Dirt cheap fast NAS?

StevenRaith

StevenRaith

StevenRaith

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30 Apr 2009
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688
Hi all,

I'm wanting to set up a fastish [IE can utlisie gigabit ethernet properly], quiet, cheap NAS.

Been lookinga at the NAS devices on 't net, and I want at least a two bay device as this would be my media drive.

What is the best option, you think, in terms of stability, throughput and price?

On the other hand I'm also thinking of getting an Atom device with eSATA [such as the Acer Aspire Revo], dropping Solaris or Debian on it and using that instead, with an external eSATA connection and four disk eSATA cage for RAID5/ZFS sharing and jury rigging four 2.5" drives in there for glorious silence when running.

What is the best option overall? General thoguhts?

Discuss.
 
Are the cheap amd's still quicker than the dual core atoms? I'd be surprised if there's much, if anything, in it now.

I think you're going to want an atom motherboard, 2gb ram, case of your choosing. Any of the boards do two sata ports so that won't cause problems. The boards cost around 60 quid, the case + psu about the same. So motherboard/processor/ram/case/psu is going to come in at under 150. Fair few atom boards do gigabit ethernet.

I'm trying to do something similar, except with four drives. That's crippled my options somewhat, as very few atom motherboards have four sata ports.
 
Zarf said:
people report decent results with freenas / openfiler and a cheap atom setup, i'd say go for that. What cost are the esata port multipliers though? Might work out cheaper to do a micro-atx setup that already has plenty of ports onboard, say one of these:
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MB-142-GI&groupid=701&catid=5&subcat=807
get a cheap AM2 processor and you're sorted. much more powerful than an atom setup too.
Click to expand...

+1 freenas is so simple but yet so powerful as a nas solution

that board looks great aswell, hook up 6 1TB drives or something whacky!
 
Are the cheap amd's still quicker than the dual core atoms? I'd be surprised if there's much, if anything, in it now.
Click to expand...

You're seriously overestimating the speed of the atoms, a 1.6ghz atom is about the same speed as a 1.3Ghz pentium III. Even an oldschool Athlon 64 is about twice the performance per clock. Spending 15-20 quid on a second hand X2 is much better bang for buck - atoms are only good if you give a toss about power.
 
Interesting. Bang for buck, an atom motherboard costs about 60 quid, and comes with the atom. So it's cheaper. The low power also means low heat, so you can run the boards fanless.

Speed difference could be a point. Bear in mind that the 330 atom has two 1.6ghz atom's inside, and both run hyperthreading. The 2.4ish ghz amds are also dual core, but without hyperthreading and are significantly older. I might look up some benchmarks comparing the two. Cheers for the heads up
 
JonJ678 said:
Interesting. Bang for buck, an atom motherboard costs about 60 quid, and comes with the atom. So it's cheaper. The low power also means low heat, so you can run the boards fanless.

Speed difference could be a point. Bear in mind that the 330 atom has two 1.6ghz atom's inside, and both run hyperthreading. The 2.4ish ghz amds are also dual core, but without hyperthreading and are significantly older. I might look up some benchmarks comparing the two. Cheers for the heads up
Click to expand...

The atom 330 boards are more like 75 quid, the 60 quid boards tend to only have the single core atom 230, which makes an new x2 + mATX board the same cost for roughly twice the performance (plus you can get second hand at really good prices since it's old hardware)
 
Definitely AM2 over Atom. Intel don't want Atom taking low end sales from Celerons and the limited expansion on the Intel boards is a consequence of that. 3 SATA ports an no expansion slots on the first Ion boards isn't much of an improvement either. Get a mobo with 4 SATA ports and you can run RAID5 onboard in software with GEOM_RAID5 in FreeNAS.

I recycled some old S939 parts for mine, but if buying new this and this would be a great start.
 
Cheers chaps.

You can get the eSATA chassis for not bad money, the idea was to hook it up to something like an Aspire Revo, but I read somewhere this morning [el reg methinks] that the Atom chipset gets chewed to bits by trying to run the file sharing stuff, and even with a fast disk setup can't get above 50MB/sec with a light Linux install - worse if you implement any RAID other than pure hardware, and something like 5-10MB/sec if you try doing Windows Server file sharing on it.

The more I think about it, the more a Core2Centrino or an A64X2 with an XOR powered hardware RAID adapter that supports eSATA makes sense. Must check the Openfiler HCL to see what it will take...wang that little lot in a passive cooled chassis, external eSATA cage for four drives, then Hardware RAID5/10 up the disks and start wapping out iSCSI and NFS shares.

[I have used Openfiler extensively and I am a big fan]
 
Been looking to setup a NAS here with min. 1Tb usable space and this thread has been very useful :)

Having trouble finding a case which will take 4 drives for RAID 5 though :(

Has anyone got a self-built RAID 5 NAS, running Freenas/openfiler - what sort of throughput do you see? If it's nothing major over the Qnap/Synology boxes I'll consider them instead but I'd prefer the flexibility of a self-built system....
 
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