Soldato
So the Synology NAS that I bought last year, a DS210j, has been a big succes. It's been one of the best bits of kit that I've bought in years and has become the main storage for everything in the house. It's made my life so much easier in backing things up and making the whole network so much more flexible.
But now it's nearly full, and instead of just replacing the drives with larger capacity ones I've decided that improvements could be made. It was my first venture into a proper NAS and so was only an entry level choice and subsequently isn't the fastest one on the market. It's also just a 2-drive unit so is less flexible in terms of array options and future expansion. This meant I went looking for a fast, 4-drive unit but was immediately having second thoughts because of the £370-£400 price tags I was seeing for NAS units that met these requirements.
After a bit of research into building my own home server I decided that this was the solution I would go with. I could build a fast (faster than any off the shelf unit), 4-drive server for a lot less cash. I just had to put in some time searching for the right components, assembling and setting it all up.
Here's the components I'll be building it with;
Case
CFI-A7879 4-Bay NAS Chassis - £95
I knew this was the right case as soon as I saw it. 4 bays in the front, large 120mm fan in the rear and no space wasted with other drives that I would not be needing.
The only reservation I have at this time is the small fan on the PSU. It's really important that the server is as quiet as possible so I may have to attend to that at some point. I'll see how it is when up and running and go from there.
Motherboard/CPU/RAM
Gigabyte GA-D525TUD with Intel Atom D525 and 2gb DDR3 - £95
It took some researching to find the right ITX motherboard as it was essential that I found one with support for 4 SATA drives and GB LAN. It was a toss up in the end between the Gigabyte and an Asus board with a large fanless heatsink. With the Asus being around £60 more I felt it was too much and that I can do something with the small fan on the Gigabyte board. Like the PSU fan I will tackle this later. One 2gb stick of DDR3 will go in it so that I have the option to add 2gb more later should I wish. Dual channel memory isn't a necessity for performance in server of this type and the dual core (hyper threading) 1.8ghz Atom is well beyond the spec of any off the shelf NAS.
Hard drives
Transcend 4GB IDE Flash Module - £35
As the server is going to have lots of spinning platters in it anyway, I wanted to avoid adding another just for the OS. A fully fledged SSD would have been overkill so in the end I've decide on the industrial IDE flash module. It's cheaper than an IDE/CF adapter and CF card and is a very neat and quiet solution. 4gb should be plenty for the OS.
Seagate Barracuda Green 2TB SATA 6Gb/s HDD - £65
The new Barracuda Green is the fastest 'green' drive and is well priced. It also draws just 6W under load, making a total of around 30W (the Atom boards rated power consumption is just 15W max!) Two drives will run in RAID1 to begin with.
So the total cost of the build is £225 (without HDDs), a big saving on the off the shelf units. This is helped by the OS being free, more on that and the build to come................
Comments extremely welcome.
But now it's nearly full, and instead of just replacing the drives with larger capacity ones I've decided that improvements could be made. It was my first venture into a proper NAS and so was only an entry level choice and subsequently isn't the fastest one on the market. It's also just a 2-drive unit so is less flexible in terms of array options and future expansion. This meant I went looking for a fast, 4-drive unit but was immediately having second thoughts because of the £370-£400 price tags I was seeing for NAS units that met these requirements.
After a bit of research into building my own home server I decided that this was the solution I would go with. I could build a fast (faster than any off the shelf unit), 4-drive server for a lot less cash. I just had to put in some time searching for the right components, assembling and setting it all up.
Here's the components I'll be building it with;
Case
CFI-A7879 4-Bay NAS Chassis - £95
I knew this was the right case as soon as I saw it. 4 bays in the front, large 120mm fan in the rear and no space wasted with other drives that I would not be needing.
The only reservation I have at this time is the small fan on the PSU. It's really important that the server is as quiet as possible so I may have to attend to that at some point. I'll see how it is when up and running and go from there.
Motherboard/CPU/RAM
Gigabyte GA-D525TUD with Intel Atom D525 and 2gb DDR3 - £95
It took some researching to find the right ITX motherboard as it was essential that I found one with support for 4 SATA drives and GB LAN. It was a toss up in the end between the Gigabyte and an Asus board with a large fanless heatsink. With the Asus being around £60 more I felt it was too much and that I can do something with the small fan on the Gigabyte board. Like the PSU fan I will tackle this later. One 2gb stick of DDR3 will go in it so that I have the option to add 2gb more later should I wish. Dual channel memory isn't a necessity for performance in server of this type and the dual core (hyper threading) 1.8ghz Atom is well beyond the spec of any off the shelf NAS.
Hard drives
Transcend 4GB IDE Flash Module - £35
As the server is going to have lots of spinning platters in it anyway, I wanted to avoid adding another just for the OS. A fully fledged SSD would have been overkill so in the end I've decide on the industrial IDE flash module. It's cheaper than an IDE/CF adapter and CF card and is a very neat and quiet solution. 4gb should be plenty for the OS.
Seagate Barracuda Green 2TB SATA 6Gb/s HDD - £65
The new Barracuda Green is the fastest 'green' drive and is well priced. It also draws just 6W under load, making a total of around 30W (the Atom boards rated power consumption is just 15W max!) Two drives will run in RAID1 to begin with.
So the total cost of the build is £225 (without HDDs), a big saving on the off the shelf units. This is helped by the OS being free, more on that and the build to come................
Comments extremely welcome.
: I'll be copying large volumes of files to it later so I'll find out then if either of the small fans starts to make a racket. It's been switched on for a few hours now though so it's looking good.
