Hi guys I have been looking for a bit now and thought best to finally put my thoughts on here for someone to shoot me down or point out better alternatives if you can spare the time!.
Basically I have a few external drives at the moment so data backup is pretty poor and it is extremely annoying having to move these drives around so what I want is a simple low power(ish) NAS that will house up to 6 drives and act as the centralised storage system so I can access my files anywhere (photos/films/documents... general stuff :) ) I also want to take this opportunity to try and setup streaming to multiple devices in my home, I plan to have media access from 3 rooms so performance doesnt need to be amazing but it needs to be OK for a maximum of 3 streams of video/film which will be done via Raspberry Pi or laptops (if I could do this on a phone... even better!).
I must stress that cost is an issue for me at the moment and I just missed out on the cashback deal on the HP Microserver N54 which would have been £85, typical aye? Regardless its hampered my plans on a NAS and I am struggling to justify spending much more than this.
I will also try to make this clearer, its a small project and at this exact point in time I plan on having 2x3TB drives and eventually expanding storage as and when I need it, I would expect myself to have 4x3TB drives in about a year and then maybe 6x3tb in a few years after that (mild data use....). I am still trying to read up on everything so please forgive my noobness when it comes to all of this as its new to me :).
From my research so far I can see that ECC is highly recommend however this seems to weigh on the use of ZFS, if you arent using ZFS I cannot really see a huge benefit in data integrity. As I dont plan on having an overly large setup I currently plan to just run RAID 1 with UFS, I am hoping I have read this correctly and it is support as my whole plan is to have a mirror of the drive always AND have an external drive that will be periodicly connected to the NAS for storing important data I will have set-up a separate directory for this as I know a NAS isnt a backup strategy and will only allow expendable data be left on the NAS and no where else. So for me I cant see a need for Raidz1 or 2 when I have such a small amount of disks and if one fails I will just simply replace it. Am I right in thinking Raid 1 is probably best for me? Or is there an alternative like having an automatic scheduling of copying so every night it copies drive 0 to drive 1? which will avoid raid all together.... onto hardware
I have been reading up and it seems the general recommendation is the Xeon e3-1230 v2 with a supermicro board and ECC ram albeit these maybe the cremedelacreme when it comes to home servers I just cannot justify my very modest data use and performance requirement :P. So the next CPU I have looked at is the pentium range which the g2020 seems rather good in terms of cost and power usage, £50 and ECC support however I can also get the Core-i3 3220 which seems identical apart from a 3.3ghz clock and hyperthreading, how much of a tangible difference would this be? Worth the £20?.
Motherboard, I cannot find a retailer in the UK that sells the supermicro boards and since I am trying to do a build on the cheap I can currently considering using my spare ASUS p8z68-v (uses intel NIC, not realtek as I have read bad things about them!) its been a reliable motherboard and I only just moved down to Mini-Itx hence its now spare so reusing it saves me trying to flog it (win win...?), are there any other options I should consider?.
Ram, I am looking for 8GB to start with unless you guys think I need more. Any ways I have decided against ECC ram and my reasoning is that ECC ram is MUCH more expensive in England, I have searched high and low but can only find 8gb ECC ram for ~£80 where as I am ready to order 8gb non-ecc for £29.98... I cant justify it that price difference even more so if I reuse my board as it doesnt support ECC. I could get 16gb if the extra 8gb makes much of a difference though as this price is pretty good! I would have 4 dimms full though as its 4gb sticks.
Cases.... not a clue on this part, I have a Lian li A70 or an Xigmatek Elysium that I can use to "trial" it but I would like a relativel small footprint if possible however I could probably make the A70 work and buy those hotswapable 5.25" bay drives. Suggestions welcomed here :D.
PSU: Will be looking at a gold rated modular psu (if not then non modular... to save pennies) however I am not sure what wattage I should be looking for, but the lowest I can find is 360w and its a this one : Seasonic SS-360gp - £48 highly rated on jonny guru which means it should be perfect, great price as well :).
Hard drives, never had a WD drive fail me in the last 15 years and have only had a seagate die on me, my first plan was to grab the 3TB WD RED drives but I am open to suggestions here anything with good performance reliability and power usage... hard to meet the perfect drive though haha.
I think thats all the aspects required for a nas apart from the USB drive, I will buy an 8GB drive solely for this but I assume any decent brand is ok like this one:http://www.amazon.co.uk/Kingston-Te...e=UTF8&qid=1376792318&sr=1-1&keywords=8gb+usb
If I have missed anything id appreciate being pointed into the right direction, like I said I am new to this and would rather do it right the first time where possible!.
