NAS recommendations

[Hicks12]

Been thinking about this for awhile now and I have just moved house so this is an option, looking for a NAS to replace my DAS systems. The main uses will be for file storage(long term and short term) and media streaming, possibly a few devices at once as I plan to setup a few systems(rasp pi probably ) for the bedroom kitchen and living room TVs. I am ideally looking for something thats as cheap as possible but then I know if I spend to little I will end up with a NAS that cant even surpass 10MB/s which isnt an option for me, I dont expect to be maxing out drive speeds but If I could get near 50MB/s read/write for the drives that should be great.

Looking at spending ~£100 (excluding drives!) for the system, I have been looking around and I can only see 2 bay setups that go for ~£60 (D-LINK Zyxle or whatever it is) but I really would like a 4 bay at the least just so I can store everything and run it in raid 5, I came to the conclusion that this 4 bay buffalo NAS http://www.ebuyer.com/507103-buffalo...FQTMtAodbAgAcQ is the only real option in this regard, I would be willing to pay £150 but this seems far to much for what I get.

I am quite a tech enthusiast and I have no issues with setting up my own NAS i.e FreeNas/Windows server 2012(I get for free as a student ) so I just started looking at the HP microservers again and just my luck that I missed the cashback deal that has been going for yonks by only a month . I thought maybe I can just go one step further and build my own, I have put down a very brief list of components and if I cannot find an on the shelf solution then I will go ahead and build it as I could do with a new project .

CPU: looking for a low AMD/Intel chip, found an AMD C60 integrated in an asus board!
Motherboard: Asus C60M1-I Motherboard Only £60 with the cpu included
RAM: Not sure how much ram I need? Theres a PNY PC3-10660 / 3GB / 1333Mhz / DDR3 / 240pin DIMM for £9, dont think dual channel would make a noticeable difference in this scenario.
GPU: Integrated.
PSU: salvaging an enermax 350w PSU
CASE: Not sure on this one, want at least 4 drives and it shouldn't be massive as its going in my room but it seems to be a hard requirement, the Cooler Master Elite 120 Advanced looks lovely but it only supports 3 drives which isnt what I want, the next case I case was the bitfenix Prodigy Mini-ITX Cube Case @ £60 its a bit pricey and its fairly big but looks nice, any other suggestions? I am very open to buying stuff secondhand whatever is cheapest and it should be in black, can go with silver/metal if its a must but it needs to hold at least 4 drives.

OS: FreeNas or windows server, probably FreeNas.

Anything else I missed? So far its looking like this will cost me ~ £129 then whatever the cost of Hard drives will be, I would also like recommendations on the drives to use I was planning on getting the newer western digital 3TB RED drives, I have never had a WD fail nor a samsung for that matter but I have had Seagate drives fail and its just my personal preference that WD are for me, I have had them since my first pc 17 years ago haha, they cost ~ £105 at the moment and I would buy two of these and if I need more then I will jump up and add in more of the same drives so I will actually start out with RAID 1 then add in 2 more down the line.

Anything I have missed? I think I will order this sometime next week if this is all ok .

Any help is appreciated!

[Skinleech]

The microserver deal will come back. I bought an n54l recently with £50 cashback then a few weeks later the price was down & the cashback was raised to £100.

Great bit of kit & with Thebays custom bios update you can use sata 5/6 in ahci mode, giving you up to 6 drives in the box. If your os choice fits on a USB stick you can even boot from an internal usb port. Worth waiting a little while for to see if the cashback deal reappears.

[Bonebreaker777]

Does those microservers support ECC and undervolting? Cause that would make then even more valuable in terms of a future NAS.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

With the 5.25" bay,you can fit 4 3.5" HDDs in the Elite 120.

[DanceswithUnix]

The traditional recommendation is that you need at least 1MHz of CPU per MB/s you want to send over ethernet, so you need a 1GHz core just to drive the network stack on a gigabit link. That makes a C60 up to the task, but there isn't much left in reserve for things like RAID parity calculations and running the filesystem.

I would think an FM2 A4-4000 would be ideal, but to keep the cost down that would probably force you into uATX as the ITX boards are a tad expensive.

[aidanjt]

Does those microservers support ECC and undervolting? Cause that would make then even more valuable in terms of a future NAS.

I'm not sure about undervolting, the CPU is already very low powered anyway. But the ECC memory? Yes. It comes with 1x2GB ECC UDIMM stick out of the box, and one slot empty for expansion.

