 I would need to add an extra drive (6 appears to be optimal) giving the same storage but an extra disk for redundancy.
Chassis
This is just going to sit quietly in a room that is rarely used so doesn't have to look amazing. It'd be nice to be compact and have hotswap for 6 (or more?) disks. But hot swapping isn't important to me. Just something cheap and practical would be fine. I'll admit to not having done much research into NAS cases, so all suggestions welcome there.
OS
FreeNAS looks like it'll do everything I need. For free. I'll run it from a USB stick.