Thanks for your time and apologies for the poor English and broken post, I have been rewriting things a bit while I kept researching so it may be a tad confusing.
Basically I have a few external drives at the moment so data backup is pretty poor and it is extremely annoying having to move these drives around so what I want is a simple low power(ish) NAS that will house up to 6 drives and act as the centralised storage system so I can access my files anywhere (photos/films/documents... general stuff :) ) I also want to take this opportunity to try and setup streaming to multiple devices in my home, I plan to have media access from 3 rooms so performance doesnt need to be amazing but it needs to be OK for a maximum of 3 streams of video/film which will be done via Raspberry Pi or laptops (if I could do this on a phone... even better!).
I must stress that cost is an issue for me at the moment and I just missed out on the cashback deal on the HP Microserver N54 which would have been £85, typical aye? Regardless its hampered my plans on a NAS and I am struggling to justify spending much more than this.
I will also try to make this clearer, its a small project and at this exact point in time I plan on having 2x3TB drives and eventually expanding storage as and when I need it, I would expect myself to have 4x3TB drives in about a year and then maybe 6x3tb in a few years after that (mild data use....). I am still trying to read up on everything so please forgive my noobness when it comes to all of this as its new to me :).
From my research so far I can see that ECC is highly recommend however this seems to weigh on the use of ZFS, if you arent using ZFS I cannot really see a huge benefit in data integrity. As I dont plan on having an overly large setup I currently plan to just run RAID 1 with UFS, I am hoping I have read this correctly and it is support as my whole plan is to have a mirror of the drive always AND have an external drive that will be periodicly connected to the NAS for storing important data I will have set-up a separate directory for this as I know a NAS isnt a backup strategy and will only allow expendable data be left on the NAS and no where else. So for me I cant see a need for Raidz1 or 2 when I have such a small amount of disks and if one fails I will just simply replace it. Am I right in thinking Raid 1 is probably best for me? Or is there an alternative like having an automatic scheduling of copying so every night it copies drive 0 to drive 1? which will avoid raid all together.... onto hardware
I have been reading up and it seems the general recommendation is the Xeon e3-1230 v2 with a supermicro board and ECC ram albeit these maybe the cremedelacreme when it comes to home servers I just cannot justify my very modest data use and performance requirement :P. So the next CPU I have looked at is the pentium range which the g2020 seems rather good in terms of cost and power usage, £50 and ECC support however I can also get the Core-i3 3220 which seems identical apart from a 3.3ghz clock and hyperthreading, how much of a tangible difference would this be? Worth the £20?.
Motherboard, I cannot find a retailer in the UK that sells the supermicro boards and since I am trying to do a build on the cheap I can currently considering using my spare ASUS p8z68-v (uses intel NIC, not realtek as I have read bad things about them!) its been a reliable motherboard and I only just moved down to Mini-Itx hence its now spare so reusing it saves me trying to flog it (win win...?), are there any other options I should consider?.
Ram, I am looking for 8GB to start with unless you guys think I need more. Any ways I have decided against ECC ram and my reasoning is that ECC ram is MUCH more expensive in England, I have searched high and low but can only find 8gb ECC ram for ~£80 where as I am ready to order 8gb non-ecc for £29.98... I cant justify it that price difference even more so if I reuse my board as it doesnt support ECC. I could get 16gb if the extra 8gb makes much of a difference though as this price is pretty good! I would have 4 dimms full though as its 4gb sticks.
Cases.... not a clue on this part, I have a Lian li A70 or an Xigmatek Elysium that I can use to "trial" it but I would like a relativel small footprint if possible however I could probably make the A70 work and buy those hotswapable 5.25" bay drives. Suggestions welcomed here :D.
PSU: Will be looking at a gold rated modular psu (if not then non modular... to save pennies) however I am not sure what wattage I should be looking for, but the lowest I can find is 360w and its a this one : Seasonic SS-360gp - £48 highly rated on jonny guru which means it should be perfect, great price as well :).
Hard drives, never had a WD drive fail me in the last 15 years and have only had a seagate die on me, my first plan was to grab the 3TB WD RED drives but I am open to suggestions here anything with good performance reliability and power usage... hard to meet the perfect drive though haha.
I think thats all the aspects required for a nas apart from the USB drive, I will buy an 8GB drive solely for this but I assume any decent brand is ok like this one:http://www.amazon.co.uk/Kingston-Te...e=UTF8&qid=1376792318&sr=1-1&keywords=8gb+usb
If I have missed anything id appreciate being pointed into the right direction, like I said I am new to this and would rather do it right the first time where possible!.
Thanks for your time and apologies for the poor English and broken post, I have been rewriting things a bit while I kept researching so it may be a tad confusing.
