This good enough for a basic nas/download server?

saitrix

saitrix

saitrix

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With stuff like FreeNAS out there you can run a NAS on pretty much anything. That spec should be fine to run that. Though 2 Sata ports isn't ideal, normally I'd Recommend using RAID1 on a pair of disks to safeguard your data, which needs both ports. So FreeNAS or whatever would need to be installed on a flash drive of sorts.

It'll do the job OK but you have no room at all for expansion later. Whether or not that's an issue for you is your call :)

(edit: having seen above post FreeNAS and alike usually have software RAID available to solve that issue)
 
Yes you could, but it'd have to be one that FreeNAS supports. Which will probably cost more than that whole barebones system.
Unless of course you can find a cheap one that has driver support for BSD and you're confident installing drivers in BSD. Up to you how much effort you want to invest really.

It's no show stopper, just a longevity consideration that's all. If you are likely to need more storage in the near future then I'd go for something a bit bigger for the outset. - slightly more money but less work and hassle, once it's built it's built. If not then it's probably better to buy that barebones now and then replace the whole lot later, as no doubt in 2-3 years there will advancements. E.G Sata3 will be more the norm (if not surpassed) and faster drives will be available, maybe even SSDs will be on the cards by then.
 
Software RAID can be achieved easily with Linux too; look at MDADM

I know that the Silicon Image Sil3114 based 4-port SATA cards work beautifully under those circumstances.

Your only concern however might be the 180 watt power supply, if you plan to stuff that case chock full of hard drives.
 
... oh and for the record, I have a Pentium 2 @ 350Mhz, 512mb RAM which had a software (MDADM) based RAID-5 and a Sil3114 chipset'ed SATA controller.

Worked beautifully as a NAS (100mbit network fully saturated - that was enough for two HD videos simultaneously), along with a torrent & usenet client running. That system is positively over-specced ;)
 
That's good to know with the specs. Had a look and those cards are are £10 which is good. Software raid I'd be fine with. You out of interest also running sickbeard/couchpotato? The only thing is the combination of getting parts as cheap as that (I don't have any spare PC bits) and power use of an older system. 180w should be fine for powering 4 hdd and the atom system. Though nice to know what amount of power is required

Edit - I am fairly new to data storage business, it seems raid 5 is quite a good compromise between security and storage efficiency. What I had seen is you can get win XP to do software raid, I'd assume Linux, like the one you mentioned, can do raid 5?
 
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Yes linux can but it can be fiddly. XP can't without it being a total bodge job, even server 2003 softraid is very iffy. If you go with FreeNAS or some other purpose built NAS distro it's all web interface management and the RAID setup is very easy. That supports 0 1 and 5 last I looked. The RAID config is also backed up with the standard config backup which is nice if you get a problem later.
If you use RAID though don't forget to turn on SMART and email alerting so it'll let you know if a drive fails. RAID is only an interim failsafe, you still need to swap out any failed drives ASAP.

there are other considerations with RAID5 too. Such as drive size. Fewer larger drives A, perform slower and B, when recovering from a drive failure the rebuild times are quite lengthy. If you want better fault tolerance (and performance as a byproduct) it's better to go with smaller drives and more of them.
 
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Skidilliplop said:
With stuff like FreeNAS out there you can run a NAS on pretty much anything. That spec should be fine to run that. Though 2 Sata ports isn't ideal, normally I'd Recommend using RAID1 on a pair of disks to safeguard your data, which needs both ports. So FreeNAS or whatever would need to be installed on a flash drive of sorts.
Click to expand...

I'd actually recommend buying two at that price and rsyncing your data between them at night (or at whatever interval suits really), guards against hard disk failure AND accidental deletion, with the low power consumption of atom boards it's a good option. RAID is nice for environments where availability is important but that's not really relevant at home, in the event of a drive failure repointing at a different share isn't much work or going to disrupt you much. AND it's only ever a guard against hardware failure.
 
bigredshark said:
I'd actually recommend buying two at that price and rsyncing your data between them at night (or at whatever interval suits really), guards against hard disk failure AND accidental deletion, with the low power consumption of atom boards it's a good option. RAID is nice for environments where availability is important but that's not really relevant at home, in the event of a drive failure repointing at a different share isn't much work or going to disrupt you much. AND it's only ever a guard against hardware failure.
Click to expand...

Fair point. It does have Rsync built into FreeNAS as well. Infact ther'es not much FreeNAS doesn't have built in tbh.
 
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