Building a NAS inside a desktop full tower case = good idea?

[dalewb]

Hello forum,
I am thinking about building a NAS inside my Corsair Obsidian 800D case because it has a built in hot-swappable 4-drive cage, but I got to thinking - one of the most important features of a NAS enclosure is the ability to see visually if a drive has gone bad (via a red LED) so you can quickly replace it. This enclosure wouldn't have that. Do you think this would become a big issue or can it be overcome by software (e.g., maybe a there exists software with a graphical on-screen view of the RAID with a health indicator next to each drive bay).

What do you think - good idea or bad?

 

[giantbucket]

for just home / home office use it would likely be fine, no big deal if there's a one day delay in swapping out a drive.

for SOHO or larger, i'd skip that case and get something that can use a hot-swap bay with LEDs. i use a cheap Rosewill 4-bay cage in my office server, in whatever ugly-a$$ case i have available. nobody looks at it, it ain't a Mac.

 

[dalewb]

for just home / home office use it would likely be fine, no big deal if there's a one day delay in swapping out a drive.

for SOHO or larger, i'd skip that case and get something that can use a hot-swap bay with LEDs. i use a cheap Rosewill 4-bay cage in my office server, in whatever ugly-a$$ case i have available. nobody looks at it, it ain't a Mac.

Thanks for the suggestions. Two questions come to mind - if a drive needs to be replaced, how do I know which one without indicator LEDs? And if at some point I need to move to a unit with more bays, can that be accomplished while preserving the array? I'm sorry - I'm just beginning to learn about storage and arrays so I have many more questions than answers at this point :-/

 

[Hlsgsz]

That will not be an issue as you can have FreeNAS notify you if a drive fails even through an email if you desire. So it can be easily overcome by software.
However, this is a way more appropriate case for a NAS(i'm inlcuding the whole build, maybe the rest will help you aswell:

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Integrated with Motherboard
Motherboard: ASRock C2550D4I Mini ITX Atom C2550 Motherboard ($278.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Memory: *Crucial 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory ($49.99 @ Newegg)
Storage: Kingston SSDNow V300 Series 120GB 2.5" Solid State Drive ($40.49 @ NCIX US)
Case: Silverstone DS380B Mini ITX Tower Case ($147.99 @ Directron)
Power Supply: SeaSonic 300W 80+ Certified SFX Power Supply ($38.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Total: $556.45
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
*Lowest price parts chosen from parametric criteria
Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-07-15 11:01 EDT-0400

EDIT: I refined teh buidl with ECC RAM.

EDIT2: You can name teh drives in software after the order they are physically so you know what;s what.

 

[dalewb]

That's definitely a sweet case. At first I was shocked by the price of the mobo until I realized it has an Intel processor soldered onto the board. Did you see the prices for the Intel Xeon variations? $800+ wow.

I'm still paying for a recent series of upgrades and hardware consolidations so buying anything right now, save a few hard drives, is out of the question. But I will keep your ideas in mind - thanks!

Have you heard about SnapRAID? It is parity on steroids, I gather, and allows for a more intelligent RAID solution. I'm looking into that along with object-based storage.

 

[Hlsgsz]

That's definitely a sweet case. At first I was shocked by the price of the mobo until I realized it has an Intel processor soldered onto the board. Did you see the prices for the Intel Xeon variations? $800+ wow.

I'm still paying for a recent series of upgrades and hardware consolidations so buying anything right now, save a few hard drives, is out of the question. But I will keep your ideas in mind - thanks!

Have you heard about SnapRAID? It is parity on steroids, I gather, and allows for a more intelligent RAID solution. I'm looking into that along with object-based storage.

My knowledge of this goes only so far, but, from what i gather, either FreeNAS with ZFS or Rockstor with btrfs are teh way to go, with the latter having a higher learning curve, but beeing expendable(ZFS doea not allow adding more drives to an existing array as far as i know).