4tb NAS or dedicated PC?

[Darryn]

Ive run out of storage space on my network.

Im currently unsure which is the best way to go, 4TB WD NAS or some kind of self built server.

Can anyone offer any advice, or even a spec. list of suitable hardware.

Thanks, Darryn.

 

[JonJ678]

I believe it comes down to whether you trust WD or yourself more. I would run linux on a basic dual core machine, and raid it through mdadm. This way when the machine dies, any linux distribution will pull the array back to life. Similarly if something goes wrong with the configuration, you can sort it out.

However, if you buy the WD machine, when it breaks, they have to deal with it. The disks may be usable in a another machine, may not be. It has an OS of sorts which will do various things, and may be easier/harder to configure than freenas or the like depending on what you want it to do.

I would want to build, maintain and troubleshoot it myself. However I'm a student with quite a lot of free time on my hands, were it for business I'd be inclined to pay someone else do deal with it. I came close to doing this a while ago, wanted an atom 330 board with 4 sata ports and couldn't find one. Pico psu, self built chassis since not many itx cases hold four hard drives. I'll get around to it sometime, currently have a pile of hard drives on the desk beside my computer.

 

[Muel]

I'd build if I were you! Modern low powered systems can be made very, very reliable.

For £400, you could easily build an Atom 330 powered machine. As said unfortunately they don't have enough Sata ports at the moment, but you could always just wack a SATA controller in there and add another 4 ports.

I've looked into it, but the main problem for me is finding an ITX case and motherboard with enough space for drives! I'd put two 2tb ones in at first but I'd want the space to upgrade to 8tb in the future. I've got nearly 1tb of stuff now and I've had to hold off on the old "collecting" front.

 

[JonJ678]

There's a couple of boards with 3 internal and 1 external sata connection, and one that I know of with four internal. Using a normal sata to e-sata pci-e plate and the shortest e-sata cable you can find, you'd have four internal. The zotac one with the built in psu looks particularly good, as if/when it dies you just replace the entire lot through rma (5 years warranty), with no expense associated with finding pico psu's and the like.

I might need to pick this project up again, like the look of the zotac.

 

[Zarf]

Build one, you can put together (or buy second hand) a socket 939 system for peanuts.

My server is as follows.
Athlon X2 3800+
2GB RAM
nForce4 motherboard
Perc 5/i hardware RAID card
Antec 900
8 hotswap drive bays
500GB boot drive.
8x 1TB Samsung F1 in RAID5
Broadcom PCI-E gigabit nic (only bought becasue I started having issues with the built in nforce nics)
Windows Server 2003

It eats up everything i throw at it: VM's, torrents, Usenet client, Teamspeak server etc. I hardly ever see more than 10% cpu utilisation (though it comes in handy on the PAR2/unrarring) I can happily get 100MB/s transfers from SMB shares to the other gigabit windows clients on my network - great for me now I have an SSD (and thus less space than i was used to), I'm juggling games directories back and forth quite often and it's nice to be able to shift a 10GB install in less than 2 minutes.

If you just want NAS features you can go without the hardware RAID card and server 2003 and just run freedos or openfiler instead to save some money.

 

[Bonjour]

I've recently set up a QNAP TS-509, with 5 1.5TB drives. Fantastic, tidy little unit. The last thing I (well, the wife) want(s) is another midi-tower taking up more space in the house.

The QNAP just sits quietly on a shelf doing its thing. Well recommended.

 

[Darryn]

Cheers for the replies, Bonjour has a good point, do i want an ugly midi-tower??

The QNAP setup seems good, but very expensive for what i need. Ill have a look for some space where i could hide a midi/mini atx case, whilst keeping it plugged into my network router.