• SNBForums Code of Conduct

    SNBForums is a community for everyone, no matter what their level of experience.

    Please be tolerant and patient of others, especially newcomers. We are all here to share and learn!

    The rules are simple: Be patient, be nice, be helpful or be gone!

NAS Advice

Darkweave

New Around Here
Hello,

I'm looking for some advice on building an NAS, I've looked all over the internet but I'm having trouble finding hardware to match what I already have that's definitely compatible with what I want:

  • Some form of redundancy, RAID5, 01 or Z, preferably Z based on my research
  • As low power consumption as possible
  • Ease of setup and use, I've only ever used Windows before
  • At least 2.5TB storage space
  • The ability to play music files and videos on my main PC (Win7 64-bit) from the NAS
  • To be able to set up folders with different permissions so that my house-mates can access my media files but not my personal documents
  • To be able to remotely maintain the system so that I don't need to keep a monitor etc. attatched

I have an mATX case, 4x1TB 3.5" HDDs, a 40GB 2.5" HDD, 2x1GB DDR2 800HMz RAM and a 400W Corsair PSU. I'm hoping to be able to use all of these in the build.

Can anyone recommend some fairly cheap hardware compatible with what I already have and compatible with an OS with a ZFS file system so that I can run software RAIDZ? I'm hoping to spend less than £200, preferably as close to £100 as possible.

I'm having trouble finding anything more than part answers online and I'd really really appreciate any help. I've been wanting to do this for ages but I don't want to buy a MB just to find out that there are no operating systems that support ZFS and RAIDZ with drivers for the NIC or whatever.

Thanks very much in advance. :)
 
Last edited:
I'd recommend a cheap AMD cpu that runs on the AM3 socket. The lower end models are very affordable, and won't use a whole bunch of power. It will have considerably more power than an Atom-based setup would have as well. For a motherboard, pretty much anything will do.

I'd consider getting an Intel based gigabit NIC, if your network is set up for gigabit speeds. 100mbit can be a bit slow on file transfers.

For ZFS, you'll need a BSD or Solaris based distribution. There's a whole bunch out there. FreeNAS and Nexenta are examples of this. There's a bunch of information about this floating around both here and on other websites/forums, so I'm going to leave it at that for now.

There are numerous software packages for streaming audio and video. I'm using Subsonic for streaming audio right now, just because it's in fairly early stages and I like testing things. There's a whole bunch of options floating around, and again, I won't get into it at this point in time.

Hope this helped a bit,


- Jesse
 

Similar threads

Latest threads

Support SNBForums w/ Amazon

If you'd like to support SNBForums, just use this link and buy anything on Amazon. Thanks!

Sign Up For SNBForums Daily Digest

Get an update of what's new every day delivered to your mailbox. Sign up here!
Top