Advice about building my own NAS

[Sir Glacius]

Hey Guys,

I want a nas for backups and long term storage for me and my family.
Since buying a nas is very expensive i am considering throwing together a cheap system and use that instead.

 

For example something like this:

Motherboard: ASRock A88M-G/3.1  (it has 8 SATA ports and it's cheap) $75
Processor: AMD Athlon X4 840 $40
Power Supply: Cooler Master MasterWatt Lite 400W $35
Ram: 16GB DDR3 stick with ECC $75
Cables & case: $35

Total price: +/- $260

As you probably guessed i do have some questions:

1. Am i overlooking something that explains the $500 between something like this and a prebuild nas?
2. Should i spend a little more and get better hardware?
3. Is there a reason why i shouldn't use Surveillance drives instead of the more expensive NAS drives?
4. Do you have any software suggestions? (I hear FreeNas works well)
5. I want to start with 3 or 4 drives in RAID 5 and add more drives later is that possible with the software?
6. What happens if my boot drive or motherboard dies? Can i recover data?

All feedback is very welcome thank you!

 

Edit:

Total storage capacity will be around 16TB to start off but i will probably need to expand that to 50+ over the coming years. Add in redundancy and the price of the hard drives and it seems a lot more economical to build something my self that can be expanded with up to 8 drives than buying a NAS for this capacity.

[Computernaut]

3. Surveillance drives have poor read speeds, especially random reads; they are designed to be written to continuously and occasionally be read from sequentially.

[Jimkirk363]

I dont Understand, You can get a NAS for around the price u r throwing at this PC and u still have to factor in the cost of storage on top.

[Alex Atkin UK]

4 minutes ago, jimkirk363 said:

I dont Understand, You can get a NAS for around the price u r throwing at this PC and u still have to factor in the cost of storage on top.

That said, would a bought NAS be as fast?

[Jimkirk363]

I have an old Synology D215J with 2 x 3GB WD Reds in and theres 4 of us working from it fine.

[Sir Glacius]

21 hours ago, jimkirk363 said:

I have an old Synology D215J with 2 x 3GB WD Reds in and theres 4 of us working from it fine.

 

21 hours ago, jimkirk363 said:

I dont Understand, You can get a NAS for around the price u r throwing at this PC and u still have to factor in the cost of storage on top.

 

Sorry for not being clear on the use case. I need a lot of long term storage for video and photos. To start with 3 8TB drives in Raid 5 will give me 16TB but that will be expanded to 8 drives over the coming years. I haven't found a NAS that can do this for under 800$. And yes i am aware that is over 1500$ in drives that's why i am planning to add the storage in stages.

 

 

 

 

[myselfolli]

1 hour ago, Sir Glacius said:

 

 

Sorry for not being clear on the use case. I need a lot of long term storage for video and photos. To start with 3 8TB drives in Raid 5 will give me 16GB but that will be expanded to 8 drives over the coming years. I haven't found a NAS that can do this for under 800$. And yes i am aware that is over 1500$ in drives that's why i am planning to add the storage in stages.

 

 

 

 

*16TB

 

I think your plan is pretty solid, do you have any experience with FreeNas etc.?

[Sir Glacius]

11 hours ago, myselfolli said:

*16TB

 

I think your plan is pretty solid, do you have any experience with FreeNas etc.?

I have no experience with FreeNas but there are a ton of guides out there. I plan to keep the original data as well for a couple of months so i have time to learn how the software works. Worst case scenario i mess it all up, call it an "adventure" and just start over 

If you have any tips however they are always welcome.

[AbydosOne]

21 hours ago, Sir Glacius said:

Ram: 16GB DDR3 stick with ECC $75

A bit of a note here: the A88 chipset doesn't support ECC, so you spending money on something that will never be used properly.

 

22 hours ago, Sir Glacius said:

Do you have any software suggestions? (I hear FreeNas works well)

FreeNAS works quite well, but you're going to want to build a system that follows the FreeNAS Guidelines. There's a lot of things to be learned over on the FreeNAS forums.

 

22 hours ago, Sir Glacius said:

Should i spend a little more and get better hardware?

If you intend to keep this system up and running 24/7 for a few years (at least), don't cheap out on hardware now. Get a server-grade motherboard (even of an older generation), a cheap Xeon (or i3, which should still support ECC), and a good PSU. (You'll need more than 400W to support the spinup of eight hard drives at the same time.)

 

22 hours ago, Sir Glacius said:

I want to start with 3 or 4 drives in RAID 5 and add more drives later is that possible with the software?

There really isn't a good way to do that, even in ZFS/FreeNAS. You can add more volumes (zvols) to a ZFS pool, but that process can be easy to screw up and cannot be undone (without wiping and creating again from scratch), so I can really only recommend it if you need to speed advantage given by doing so.

 

22 hours ago, Sir Glacius said:

What happens if my boot drive or motherboard dies? Can i recover data?

ZFS (used by FreeNAS, and can be installed under Linux) is hardware agnostic, and as long as all the drives are connected to another system, the whole array can be reimported and used. This is true even if the drives are spread across multiple controllers (which is really neat, IMHO). Avoid hardware RAID controllers, which are much more fragile and picky.

 

22 hours ago, Sir Glacius said:

Cables & case: $35

I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a case that can fit eight hard drives for that price point, let alone including SATA cables, etc.

 

Feel free to ask me any other questions: I've been running FreeNAS for a few years now, so (I think) I have got a pretty good handle on what to do.