Advice Needed on Building a NAS

[hitman]

Looking for a NAS for home use only.
Will be used with my desktop and laptop.
Ned something to back up data and to stream music and video.
Was going to go for a Synology 214j but have started to think about building my own.
I want something that is quite cheap to build and run and can be sourced new as want to do this quite quickly - maybe over Christmas.
Would like 3TB storage to start and not sure whether to run RAID or unRAID.
Software would probably be NAS4Free.
Any advice would be great as I'm a novice with this.

 

[Confused]

This is essentially what my server is:

YOUR BASKET
1 x Toshiba 3TB 7200RPM SATA 6GB/s 64MB Cache - OEM (DT01ACA300) HDD £79.99
1 x Microsoft Windows Home Server 2011 64Bit (1 Server & 10 Client Licenses) - OEM (CCQ-00128) £39.98
1 x TeamGroup Elite 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C11 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit (TED34GM1600HC11DC01) £32.99
1 x Intel Celeron G1610 2.7GHz (Ivybridge) Socket LGA1155 Processor - OEM £31.99
1 x Imp MicroATX Tower Case (500w PSU) £31.99
1 x Foxconn H67M Intel H67 (Socket 1155) DDR3 Micro ATX Motherboard £29.99
Total : £260.44 (includes shipping : £11.25).




(Although the CPU says "OEM", when I purchased one of these a couple of weeks ago, it was in a retail box with heatsink/fan...)

I have more hard drives, as well as StableBit DrivePool to provide one large storage pool (currently 8TB across 3 drives) with the ability to easily add or remove drives.

This stores all my data, does automated backups of my PCs in the house, and with a TV Tuner card provides live/recorded TV across my house, and runs MySQL, XBMC, apache, FTP server and anything else that I need access to 24/7.

 

[hitman]

Cheers very helpful !
Any reasons Why you went for the Toshiba HDD rather than a western Digital Red HDD which lots of people seem to recommend?
Also how easy is the stable bit drive pool to use?

 

[Confused]

I just picked the cheapest 3TB drive that OcUK have on sale at the moment!


I've actually got 2x 3TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 and 1x 2TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 drives in mine, again, because they were the cheapest available at the time.

The Reds are probably recommended because they are "designed for NAS" use, and longer warranty etc compared to consumer drives.


DrivePool is ridiculously easy to use, you install it, you get an entry in the WHS Dashboard, and you add your drives to the pool. You'll give the pool a drive letter (such as Z: ) and then set all your shared folders on this drive.

Any additional drives you add you just click a couple of buttons, and it's added to your storage pool.

With more than 1 drive, you can set up duplication on a per folder level - for example, I have my Photos and Documents folders duplicated on multiple disks, but my music, videos, game installers etc aren't - I see no point in using drive space duplicating stuff like that which I can very easily retrieve again, and aren't critical.