Small 5bay cases/systems?

[gaikokujinkyofusho]

Despite this being the DIY section I am actually hoping to find a somewhat premade solution but am not totally against putting something together (just haven’t had a lot of time lately). I am hoping to find a system that is minimal in size (think 5bay drobo-ish in size) that is linux/bsd friendly in terms of hardware. I am looking for fairly compact because I move around a fair bit (once to twice a year) and am abroad so a power supply that can handle 220v. Green is good too 
What I am hoping to do is install something like freeNAS for the time being and would like to be able to run a IMAP server, cloud software (seafile looks promising), and some sync software (hopefully btsync but if not then will try to re-figure out rsync, networking has never come easy to me).

I have been able to find lots of NASes and lots of larger-than-i-would-like cases but not so much in terms of compact solutions and very little in terms of compact ready to go solutions that wouldn’t totally break the bank (I was thinking it would run something similar to what a NAS would run, like 400-550 range?). I have drives and actually would be keen on trying a setup where I could have five 3.5” drives for RAID and SSD that I have laying around for the OS. Thoughts and suggestions (esp hdwar deals) very much appreciated!

Thx in advance!

 

[00Roush]

Well first question is do you want/need hotswap?

First thing that comes to my mind is possibly the HP MicroServer. The new Gen8 versions are hotswap but only support 4 drives. Sounds like they have mixed reviews... Also fairly new so they might not be fully supported yet by some of the Linux/*BSD OSes. HP ProLiant N54L might be a better option but no hot swap.

If you wanted to do your own build you could possibly start with something like this http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811112339 or maybe http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811352027. There are probably many more case options out there but small NAS style cases for DIY are not near as common as desktop cases. Some can be very expensive and are not sold very many places.

Also if you are thinking about FreeNAS you might also want to consider NAS4Free.

00Roush

 

[gaikokujinkyofusho]

Doh, important detail sorry to have forgotten it. Hotswap is actually not critical to me, would be nice to have but 5 bays is more important.

Thanks for the links, i will check them out. I'm willing to pay a bit more for the convenience of something compact but guess I will weigh my options. Kinda along that vein (I think that is the term) is there anyway to form some sort of distributed backup across multiple boxes ("distributed data store" i think?)? Think like freenet has (as i understand it) where files uploaded to that network are distributed across tons of computers with some redundancy built in there, of course their aim is more privacy etc but it seems like that would be really handy for someone with a mishmash of hardware (and it would fit nicely with my future plans). Just a thought.

As for NAS4Free, I hadn't heard of it but looks really interesting I will def look into it more thanks!!

Edit: Looked into NAS4Free... doh, i am waaaay behind the times, knew I hadn't looked at freenas for awhile but didn't know it had been that long, so now know its effectively nas3free, mental note made. Also, in reading (always helps) it *seems* that I might have started to have answered another one of my questions, the "distributed storage" question. On the NAS4Free site there was a mention of HAST and i've been trying to read up on and understand (harder than the actual reading part) HAST, and it seems that HAST is effectively what I was looking for. So thanks and thanks again! Happy new year as well!

 

[00Roush]

Glad you checked out NAS4Free. If you didn't know NAS4Free is the continuation of the original FreeNAS project after the name was bought by iX Systems.

I haven't really checked out HAST that much but my understanding is it is to allow for something like you described. Then it also provides failover in case a server goes down. Let us know what you end up going with.

00Roush