Mini ITX NAS Build?

[sniffsunderclouds]

I've been racking my brains recently and searching the net for ideas on a NAS build.

This is what I've selected so far:
Mobo - Asrock A330ION
Memory - 1GB or maybe 2GB DDR3 ??
HDD - 2 x WD 2TB SATAII Caviar Green
HDD - 1 x WD 2.5" Scorpio Blue for OS
Case - Lian-li A01
OS - either WHS, Ubuntu or Freenas ??

How does the above sound?

If I go for WHS what drivers do I use, I've read that XP drivers will probably work, the same question applies to the other OS's?

Any ideas or comments would be appreciated.

 

[00Roush]

What are your goals? Performance, power usage, expansion, ease of use, total needed storage, etc.

The setup you have listed looks just fine but it does depend on your goals.

You are correct about XP drivers working in WHS. Basically WHS is Windows Server 2003 so drivers for Server 2003 will work too. As for other OSes... FreeNAS is pretty much set right out of the box. If your hardware doesn't work it is a bit difficult to make it work. Ubuntu is kind of in the same boat but due to being popular you can possibly find information online about how to get hardware to work if it does not work out of the box.

00Roush

 

[sniffsunderclouds]

What are your goals? Performance, power usage, expansion, ease of use, total needed storage, etc.

The setup you have listed looks just fine but it does depend on your goals.

00Roush

Thanks for the feedback, I'll try and give you an idea of my needs.


Performance, I assume you're referring to actual throughput/bandwidth, I’m pretty sure this will come out when I tell you what some of my goals are; what is good performance and what is bad performance, I’m not sure as I’m only just beginning to learn about networks, perhaps you could advise me on this.


Power usage, I assume you’re referring to the amount of watts consumed. Well I wanted to keep this reasonably low (trying to keep my carbon footprint down) hence the selection of WD Green drives and Atom board.


Expansion, yes it needs to be a bit expandable/future proof e.g. expanding the storage a bit in the future if necessary.


Ease of use, yes it needs to be easy to use as my wife and daughter will need to store music, photos etc. As for initial setting up I suppose yes again it needs to be reasonably easy to use as I’m not that familiar with networks (but I’m learning).


Total needed storage, hmm that’s a difficult one and I suppose depends on some of my other goals I’ll list below, but I thought around 2TB would be sufficient for the moment.


My goals, what my NAS needs to do:

Store and make available anywhere in my home for playback on other networked devices, my ever expanding digital photo and music collection and new movie collection, currently @ around a combined 250GB and growing.


Make available some of the above media content to external computers that are not on the network, i.e. via the internet.


Provide a centralized storage for other files for sharing on the network.


Provide an automated backup of all computers on the network.


There needs to be a level of safety built in so I was thinking of a RAID 1 setup as a minimum. I was also thinking of including a drive caddy so these are hot-swappable; I don’t really know why this is necessary other than being able to change a faulty drive without dismantling the case but I thought it would look cool too.


That’s probably the extent of my needs at the moment. However, some expandability is good, as mentioned above, so there needs to be some flexibility with the NAS OS etc so I can add to it as time goes on.

Thanks
Sniffs............

 

[Jesse B]

One thing I'm just going to point out. RAID is not backup. It's a common misconception. RAID1 will simply make a duplicate of your drive. RAID is more for minimizing down-time (such as in mission critical servers). This does not prevent against accidental file deletion, file corruption, damage due to viruses, etc. The most secure way to "backup" data is to do a manual backup to another drive, preferably kept off site to protect against natural disasters, etc. This is quite excessive for the average user, but you have to think about how much your data means to you. RAID1 will protect against drive failure mostly. If that's all you need out of it, then ignore me

 

[00Roush]

Sniffs-

Based on your requirements the setup you had outlined should work. Since memory prices are pretty good I would say 2 GB RAM if possible. If you have two slots on the board go for a single stick. That way if in the future you wanted to add more you could. FreeNAS is probably the easiest to setup. Fairly sure you can find a tutorial online of how to set it up if you need. I would probably start there if you are not too familiar with linux.

00Roush

 

[tropmonky]

this is a simple question for me.

I just got done setting up a NAS myself.

I am on an extreme budget of $1,500 shipped. However I am needing iSCSI support for my VMware environment. You're just needing standard NAS stuff.

I first tried OpenFiler. It currently has issues with VMware, so I scrapped that and then loaded FreeNAS 8beta. After playing with FreeNAS 8 beta I found out that it didn't have iSCSI support yet, so I installed full version 7. Version 8 beta was far easier to install and setup, and the interface is much slicker to.

for the price, an Atom based system just doesn't make since right now IMO. You can double/quadrupole the processing power with a minimal power increase. Personally I'd go with the cheapest AMD Socket AM3 processor out, and in the future you could always upgrade it if need be. RAM= soooo cheap right now you might as go with 2 2GB ram sticks, I mean why not? Motherboard, I prefer the Gigabyte Ultra Durable series boards, but in any case I'd pick one with 6 SATA ports on it. FreeNAS installs the OS on a USB stick, so pick up a small 1-2GB usb stick. Then I used 4 2TB Western Digital Green drives.

When you setup FreeNAS you can set it up to use the XFS RAID setup, meaning that if a drive fails, just unplug it, replace the drive and it will rebuild on it's own. Also, with XFS, you can replace a drive with a larger drive, wait for it to sync up, then do the same to another drive until you've replaced all the drives, this way you'll end up with more space just by swapping out drives.

With FreeNAS you can setup file sharing via FTP if you want, or via HTTP with passwords from what I remember as well.

WHS, with the new updates err, feature cuts, coming I'd rather go with something that's more robust... and frankly, Linux based equipment has always been more reliable than windows based stuff for me.

 

[sniffsunderclouds]

Based on some of the feedback I've had I am now reconsidering my build. I now think the Atom board is out and I'm going for a cheep AMD board and AM3 processor, this is what I've picked out. Any feedback would be welcome.

MOB Gigabyte GA-MA78LMT-US2H 760G Socket AM3
CPU AMD Sempron 140 2.7GHz Socket AM3
MEM Kingston 2GB DDR3 1066MHz i5 Memory Module CL7 1.5V
HDD (OS) WD WD1600BEVT 160GB 2.5" Hard Drive Scorpio Blue
HDD (NAS) WD WD20EARS 2TB Hard Drive Caviar Green
Case Lian-li A01 Silver Desktop/Tower - No psu
PSU Zalman ZM400-ST 400W Two-Forward Switching PSU
RAID IcyBox IB-553SK Backplane

 

[00Roush]

Setup looks pretty good to me. Should be able to provide good performance and still allow for fairly low (40 watts or less) power use at idle. Not quite as low as an Atom build but much more processing power. Also since you have an AM3 socket motherboard you could upgrade the CPU if you ever needed more processing power.

00Roush

 

[sniffsunderclouds]

Setup looks pretty good to me. Should be able to provide good performance and still allow for fairly low (40 watts or less) power use at idle. Not quite as low as an Atom build but much more processing power. Also since you have an AM3 socket motherboard you could upgrade the CPU if you ever needed more processing power.

00Roush

Cool thanks 00Roush, and it works out a bit cheeper too. Thanks all for your help and feedback.

I might try and put together a short build log with photos as I go along.

Thanks
Sniffs