Spec me a miniITX purely for running FreeNAS

[xyphox]

I'd like to see what I can get for my money by building a miniITX system capable of using RAID to run FreeNAS. Could this be cheaper than a standard out of the box NAS?

I'll need pretty much...

Case
PSU
Motherboard
CPU
Memory
RAID Card??

I know most of these miniITX motherboards come with on-board graphics and Intel Atoms etc so that's no problem.

Don't worry about including HDD's I'll sort them out afterwards. Couple of 2TB seagates me thinks like. Oh yeah, and I'm hoping to build this for nothing majorly over £200 which I think can be done!

 

[JonJ678]

How many hard drives? Anything over two and your choices for case become exceptionally limited.

You probably can't do this cheaper than an out of the box nas. Cheapest option features a mini-itx atom system with a gb of value ram in a case which came with a power supply. You don't need a raid card if you're using a sensible operating system, most flavours of linux use mdadm for software raid which is brilliant though there are probably better options out there.

Have you met the phrase "raid is not a backup"? A raid 1 or 5 nas acting as a backup for multiple computers can be very convenient, but try to make sure it's not the only place where important data is located.

 

[Biffa]

Case: CFI A9849 Mini-ITX NAS/Server Case @ £72
PSU: Included
Mobo: Intel D510MO Intel Atom Dual Core 1.66GHz Mini-ITX Mainboard @ £73
CPU: included
Memory: 2GB Generic DDR2 @ £40
Cheap SATA Raid Card: You need to find one compatible with FreeNAS but there are cards in the £15-20 range to fit in budget.