DIY Low Power Desktop Nas - Help wanted with component selection

[irishbiker]

Hi All

I'm just about to build a desktop NAS box to cover my family needs, i.e. streaming films, photo storage, (Private Cloud) as well as a small Minecraft/Ark Server. I have a low power system which I am currently using which consists of:

Gigabyte J1900N-D3V
16gb DDR3
1tb 2.5" HDD along with hotswapping an external 2tb USB drive.
60W internal power supply fed by an external brick.
Running Mint Linux (64bit)

The current system runs less than 60W

I've just bought a Prodigy Cube Case Mini-ITX BFC-PRO-300-BBXKB-RP which I will be transferring the board to..

Does anyone have help with selecting the following:

1. PSU

As with my current system I want to keep power commission to a minimum, assume the above specs with an additional 4-6 port raid card (PCI) and 4 x 3tb drives. I may also spec a BDXL Blu-ray drive for long term photo backup.
Do I assume 25W per drive as a general rule of thumb?

3. Drives

I'm going to go for a raid 0 setup speed is not my primary goal but as with the PSU, power consumption is primary as the unit will be 24x7 I will start with 1 or 2 drives and build the system up over time as demands needs.

3. Cooling

I'm planning to have minimum cooling as the case will allow me to spread out the drives to maximize passive cooling but ideas on what fans I need to source would be great. Noise levels to a minimum would be my main achievement in this area.

Thanks

Paul

 

[popatim]

Raid 0 in a nas is pointless and only serves to raise the risk level of losing all your files. Inany raid 0 if you lose any drive all your files are gone from all the the drives so you now have 4 times the possibility of losing it all. The only benefit raid 0 has IS speed and since it is a nas and will be running at your networks speed, your network will bottleneck the raid array. Even a single modern drive will be bottlenecked by the network.

Use ZFS if you can. You have enough ram for now but keep in mind that the general rule for zfs is 1gb ram per tb of hdd.


For the cooling, I would install the optional 2nd front 120mm fan. Heat will naturally find its own way out so I dont think you'll need the top fans at this point.

Any ATX power supply will fit but for your build I would definitely pick up a quality unit. I use seasonics in my nas/server builds.