Home Brew NAS Questions

[Boosted7M]

I have been toying with building a NAS for a while. Before I go whole hog and build something around a G4400 I have laying around I wanted to get/build something much cheaper for a proof of concept NAS. So I started looking at old workstations on ebay and goodwill computers as a cheaper quick system to use for the build. My question is what specific parts should I be looking for in these computers before I pull the trigger. I know I want SATA III support on the motherboard, but is there anything else I should be looking for? Are there specific CPU SKUs to look for, Recommendations on old workstation Xeons that would have SATA III. There are a lot of E5340 computers on Ebay but their boards will typically only support SATA II. Any advice would be Awesome, Thanks in advance.

 

[maxwellmelon]

Depends on what the NAS software and your needs.

Big/reliable hard drives as well this is the reason for a NAS really slow hard drives can limit transfer rates if ram buffer is smaller.

RAM (used for transfer buffer, read ahead buffer, write buffer) depends on software but you will find most recommend 4gb at least and Number of hard drive ports are important.

Network card is highly important remember that older 100mb network cards will typically only get you about 12MB sec transfer rate which is slow if your router supports it make sure you get a gigbit card as that will be up to about 120MB transfer rate.

CPU depending on your planed usage, a basic NAS doesn't need much cpu power, running encryption and other features will need more powerful cpu.

Hardware raid support can be useful and increase performance but most NAS software will allow software raid which puts a little more load on the cpu.

You don't need but a basic video card only for basic install of nas software to begin with usually after install you can setup the rest of settings over the network, integrated graphics are fine as most nas software uses basic text, sound card doesn't mater. really don't need any other hardware.

It really all depends on your plans. Ive actually just build a cheap nas out of a intel p4 2ghz cpu 512Mb of ddr 400mhz ram (though I wish I had more to use zfs file system) and 3 1gb hard drives. on a generic 300 watt psu. using a free nas software.

forgot to add you prob want a 64bit cpu as most nas software has stoped 32bit support.

 

[RealBeast]

^ Agree with Max.

Also you don't need SATA III for hard drives, only if your NAS is using SSDs. A lower end CPU is fine, but more memory is good if you plan to use zfs (like with FreeNAS that is quite good).

It really all depends on your budget, storage needs, and how much you want to work on building and maintaining the NAS.

 

[Boosted7M]

Thanks guys, I have done a good amount of research on the OS and their pros and cons, I might run FreeNAS because it is free and so versitile, but I kinda want to try unraid because I can practically use any drive and it will make it work (Downside, paying for a license). Ultimately, I was hoping to go to a local thrift shop/ebay with an idea of what parts were modern enough to have giabit lan and SATA III support. I really didn't want to spend more than $150 on the system sans drives. I did want SATA3 because of the benefits of caching with an SSD, which I would add in the future. I really appreciate your help, plan really hasn't changed. I guess is there a simple way to look at a motherboard I/O and lets say if it has an HDMI port or USB3.0 that I can assume that there is sata3 support and gigabit lan?