[gagaga]

Good choices. The 3TB WD reds are great drives.

Get a separate drive for the OS - saves pain later if you keep your data completely separate from the OS (I use the smallest 2.5" drives I can get hold of for low power) ... this is especially true if you might flip between Windows/Freenas etc

FreeNAS good, but if you have Windows PCs, the £35 spent on WHS2011 is a fine investment - automatic daily backups are awesome for those times you drop your girlfriends laptop and break the hard disk ...

Be warned, this is a slippery slope. I started with two 180GB IBM deskstars and now have 14 3TB drives for data, 2 for PC backups and another 2 for parity. Plus a microserver to backup the backups ...

[abaxas]

Forget buying an intel/amd based nas if you are worried about power consumption.

Most arm devices should come under 20w with two drives while a microserver is 30+ without any drives at all.

Hence you are looking at 20 quid + a year, just for the difference.

[Dooms]

Be warned, this is a slippery slope. I started with two 180GB IBM deskstars and now have 14 3TB drives for data, 2 for PC backups and another 2 for parity. Plus a microserver to backup the backups ...

Mistype with 14x 3TB drives?!?

I'm currently sitting at 4x 2TB internal and 4x 1TB external on the microserver with the only method of backup being a schedualed task which runs a .bat that does a DIR listing .txt of each drive and dumps it into dropbox (so if I lose a drive I know what I've lost ).

[gagaga]

Forget buying an intel/amd based nas if you are worried about power consumption.

Most arm devices should come under 20w with two drives while a microserver is 30+ without any drives at all.

Hence you are looking at 20 quid + a year, just for the difference.

Not necessarily - my atom system (Intel motherboard - D945GSEJT) idled at 12w at the wall (disks spun down) and was around 20w with drive spinning (2x2TB WD greens, a laptop system drive and a cheapo pci sata card). I've now got a DN2800MT which is dual core and even more frugal. You're right in that most of pre-built intel based NAS boxes are higher as they use the desktop atom chips that are less frugal.

I'm waiting on the new intel based microservers - i'm guessing that they'll be in the under 20w bracket at idle too (i've got an N36 that is off most of the time).

Mistype with 14x 3TB drives?!?

Nope, and i'm down to the last 200 gig so time to start looking at the 4TB drives now the prices are getting sensible.

Backup? I've got multiple copies of important stuff (photos, music) including offsite ... the video isn't backed up but i've got the blurays and really can't justify a second server of the same size. I use flexraid with dual parity so fire/theft would be a problem but i can (and have) managed drive failures.

Big server uses a supermicro board + E3-1220L v2 + 16GB + 2x IBM M1015s. It's about 65w idle with most of the drives spun down. The sata cards are thirsty (~8w each idle) plus the IPMI uses about 5-6w too. Each drive adds 1-2w spundown.

[Dooms]

Sounds like a great setup. I've started looking at how to expand mine but space is an issue at the moment so I've resorted to house keeping & a pause on downloads until resolved

[DanceswithUnix]

I'm waiting on the new intel based microservers - i'm guessing that they'll be in the under 20w bracket at idle too (i've got an N36 that is off most of the time).

Hadn't heard of them. Looks like they should be a bit quicker, I presume if they are celeron based you lose the ECC on the ram?

[Dooms]

I need a microserver that has enough juice to do PLEX transcoding on the fly... so some sort of Core Duo 2Ghz equivalent

[abaxas]

A lower powered nas with a better media player is the answer.

Transcoding is always a poor option.

[DanceswithUnix]

I need a microserver that has enough juice to do PLEX transcoding on the fly... so some sort of Core Duo 2Ghz equivalent

That is sort of why my home server is a socket FM1 quad core running CentOS. I could have put together a cheaper & simpler machine, but basically I can't imagine a home task that will tax this one. After all, if you need the grunt to transcode a media stream, then perhaps next week you will need to handle two streams at the same time

A lower powered nas with a better media player is the answer.

Transcoding is always a poor option.

Doesn't that mean that if you have 5 clients then you now need 5 machines capable of transcoding to their output resolution, rather than one?

[Dooms]

A lower powered nas with a better media player is the answer.

Transcoding is always a poor option.

Not really. I use XBMC on all TV's at home with no transcoding needed to play 1080 rips however it is much easier to use PLEX on mobile devices both in and out of the house. The sync and offline modes for the new versions of plex are awesome to quickly grab some content for an upcoming train journey etc.