Buy vs Build?

[davidhayes]

Hi,
It's time to replace my ageing WHS box with something a littlemore reliable and performant.
Requirements (in no real order)
1. Run Squeeze Center
2. At least 4 drives, probably RAID 1 ideally I'd like the possibility to expand to 8 but I'm flexible here
3. Able to backup to an external USB drive
4. Fast read/write speeds 80mb/s + would be great
5. Reasonably easy to look after, I work in IT and I'm happy in *nux/Windows etc and happy to build a machine but I don't want to spend my life tweaking this box
6. Gigabit Ethernet (obviously?)
7. Low power consumption (compared to running a full power PC)
8. Quiet as possible
9. Torrent Client
I'm looking at the Synology DS411+ http://www.synology.com/us/products/DS411+/index.php but at ~$700+tax (CAD) I figure I should be able to build something better maybe using FreeNAS

Does anybody have any experience building a NAS rather thany buying one?
Thanks in advance for your advice
Dave

 

[thiggins]

Lots of info in this section of the forums.

 

[Generious]

For decent speeds 80+ it will cost you if you go down the vendor route!
You can build a decent system using a i3, 2Gb of Ram, 2 decent Intel Pro1000/PT/MT/GT nics and a 30E graphics card that will give you better performance and more room for expansion.

Depends if you rather build or buy from Vendor.
In my case what I did was
Bought a i5, 8GB of ram, cheap GFX card, Asus systemeboard, 3x pro1000 nics,2610SA controller, already had 10TB of storage mix of Samsung F3/ and Hitachi Disks and installed VMware ESXi 4.1 on it, running a freenas box/ and windows home server a amahi home server, a unbuntu mail server, untangle firewall box, windows 2008 DC, and a web server on it, and a torrent download station.

Did all of this for under 700Euro's.
The WHS write performance over lan from main system with bonded nics(ESX host nics are both active/active + jumbo frames on switch and main system and ESX host is between 95-110mbps on average...

To get the same level of performance from a vendor based solution you will pay for it so be prepared to spend a good chunk of money on it.

I wanted to do several things on my systems so this was the best flexible solution for me, and loving it all since I set it all up no issues either.

 

[teknojnky]

really, it all comes down to:

do you spend extra cash to save (potential) time

(setup/tweaking/optimizing/fixing/etc)

or do you spend the extra time to save (potential) cash

only you can answer that question.