Media Server Nas

nabs

nabs

nabs

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11 Nov 2010
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11
I am thinking of building a media/ file Nas. Putting the parts together for something on 24/7

I was thinking of an i3 CPU, possibly the newer sandybridge and planned to underclock the thing to produce the best power ratio however with the ability to bring the clock back up if needed for more intensive tasks if required. Although I only intend to serve media I was worried about the power of the atoms.

If I choose to go this way I would like a smaller form case e.g. fractal design Array mini R2 (I have a midi R3 already), however that would leave motherboards and here I am stuck - which one especially at iDTX/ mini-itix size

I thought I would run unraid possibly or raid 5, probably using a PCIE sata controller rather than share the raid bus between 4 HDD. Un raid may give me the ability to hdd later ( initially I thought 4 HDD), although I am open to suggestions as I have never built a nas before,

Thanks
 
1. Keep it simple.
2. If all you are doing is fileserving a i3 is massively overpowered. He'll an atom probably has 100x the power needed.
3. If you plan to do some transcoding say from hd mkv to iPhone on the fly then you need some decent power.
4. Keep it simple, don't mess with underclocking, and then bring it back up for this and that think of it as an appliance, you dnt underclock you tv to save electric and then bring it back up to watch a hd stream
5. Raid do you need it? Why do you want it ? 99% of people are better served with a functioning backup routine than a raid setup.
 
if ur just runnign it as a nas, then an atom would be fine.

or even something like a via epia if you can find one cheap.


u could run something like FreeNAS on it, which is pretty easy to setup and get running
 
Like above, you can lower your spec a fair bit. I ran unraid on a 2Ghz P4 without any issues with speed.

Unraid is great and you won't need a PCIE controller for them as the bus speed won't ever get overwhelmed by the network transfer you'll get so only buy an PCIE adapter if you exceed the free SATA available on your motherboard. You'll need one drive to act as a parity drive, then if you want 4 drives of useable space you need 4 drives of equal or lower size (so say you have a 2TB parity, you have have 1TB, 1.5TB and 2x 500GB if you wish, just can't be bigger than 2TB). Runs from a USB stick so as long as your hardware is bootable from usb your good to go. Running on gigabit networking you can expect unraid writing speed of maybe 20-35mb hardware depending (I get around 29mb/s write and never found read to be too slow even on 15gb Blueray MVK rips)

I wouldnt bother with RAID5 for a media server, unraid gives pretty much all the good points you'll need of a storage system without a lot of the downsides of RAID5.
 
Thanks guys, a big help.... I might as well go with an atom then as it is much cheaper and less fiddly. So uni raid seems the best way then, sounds good.

I had considered the possibility of transcoding on the fly, which is what I am doing currently with my i5 pc, however I am now fed up with the limitations of the PS3 and am in the process of puchasing a DUNE. If I hit a limitation with the dune I could simply switch on my Min PC and transcode to the ps3 as I am doing now using media from the file server - hopefully I will not need to do this hence the DUNE.
 
Ok I am thinking Zotac nm10-dtx-F-E + Fractal Design Array.

Now for the Harddrives, I currenly have WD Caviar black but I suspect this is overkill for a Nas. Any recommendations for 2TB drives, contenders WD Green, Seagate F3 or F4
 
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