Buildning a NAS instead of buying Synology/QNAP

[kim83]

Hi all,

I am looking for feedback on hardware for a new NAS system.
The parts have been choosen mostly because of the price (cheaper than QNAP/Synology).

Motherboard: ASRock FM2A88X-ITX+
CPU: AMD A-serie A8-5600K
PSU: Corsair Builder Series CX500 V2
Ram: Corsair XMS3 DHX 4GB.
SSD: Samsung SSD 840 EVO 120GB
HDD (RAID): 5x WD RED WD30EFRX
Enclosure: Fractal Design Node 304 Mini-ITX White

 

[Quixit]

Is this for home or work and what are you using it for?

If it's for just a few users you can literally use anything, I have a NAS system at home that's made out of spare parts (apart from the hard drives) and it can still saturate 1Gbps Ethernet.

 

[kim83]

Both. I have some old spareparts from the Pentium III/4 days and that is too slow.

 

[Anathemata]

Any reason why you have the SSD? You can run freenas from a thumb drive. Take the money saved and run more RAM.

Also, I love that case (I used it for my NAS build), but there is not a lot of free room for cable management, so I would get at least a partially modular PSU. And as much time as this thing is at idle, I would suggest looking for PSUs that have great efficiency at idle or low loads.

 

[mdocod]

With the option for up to 8XSATA on the A85/88 chipsets, I've long thought these made sense as ultra-budget storage servers, but then... picking an ITX board that doesn't have room for all of the SATA ports that the chipset supports sort of defeats the purpose.

 

[Anathemata]

Motherboard: ASRock FM2A88X-ITX+
CPU: AMD A-serie A8-5600K
PSU: Rosewill Fortress 450
Ram: G.SKILL Value Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10600) Desktop
SSD: at lest 4 GB thumb drive running FREENAS
HDD (RAID): 5x WD RED WD30EFRX
Enclosure: Fractal Design Node 304 Mini-ITX White

I made a few changes. Overall your build is solid. WD Reds are a solid choice, but it couldn't hurt to have a 6th HDD in the cage not plugged in that you can just swap too if one of the others go bad in a few years.

I upped the RAM based on recommendations I've received in the past. Having never run less than 1GB RAM per TB of HDD space, I can't give you first-hand experience on how much it will constrain you.

 

[fosken]

This is very interesting. I'm also interested to buy some cheap hardware for NAS! But I lack the knowledge of the latest and the greatest, in other words how to get as much bang for the buck as possible.

1GB per TB is more of a requirement of your are going to use ZFS on Free4nas for example. But not if you are using other NAS distros ex. Open Media vault with snapraid. It depends what you want to accomplish.

By biggest fear is performance with encryption. I'm going for full HDD encryption, maybe luks with AES. But I guess it wont be a issue.

 

[mdocod]

For AES encryption, you'll obviously want to pick a supporting CPU, which means, anything AMD, and i5 or better with Intel. (might as well go E3 at that point).

 

[Anathemata]

Yeah, I went with a 65W i5, the least expensive mITX mobo that would support my needs, and 16GB of budget RAM for my build. I run freenas with 5x3 WD reds in zfs running plex, torrenting, etc and it runs just fine. I figured go with something that has the power to last me 6+ years until I need more space.