Build your own NAS?

stueng

stueng

stueng

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Hi, I am on the verge of buying a Synology DS411j but I thought I would just put a shout out to see what alternatives are around for a do-it-yourself solution

I am a linux user as well as a SABnzb, Sickbeard, Couchpotato, XBMC etc user. I would "hack" the synology to run these packages... with all the "hacking" required I am starting to wonder about just building the whole thing myself

Is anyone aware of a nice case out there that can house 4 X Sata gb/s disks along with motherboard, CPU etc? I'd like a solution of similar size, noise and power draw to an "off the shelf" NAS

thoughts?

Stu
 
As far as I could tell when I looked into this, the only real advantages of a pre-built system are:

Small Size
Low Noise
Low Power

There's no doubt that you could achieve those 3 things with DIY, but it will probably start to cost a bit if you want all 3.

The obvious advantage of a home-built system is that it can be as powerful and as customisable as you want, but you will almost certainly sacrifice on either size, noise or power consumption, unless you're prepared to fork out quite a bit.
 
Have to say that I've built my own. I have an AMD 630 (which I'd now use something like an i3/i5 sandybridge) 10G memory and 8 disks, running FreeBSD. The advantage of FreeBSD is ZFS as I have 5 of the disks in a RAIDZ array (4 active, one hot spare) for a media store, 2 disks mirrored as a central backup and a system disk. All inside a Fractal Design Define R3. Local performance on to the RAIDZ drives is:

Block write 276MB/s
Block rewrite 151MB/s
Block read 384MB/s

and I can saturate gigabit with it getting data on and off the drives. I also use it as my internal web server, MySQL server, FTP server, named server etc...

It's pretty quiet and has oodles of power for a house server. It wasn't necessarily cheap though and it isn't particularly small. It is very flexible (I'm starting to think about an externally accessible mail server running in a jail).
 
Been through the whole building your own, trying cheap NASes, etc. etc.

Recently got one of these for a company I do a bit of IT stuff for now and again:

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=NW-012-QN&groupid=46&catid=2125&subcat=2126

And ended up buying one for my own personal use and wish I'd done it from the start - no messing about - flash with the latest firmware so it can do realtime USB replication* and you've got a solid backup solution that really works and a ton of functionality if you needed it and unobtrusive if you don't. User and Groups actually works, it spins down properly when idle which a lot don't, the fan is quiet in operation and it runs cool with low power use.

The Synology may have similiar level of functionality/reliability and usefulness but I've not tried one to be sure.


* You can do say 2x 1TB internal discs in RAID and then have them mirrored in realtime to an external USB 1TB disc (thats not part of the stripe just normal NTFS format) with hardly any performance penalty for great level of redundancy. And if your really worried about data backup you can then setup the USB Copy function so that you can at regular intervals plug another USB disc in the front and quickly and efficently take a copy of the current state of the discs with one button press.
 
Rroff your arguments are the exact same ones that I use when suggesting people stear clear from home made NAS.

I however like having an extremely complicated project to work on, everything you listed can be achieved manually

Also the synology is more feature rich than the QNAP, people sometimes load the synology firmware on them as a hack
 
I still haven't decided whether to do Synology or DIY yet but this looks really good

YOUR BASKET
3 x Seagate Barracuda 3TB 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache - OEM (ST3000DM001) £129.98 (£389.94)
1 x AMD A6-3670K 2.70GHz (Socket FM1) APU Processor (AD3670WNGXBOX) £89.99
1 x Lian Li PC-Q08B USB3.0 Mini-ITX Case - Black £73.98
1 x Asus F1A75-M PRO AMD A75 (Socket FM1) DDR3 Micro ATX Motherboard £71.99
1 x BeQuiet Pure Power L8 430W '80 Plus Bronze' Modular Power Supply - With 120mm Silent Wing Fan Built in £51.98
1 x Corsair Value 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-10666C9 1333MHz Dual Channel Kit (CMV8GX3M2A1333C9) £34.99
Total : £726.38 (includes shipping : £11.25).



This motherboard can support up to 64GB RAM! This "NAS" would be able to run some VM's quite easily and I could put an XBMC client on it along with SABNZB, Sickbeard, Couchpotato etc

Supports up to 6 X 6GB/s SATA3 3.5 disks for a total potential capacity of 24TB, but a more sesible approach I think would be to configure RAID-Z and start with 3 X 3TB disks leaving expansion for 3 X 3TB or 3 X 4TB drives in the future if the price drops

I dont have a fan on there, any suggestions?
have I got anything wrong?
missing anything?

I havent checked to make sure the PSU fits yet
 
mrbell1984 said:
@stueng

^^ over kill for a NAS system.
Click to expand...

Indeed... I started out looking for a NAS but Im wondering what else is possible

I have a laptop running homeseer (winxp), a 2TB NAS (netgear) and a Zotac Zbox (xbmc + sab + sickbeard etc) all in the same cupboard at the moment.

This single box could replace all three of these devices and do all three jobs better

a simple NAS would cost £600 with 3 X 3TB disks with capacity to add more disks... so add another £150-£200 and instead of a "simple" NAS you get quad core, HD6000 GFX, 32GB RAM etc
 
stueng said:
I need to find a mini-itx board that can do 6 X SATA 6gb/s ports though...
Click to expand...

There is only one I can find which is this that has 6 sata ports:
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MB-012-ZT&groupid=701&catid=5&subcat=2071
Unsure as to why you need 6? surely 4 would be sufficient?

My two cents

YOUR BASKET
1 x Asus E45M1-I DELUXE AMD Hudson M1 DDR3 Mini ITX Motherboard £129.98
3 x Seagate Barracuda 3TB 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache - OEM (ST3000DM001) £129.98 (389.94)
1 x BitFenix Prodigy Mini-ITX Cube Case - Arctic White £59.99
1 x BeQuiet Pure Power L8 430W '80 Plus Bronze' Modular Power Supply - With 120mm Silent Wing Fan Built in £51.98
1 x Corsair Value 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-10666C9 1333MHz Dual Channel Kit (CMV8GX3M2A1333C9) £34.99
Total : £679.50 (includes shipping : £10.50).



With the potential to add another 2 drives, Its pretty good, Not as powerful as the A6 but there are no ITX boards for the A6 really.
 
I hate the microserver, except the price... who builds a "server" that doesn't support RAID 5...?

That bitfenix case is wicked, too tall for my shelf though its 40cm high compared to 27cm on the Lian Li

The Lian Li can support 6 internal 3.5" disks which is why I was looking for a board with 6 SATA 6gb/s connections
 
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