Building a NAS - what do i need?

crazypete00

crazypete00

crazypete00

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16 Mar 2007
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ok so i have a good case which can hold 24 3.5 drives and has a backplane that takes sff-8077 cables. i'm looking for a budget board which has the most amount of pcie slots. i need 2 slots for raid cards, one for a sound card and another for a 10g nic.

also i need to replace my sas drives with sata. they need to be 3tb, what do people recommend these days?
 
This is not a speciality forum on servers
But what you are asking about will cost a lot of cash
I have a couple of sugestions and questions
Is there a need for 24 3Tb drives?
I am aware that 3tb hard drives have a good price per Tb of storage
But the acquisition of the rest of the hardware will be so expensive that you are better off buying 10Tb hard drives
8 of them will do the job
If you require 4 expansion slots you will need a LGA2011 motherbord
It will be cheaper to go with a LGA1151 platform
 
Yeah I'd just be buying a synology or other off the shelf nas solution and stuffing it with the biggest hard drives for the amount of money that custom build will cost.

You haven't told us what the use case is for this box, so I can't give any alternative solutions that might be more appropriate.
 
What peak data input/output are you looking at?

I recommend WD Red 3TB drives for storage, though they are available in larger sizes more economically - is there a hard limit of 3TB?
 
thanks for the input. i dont specifically need 24x 3TB drives however if i bought say 4-6 now i have the space in future to expand.

The sound card is because i have zoned audio. the onboard and a separate sound card will do 2 zones. the NAS will be for data storage media etc as I do a lot of video editing and want it stored somewhere off my main machine. never thought about the synology. will take a look at them and price it up. Also i like the idea of the LGA2011 as i can run 1 or 2 xeons on it.
 
For my server, I just went with a z87 board and stuck in a couple of LSI 9261-8i's. For My actual NAS, I bought a passive cooled server mobo with 12 Sata ports and integrated avoton cpu, dual NIC's and a third ethernet port for remote management. For that I went ITX board though, only need one raid card in it, when i expand into another array can do it in software (storage spaces) since i dont need decent write performance on it. Why not buy a raid card with more ports on it, so that you don't need so many pci-e slots? Could also go USB soundcard, which makes it nice and versatile for any future applications you havent thought of. Can probably find a mobo with 10g nic onboard as well.
I used fractal and nanoxia cases for silently running 20ish drives in each case.
WD RED have been my drive of choice for new purchases, although I've got some older samsung (down to the last two) and seagate drives in one array, and some enterprise toshiba's in another when i managed to get some cheaply.

If it is a NAS, then you dont need a soundcard, or high end mobo/cpu etc, as its just serving data to other devices? Or is your plan more of a server, that actually has stuff to do, but also happens to also have internal storage?

Personally, synology etc, seem way overpriced to me compared to building one yourself, they have their place, but i like the versatility ive got from mine. Although it only makes sense if you are going with a large number of drives, or are using old kit you've got lying around.
 
I use software called 'Stablebit Drivepool' it allows you to add / remove drives as and when you please, you can use SSDs for cache and SATA as archive drives if you require performance.

Has many options around resilience, fantastic software and only about £20 from memory.

If the PC dies you can plug the drives in either together and re-install software and it's all back to how it was without any config or plug the drives in individually to another PC if needed and read the data.
 
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