Associate
Firstly would like to take the opportunity to say a massive thanks to Andy from OcUK for sorting me out some discount on 4 x 3TB Western Digital Red drives and a Seasonic 80+ Gold PSU, many thanks mate 
So to cut a long story short I was using a HP Microserver as my home NAS with 4 x 2TB drives in for storage un-raided, there was also a Crucial M4 64GB SSD (OS) and a pair of 2.5" 500GB's for backup and while initially it was great because of the low power consumption and small footprint it didn't have much oomph behind it being just a 1.5ghz dual core.
I started using Plex as my media server because it has a server back end and multiple client front ends, I run plex on 3 HTPC's, an iPad 3 and 2 Android phones and I found that when streaming to the iPad and Android phones the video has to be transcoded on the fly which quite frankly the poor little CPU in the HP Microserver couldn't handle resulting in jumpy un-watchable media
I decided that I need a newer, faster NAS which still has a low power consumption, I also wanted to have a reasonably good looking install, I currently have a 12u rack in my "office" at home (small bedroom converted) I have ran all my network cables back to this room and up into the back of this rack, below is a pic of how its been looking for the last year or so
Over last couple of months I collected various parts ready to build my new NAS and decided to go for proper rack-mount cases as I already had a pair of 4u 450mm rack-mount cases sat spare, my only issue is that my 12u rack is 450mm from front to back so the cases will not fully go in at all so I have decided to get rid of the 12u and build my own pair of smaller racks!
I will be using MDF and instead of going 12u tall im going to do 2 x 8u wide so the 8u on the right will hold both my rack-mount servers (other 4u server is my VMware ESXi server) and the 8u on the left will hold the power and network gear, much more to come with this soon once I've done my calculations and been to B&Q to get some wood cut!...
So back to the new NAS - its now built and im currently configuring it and playing with the RAID settings, I have gone for a Raid-5 configuration so will be getting 8.18TB of usable space from the 4 x 3TB Red's, im going to stick with default 64KB stripe size and have a play with the read-ahead, read through, write through and write back settings to see what I/O I can get, will report back soon
Spec of the NAS is:
There is a 120mm inlet fan at low speed, the top panel expansion card arm holder thing I've modded to hold an 80mm fan to breeze air over the RAID controller heatsink as that sucker gets hot!
Anyway Pics!...
Plenty more to come!
So to cut a long story short I was using a HP Microserver as my home NAS with 4 x 2TB drives in for storage un-raided, there was also a Crucial M4 64GB SSD (OS) and a pair of 2.5" 500GB's for backup and while initially it was great because of the low power consumption and small footprint it didn't have much oomph behind it being just a 1.5ghz dual core.
I started using Plex as my media server because it has a server back end and multiple client front ends, I run plex on 3 HTPC's, an iPad 3 and 2 Android phones and I found that when streaming to the iPad and Android phones the video has to be transcoded on the fly which quite frankly the poor little CPU in the HP Microserver couldn't handle resulting in jumpy un-watchable media
I decided that I need a newer, faster NAS which still has a low power consumption, I also wanted to have a reasonably good looking install, I currently have a 12u rack in my "office" at home (small bedroom converted) I have ran all my network cables back to this room and up into the back of this rack, below is a pic of how its been looking for the last year or so
Over last couple of months I collected various parts ready to build my new NAS and decided to go for proper rack-mount cases as I already had a pair of 4u 450mm rack-mount cases sat spare, my only issue is that my 12u rack is 450mm from front to back so the cases will not fully go in at all so I have decided to get rid of the 12u and build my own pair of smaller racks!
I will be using MDF and instead of going 12u tall im going to do 2 x 8u wide so the 8u on the right will hold both my rack-mount servers (other 4u server is my VMware ESXi server) and the 8u on the left will hold the power and network gear, much more to come with this soon once I've done my calculations and been to B&Q to get some wood cut!...
So back to the new NAS - its now built and im currently configuring it and playing with the RAID settings, I have gone for a Raid-5 configuration so will be getting 8.18TB of usable space from the 4 x 3TB Red's, im going to stick with default 64KB stripe size and have a play with the read-ahead, read through, write through and write back settings to see what I/O I can get, will report back soon
Spec of the NAS is:
- 4U Rack mount case
- MSI H77MA-G43 s1155 Motherboard
- Intel i3 2120 CPU @ stock 3.3ghz
- Kingston Hyper DDR3 RAM 4 x 4gb @ stock 1600mhz
- Seasonic G series 360w '80 Plus Gold' PSU
- LSi 8-port 2960i RAID Controller with 256mb Cache (Need a BBU!)
- 4 x Western Digital 3TB "Red" (Raid edition) Harddrives
- Icy Box IB-545SSK Tray less 5 Bay HDD enclosure
- Crucial M4 64GB SSD for OS & Plex server
- WD Green 2TB HDD for general dumping group/PC backups/DL's etc
- Intel Pro 1000 PT PCIe Server NIC
There is a 120mm inlet fan at low speed, the top panel expansion card arm holder thing I've modded to hold an 80mm fan to breeze air over the RAID controller heatsink as that sucker gets hot!
Anyway Pics!...
Plenty more to come!
