Planning an advanced, upgradeable NAS/Home Server Solution.

[rjk]

Hi Guys

I am planning a new build soon, the plan is for a high powered, upgradeable home server to act as a NAS and mediahub for the house.

Stuff I have:

1. Bitfenix Prodigy
2. Corsair 60GB SSD
3. 8GB or 16GB DDR3
4. Gigabyte Z77N-WIFI
5. Choice of two CPU coolers
6. 1TB Samsung F3
7. 2TB ST2000DM001

Stuff I plan to get:

1. Seasonic X-Series 460w FANLESS
2. A CPU
3. More HDDs

I realise the memory is probably huge overkill but is cheap.

I need a suggestion for a low power 1155 CPU for this server, my initial thoughts was to go with a quad but I feel that it may be overkill, maybe a Intel Pentium G620?
one of the coolers i have could potentially be ran passive with a low power cpu. this would be ideal as the only noise coming from the unit would be the HDDs


I have a few storage drives already so may as well use them, what drives should I be looking at for additional storage here? are WD Greens still the best idea?


the big question i have is what operating system should i run.
This is where i really have no knowledge

Initial thoughts were to install free nas? what are the pros and cons of this?
I also have copies of 64bit XPpro/Vista ultimate/7 ultimate and windows 8

would an MS operating system offer me more customisation than freenas?

any other suggestions in this area would be very welcome.

 

[rjk]

Do you really need "power" for a NAS/Homeserver?

I think you are right to look at low power consumption components.

I use Plex on Windows Server as there is an inbuilt client for my Samsung TV.

low power is key here.

I assume Plex is a windows based app?

what are its limitations?

I'm planning something similar, I'm going to get an i3 3120 - I'd recommend also getting a LSI card and WD Reds, nice bit of extra performance and reliability.

Still undecided with regards to OS, but possibly swaying to Ubuntu server and just setting up the storage myself (samba\iSCSI) - although after playing with WS2012 and the improvements in NFS, I might virtualise Linux and use NFS to do to it and get my Linux-y bits to write back to a NFS share.

I want something i am familiar with really, or at least something really easy to use.

You need to decide what you want do with it, from there you can decide on the OS.

It will be for data storage, media streaming, NAS functionality essentially.
I want something that works on par with a very high end NAS unit [synology/qnap]

If it’s on 24/7 then you need to look at using low powered parts.

hence why i am looking at the pentium parts.