NAS from old parts

himen256

himen256

himen256

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Joined
29 Jan 2010
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339
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London
Hi guys, I have been looking in to NASs for some time but do to price I did held back. Now I have Athlon (2Ghz) with 1.25GB ram:D supported by two 80GB IDE drives with 400 watts PSU. I'm thinking of getting a PCI RAID card with 4 ports and buying 4x4TB drives. My questions are if its good enough for a home nas? will it be possible later on to move HDD with data to good server and rebuild RAID. I will have more question so please feel free to suggest them. Card http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/SATA-II-RAID-4-Ports-1-5GB-s-Sil3114-SATA-PCI-Controller-Card-/320895315395?pt=UK_Computing_Other_Computing_Networking&hash=item4ab6d9edc3
 
Personally I wouldn't bother with that. You'd be relying on a RAID controller, and they can break.

If you can afford 4x4tb drives, surely you can afford £125 for an HP Microserver to put them in? Then you don't have just a NAS built out of old stuff with no power that burns loads of electricity, you have a super efficient little box which is powerful enough to do an awful lot more than just server files.
 
I was thinking of RAID 1 two 80GB system drives, RAID card would cost me £12. HP microserver is more or less 1x4TB drive, I know I will be building a real server in a year or two. So for now I'm looking for NAS as I need space.
 
I would 100% not rely on a £12 raid controller from ebay if you're already planning on building a new server in a year or whatever.

Personally I would set up your current hardware but not bother with raid, just have raw drives. That way you can play with server OSs and setups, and easily swap drives around.

No matter what you do, I would 100% not rely on a £12 RAID controller. If (when?) that dies, or you find it's incompatible with something, or it does something weird then your whole array is junk.
 
So you think is a good idea to instal OS on one of the 80GB with daliy backup to second 80GB and have this card running 4x4TB in JBOD with it evenly spread so if I lose one HDD I lose only data from that HDD? Will it be difficult to then connect those drive plus some more to a good server running LSI RAID card? without losing data?
 
Nope, I think it'd be best if you just plug all the drives in with no RAID at all, and play around with OSs, backups, data structures etc and find out what works.

RAID is for redundancy, not backups. Additionally, you cannot (apart from in very special cases), transfer an array of RAID controlled drives from one controller to another, unless they are of an identical make and model.

Honestly if I were you (and I am in a way, I am slowly modifying and changing my own server), I would buy 1 or 2 3-4tb internal drives and a big USB external to backup to, that way you can try out different OSs, backup systems, HDD formats etc and find what works for you. RAID seems very tempting at first but you'll soon end up having hassle with it. Surely you don't need more than 4tb shares?

Don't complicate things when they can be simple!
 
On the flip side, the linked to Ebay card is a common as muck SIL3114 chipset.
Basically speaking, take a RAID set from any SIL3114 card (And most other SIL chipsets) and plug it into another and you *should* work.

They're supported by everything consumer level, and there is some support in terms of enterprise level kit, but not as much.
The biggest issue with them, is that anything RAID related will murder your CPU. If you're not writing huge amounts of data or trying to rebuild your RAID after a drive failure there's nothing wrong with them, but if one of these occurs, your CPU usage will go through the roof and your write speeds will be non-existant :)

Horses for courses really, there's nothing wrong with them at all.
They're just as 'safe' as Unraid, which is really just a proprietary filesystem translation layer to underlying ReiserFS volumes with a parity volume thrown in.

Consider backups, not RAID would be my advice.

-Leezer-
 
Another vote for unraid here.

Can use any size/brand of hard disk in the array so can upgrade when 1 drive is becoming full or find a bargain etc.

You lose the capacity of the largest drive for parity but then if you have one disk fail you can rebuild the array.

Ive currently got 1.5tb parity, 2x 1tb, 2x 500gb and 1x 300gb as my array giving a total 3.3tb. Going to replace the 300 with either another 500gb ive got spare or 1tb if i can find one cheap enough.

They do a free version which allows 1 parity and 2 data drives which gives a you a feel for it and then can be upgraded to plus (1p/5d/1cache drive)/pro (1p/23d/1c) at any time.

Ive also got my unraid server running as an xmbc central database and sabnzd/sickbeard/couchpotato. looking at adding a tv card and having it stream to multple devices around the house too
 
Personally I'd avoid the Silicon Image 3114 cards - they're reliable enough for cheap tat, but the disk transfer speeds are abysmal, especially compared to an entry level adaptec card.
 
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