Best Economically Friendly Consumer Motherboard for NAS

[splizza]

Hey guys, so I'm the broke college kid that's been posting around the forums lately. I am in the process of trying to piece together a computer to make a NAS server. I'm looking to build from the ground up, because I've come to realize going with any prebuilt is going to severely limit the amount of drives I can have connected to the computer at any given point (that goes for upgrade paths too). So, is there a consumer motherboard that you guys'd recommend that has anywhere from 2-6 sata ports on it? I'm looking to have a three drive array in raid 1. If the sata ports aren't a huge deal could you guys point me in the right direction? Thanks.

[Mark77]

Sandy Bridge boards/CPU's should be available used for not a lot of money if you look at kijiji or the buy/sell forums.  And the power consumption of that platform is considerably lower than the predecessors.  NAS doesn't require much computing power, so don't feel that you need to get the latest platform to have a decent machine.  Most people on here with home built NAS's constructed them of either used or spare parts I suspect.

 

A lot of it depends upon what you can find for cheap within your budget.  My first "NAS" was a Pentium-66 (yes, 66MHz) built of free components.  You can still build up a pretty decent system if you dumpster-dive for LGA775 stuff or the AMD equivalent. 

 

 

 

 

[splizza]

Yeah, I've browsed around kijiji and craigslist in Toronto (as that's where I live) and there aren't too many options as far as I can see. Seeing as I've just moved here not too long ago I haven't found the sweet spot yet for hardware. (If there's anyone from Toronto browsing here, feel free to chime in!)

[AshleyAshes]

My vote would be eBay if Kijiji is giving you no love.  Most Mobos have at least 4 SATA ports and often have 6, higher ends will have extra controllers to increase that. But you can just slap in extra PCI-E SATA controllers to expand later if you want.  If you don't care about power efficiency, you can probably get some kinda Core 2 Duo or Core 2 Quad, complete with motherboard and cooler for not much money.

 

Here's a quick example I could come up with:

 

http://www.ebay.ca/itm/Intel-DG31PR-Desktop-Motherboard-Core-2-Duo-E7400-2-80GHz-CPU-2GB-DDR2-RAM-/131756943359?hash=item1ead5367ff:g:2Z4AAOSwJkJWin4h

 

It's a motherboard, CPU and RAM for about $70.  It has two PCI-E slots so you could add more controller cards later, two 4 port controller cards would give you 12 ports total for example.  You could PROBABLY find a better price, this was just the first vaguely relevant hit I could find as an example.

[Jarsky]

Typically I wouldn't recommend building a NAS if you're on such a tight budget - since if something breaks its going to often cause downtime while you source a replacement part, and of course the money to fix it. You're also spending money on case, psu, board, cpu, memory, etc...that could go into just buying the drives themselves to go in your PC.

 

Really if you want to build a dedicated NAS, basically anything x86 based will work if you're using stand alone drives or software arrays like Windows Server RAID, Storage Spaces, or MDADM.  Just look for deals for the cheapest motherboard/cpu/ram combo - it doesnt take much power to run the above software solutions. I used to run a 6 x 2TB disk RAID5 with Windows 2008 R2 for years off an old repurposed Phenom X2 550BE with the cheapest Asus mobo and 4GB ram.

 

The advantage to software arrays if you're looking to pool storage, is that it holds the array info on the drives, so in the event of a failure different SATA controllers, etc..and the above solutions don't really care about what type of memory you're running like ZFS or BTRFS.