Tips on building a budget nas build

[Turbo.SG]

I want to build a medium-capacity NAS with room to upgrade the storage in the future. I want to *try* to spend about US$400-500 before drives.

 

I'm not to knowledgeable on Xeon processors and their compatible motherboards, but I'd like to have a lower power one to save on my power bill. I plan to start out with 4x 4TB or 6TB WD Red Pro drives (drive recommendations also welcome), and slowly add 4 at a time until I fill up a 24 drive enclosure. HERE is a post to an ebay listing of a server I'm considering. I'll also need a raid card for redundancy. I don't know what type of raid I will be going for yet but I'd like 1-2 drive failures without losing data.

 

My main use of this would be cold storage for my games, video files (not a ton right now) and a Plex server for movies.

[Electronics Wizardy]

Id get the shucked external 8,10 and 12tb drives, much cheaper per tb, about the same speed or faster than those smaller 4 and 6 tb red pros. 

 

any dual xeon system, esp with that many drives is gonna be pretty power hungry, that selected system is a pretty good buy, but with drives, id guess around 300-400w is normal. 

 

Do you have a backup plan? What speeds do you want? 

 

That server has a hba(you probably don't want a raid card), then id probalby run ZFS  on it.

[AbsoluteFool]

4 minutes ago, Turbo.SG said:

I want to build a medium-capacity NAS with room to upgrade the storage in the future. I want to *try* to spend about US$400-500 before drives.

 

I'm not to knowledgeable on Xeon processors and their compatible motherboards, but I'd like to have a lower power one to save on my power bill. I plan to start out with 4x 4TB or 6TB WD Red Pro drives (drive recommendations also welcome), and slowly add 4 at a time until I fill up a 24 drive enclosure. HERE is a post to an ebay listing of a server I'm considering. I'll also need a raid card for redundancy. I don't know what type of raid I will be going for yet but I'd like 1-2 drive failures without losing data.

 

My main use of this would be cold storage for my games, video files (not a ton right now) and a Plex server for movies.

Ok here is what i can tell you about the server you listed.

 

1. SuperMicro Servers are very powerful but they make lot of noise.

2. The server has a backplane which is good.

3. In the description it says (IT mode) this is something regularely used on Raid Controllers to allow JBOD in case you want to use the controller as a "passthrough" card.

4. There are probably cheaper alternatives with other brands. SuperMicro systems tend to hold a quite high price compared to other vendors (even on used stuff).

[Turbo.SG]

40 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Do you have a backup plan? What speeds do you want?

My backup plan is going Synology, probably their 4-6 bay desktop NAS.

 

I'd like to get around 300-400 mbps on the drives. I'm going to have a Ubiquiti switch with two 10G SFP+ ports. One for the NAS and the other for my PC.

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, Turbo.SG said:

My backup plan is going Synology, probably their 4-6 bay desktop NAS.

 

I'd like to get around 300-400 mbps on the drives. I'm going to have a Ubiquiti switch with two 10G SFP+ ports. One for the NAS and the other for my PC.

If you just want a 10gb connection between 2 systems, id just run the cable between the two systems, no switch needed.

 

Just saying, that speed is pretty low, easily achieved by a single disk, you sure that unit is right?

 

 

[Turbo.SG]

6 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

If you just want a 10gb connection between 2 systems, id just run the cable between the two systems, no switch needed.

 

Just saying, that speed is pretty low, easily achieved by a single disk, you sure that unit is right?

 

 

I mean... I don't fully know what to expect. Ideally I could play some games off of the NAS so I wouldn't have to transfer from the NAS to my PC to play the game.

 

EDIT:

I'm planning on using Raid 5 or 6

[Electronics Wizardy]

Just now, Turbo.SG said:

I mean... I don't fully know what to expect. Ideally I could play some games off of the NAS so I wouldn't have to transfer from the NAS to my PC to play the game.

That server specs should be able to hit around 500mBs, esp once you add drives.

 

What os do you plan to use?

 

Try using iscsi for games, some don't like smb for game storage.

[Turbo.SG]

8 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

 

What os do you plan to use?

 

I was thinking FreeNAS.

[Turbo.SG]

1 hour ago, AbsoluteFool said:

SuperMicro Servers are very powerful but they make lot of noise.

Is there any way to swap the fans for different ones from Noctua?

1 hour ago, AbsoluteFool said:

There are probably cheaper alternatives with other brands.

What brands do you recommend?

[Electronics Wizardy]

Just now, Turbo.SG said:

I was thinking FreeNAS.

Yea that should work well here. You can also go with a linux distro with ZFS  aswell

[zogthegreat]

@Turbo.SG

 

You can snage a SuperMicro X8DTT blade board on eBay for around $40 USD. A pair of Xeon e5645's will cost you about $20 USD and 8gb DDR3 ECC Reg memory is going for about $12 USD per stick. I know that this is "EOL" gear, but for a home file server, it's really all that you need, If you need more PCI-E expansion slots, just search eBay for "SuperMicro X8" and you will find a plethora of excellent server motherboards. Since large corporations swap out their "old" hardware every year, you can find older generation hardware fairly cheaply.

 

I hope this helps,

 

zog