DIY NAS what software

Ultim8

Ultim8

Ultim8

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Ok so i have scrounged some bits for a NAS box here is the spec:

Chenbro ES34169 Case (4 Hotswap + 1x Slim Optical + 1x 2.5" internal)
Zotac H55ITX-C-E
Intel 1156 G6950
4GB 7-7-7-20 1333Mhz Dual Channel Kit

I will be filling this thing with hard drives probably 2TB x 4.

The main use for this NAS is for Full HD media streaming to 2-3 PC's at a time and various PC's streaming MP3's. File storage for all PC's/Laptops/media devices.

Devices

HTPC windows 7 running XBMC x 3
Xbox 360 x 2
PS3 x 2
PC's windows 7 x 2
Laptops windows 7 x 4

I need speed as im impatient and often transferring large files of 10GB+.

so my question is what NAS/Server software should i run, i need speed and compatibility with all of above. I would also like to have some redundancy and i believe ZFS has huge bennefits.

Im looking at freenas, openfiler, Amahi, opensolaris ect ect.
Opensolaris seems to have the speed advantage but Amahi looks simple to use.

Also im toying with using an SSD for a cache pool but this is new territory for me so can someone explain the bennefits and what increases in performance im likely to see.

Cheers
 
No real experience building a NAS box but I would just download each OS and play around with them in VirtualBox. :)

I would also recommend looking at Ubuntu Server (debian), OpenSUSE and CentOS (based on redhat).
 
yeah im toying with the idea of running a VM and trying the various options but if somebody can give me a definitive list of pros and cons of each option and save me the time that would be great.
 
They'll all perform very similarly, i.e. any one of them should be able to hit the limits of the onboard nic with no fuss.

Ubuntu is tolerent of new users, even of new users who aren't willing to spend any time learning things about linux. That's probably the way to go.

Raid is dealt with using mdadm, ZFS is opensolaris only as far as I know.

Raid 5 is the standard choice for a 4 or 5 disk nas, as read speeds are very good and it survives a hard drive dying.
 
Hi Jon,

I have looked at a few comparisoms and opensolaris seems to kill freenas in IOPs.
See review here http://www.zfsbuild.com/2010/09/10/freenas-vs-opensolaris-zfs-benchmarks/

And ZFS is available in other OS's as i believe freenas is BSD based unix.
Raid 5 does sound good and with 4 drives i should be easily able to saturate my Gb network.

I'm going to buy a couple of those HP microserver's to play with, at under £100 each i cant go wrong so i will have 3 systems to play around with various solutions/distros.

Thanks for the help
 
FreeNAS is ok, easy to setup and run quite light. However the BSD implementation of ZFS isn't amazing yet and the biggest let down for me was how slow samba on BSD is.

I've since gone for Arch and zfs-fuse, no pretty web UI without doing it yourself but it let me change 2 PC's (XBMC/FreeNAS [for zfs]) to just 1. The ZFS version is pretty mature and have only found it lacking built in smb/nfs etc. Also running XBMC as standalone (just on top of X) is super quick :)
 
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