Help Spec'ing New Home NAS

I'm in need of an inexpensive, yet reliable NAS for my home that still manages to perform well enough for my needs which are (in order of importance):

- As inexpensive as possible (softRAID with FreeNAS or OpenFiler)
- Reliable (although I will likely make routine off-site backups to large USB drives).
- Ability to be expandable.
- Fast enough to be able to have media (MP3's, DVD's, Bluray, etc.) streamed from at LEAST two locations in the house simultaneously over my existing 1GB network.

Is it as simple as getting a motherboard with enough SATAII ports, throwing in 1.5TB drives, a smaller boot drive for installing FreeNAS or OpenFiler, setting up whichever OS I choose, creating an array and away we go or am I missing something here?

Mr. Chambers said:

Is it as simple as getting a motherboard with enough SATAII ports, throwing in 1.5TB drives, a smaller boot drive for installing FreeNAS or OpenFiler, setting up whichever OS I choose, creating an array and away we go or am I missing something here?

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From my experience it's really that simple. I built a FreeNas box with a mix of drives with a JBOD and was pulling 12 mb/s read/writes (the card and the switch were both 10/100). That's crappy I know, but it was really old equipment. As long as you have Gigabit ethernet across the board, you're going to see some huge jumps. Just find a board with a bunch of sata ports.

You can also just run a regular linux distro. I have my 20 drive server (6 currently) running on Ubuntu Desktop with mdadm software RAID and shares via Samba. FreeNAS is not expandable, btw.

Are you building this from scratch or are you trying to recycle parts? How many drives are you wanting to use and what kind of failure protection are you wanting?

If you are streaming blu-ray you will certainly want gigabit lan. 10/100 can barely handle one stream. Gigabit is so prevalent on motherboards today, and you already have a gigabit network, it only makes sense to use it. I went from 11-12mb/s on a 10/100 to 75mb/s on a gigabit connection (likely drive limited). This made copying blu-ray encodes super fast between my htpc and server. A single movie transfer taking up to 20 minutes became 2-3 minutes.

I put in a 24 port gigabit switch and ran at least a couple of lines to every room of my house when I remodeled my basement last year so the network is covered.

As for the parts - if I *could* recycle then I'd be fine doing so - my concern was finding hardware that was compatible with FreeNAS, but I wasn't aware it wasn't expandable so there's a negative to it already. I've read up on OpenFiler as well, but perhaps you're right Maxvla it's certainly possible that a Linux server distro would serve my needs as well.

I would be buying new 1TB (or possibly even 1.5TB drives) and would at a minimum like the array to be able to withstand 1 drive dying and not losing any information. 2 would be better obviously but it's not a deal-breaker for me.

I have access to all the P4-era motherboards/RAM/CPU's I could ever need, but I'm leaning towards a new low-power AMD or Intel chip and mobo, with 6 onboard SATAII ports as well - just not sure the P4 with some SATAII PCI cards would give me enough performance?

If I use a Linux distro with mdadm what happens if the Linux OS goes to hell? Is the RAID easily recoverable or transferable to another OS install? Sorry for all the questions but this is definitely not something I've dabbled in before! Thanks.

Openfiler also isn't truly expandable. It apparently is a feature to be implemented at a future date. I found out first hand when I tried to expand my 4 disk Openfiler RAID6 to a 6 disk RAID6.

Here's a link to my build thread. Make sure to read it all, not just the first post.

http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=601854

I am not well versed in linux at all. I am currently running with some risk having only 1 OS drive, but it is a drive I have used for many years so I know it is trustworthy. At some point I need to figure out how to add redundancy to it, but currently I'm content with what I have.

How many drives are you looking to use?

WHS is expandable

Maxvla said:

Openfiler also isn't truly expandable. It apparently is a feature to be implemented at a future date. I found out first hand when I tried to expand my 4 disk Openfiler RAID6 to a 6 disk RAID6.

Here's a link to my build thread. Make sure to read it all, not just the first post.

http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=601854

I am not well versed in linux at all. I am currently running with some risk having only 1 OS drive, but it is a drive I have used for many years so I know it is trustworthy. At some point I need to figure out how to add redundancy to it, but currently I'm content with what I have.

How many drives are you looking to use?

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Thanks for the link Maxvla I'll read through the thread. I'm thinking at a minimum 3 1TB drives at least to start (or whatever the minimum quantity of drives is where I could lose one but not lose the array). Also it depends on if the solution I go with is easily expandable or not. Many decisions!

I have a rack (but no back rails, so I don't believe it would be able to support a case like yours fully loaded). Not to mention that most of the "computer" stuff goes back in the utility room, away from the theater for noise/safety/etc.

The case I'm hoping to use because I already have it is the Chieftec Dragon Medium Tower (seen HERE).

I'm assuming I could cram 6 drives in the lower two 3.5" bays and another 4 in the top 5.25" bays if needed?

Your thread was very helpful Maxvla, thanks for the link.

Do you feel a P4 2.6ghz with 1GB of DDR and a couple of these in the available PCI slots would suffice for a media server/backup box? I'm concerned about speed issues with 8 hard drives on the PCI bus but maybe it isn't a problem?

Or would I be better served to purchase a new motherboard with an ICH9 or 10 southbridge, get 6 SATA ports on the motherboard itself and go to town?

You might be ok, but if you want to be safe I'd suggest a platform like I ended up with, the low power X2 4850e. The 8 hard drives on the PCI bus is no problem. My reads/writes to my server are around 75mb/s. PCI's cap is 133mb/s.

Having 6-8 ports on the motherboard can help you start cheaper. If you have a spare video card you could go for the Gigabyte MA790X-UD4P, this board has 8 ports, plus it can support AM3 (Phenom II) processors should you ever desire to upgrade.

I just got a msi nettop, it handles streaming hd to 3 systems and mp3 to another with no problem.But not sure about raid capabilities,the onboard gig nic and only 30 watts sold me.And you don't need back rails to hold a 4u.Here is my cab

This is the 4u I got,build quality is actually decent for the price.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811182566

Well I bit the bullet and picked up this board and this CPU from the classifieds.

The board has 6 SATAII connections, which should suffice me for the foreseable future if I go with at least 1TB drives.

Now to decide on the hard drives...

I'm fairly sure I'm going to start with 3 of these:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136284

Are you planning to go with RAID 5 with your 3 disks? Which OS were you planning to use/how were you planning on expanding your RAID 5 array?

neonblingbling said:

Are you planning to go with RAID 5 with your 3 disks? Which OS were you planning to use/how were you planning on expanding your RAID 5 array?

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I'm leaning more towards softRAID at this point. Either Microsoft WHS, or Ubuntu Server at this point.

No reason to get Blacks when it's a NAS. Greens will be just as fast, lower power/heat as well.