Re-purpose PC for home NAS

[SaltanSupreme]

Hey, I'm looking to re-purpose a PC for use as a NAS and I was curious what I would need and if the parts I currently have are any good for use as a NAS. Also, if anyone could suggest a good NAS PC case that has hot-swap bays that supports microATX boards since that's what I'm working on atm and I'd like to keep the budget as low as possible and replace as few parts as possible.

 

Here's the build I have:

AMD a10 7860K APU (I have a lower power APU to replace this one since I don't need the higher end graphics, both came with the system)

AsRock micro ATX mobo

8 GB ddr3 RAM (1 stick)

450W PSU

2 500 GB HDD which I plan on replacing with NAS drives.

 

thanks!

 

 

[MorganO]

2 minutes ago, SaltanSupreme said:

Hey, I'm looking to re-purpose a PC for use as a NAS and I was curious what I would need and if the parts I currently have are any good for use as a NAS. Also, if anyone could suggest a good NAS PC case that has hot-swap bays that supports microATX boards since that's what I'm working on atm and I'd like to keep the budget as low as possible and replace as few parts as possible.

 

Here's the build I have:

AMD a10 7860K APU (I have a lower power APU to replace this one since I don't need the higher end graphics, both came with the system)

AsRock micro ATX mobo

8 GB ddr3 RAM (1 stick)

450W PSU

2 500 GB HDD which I plan on replacing with NAS drives.

 

thanks!

 

 

should be fine

[knightslugger]

yup. did that myself with an old-ish lenovo tower. installed a 3 bay 3.5" HDD actively cooled add-on where the 5.25" optical drives resided (had to saw the support beam out), and since i didn't have the original drive cage for the HDD i just shoved the 4th drive into the original cage kiddy-wompus. added a 2-port intel 1GB NIC for failover, and installed FreeNAS on three kingston USB drives in a mirror configuration and never looked back. thing has run 24/7 for pretty much a year straight.

[Hiitchy]

If it's just going to be for home, it sounds good enough to me. Have you thought of which RAID array you're going to use for your system? 

[SaltanSupreme]

Just now, Hiitchy said:

If it's just going to be for home, it sounds good enough to me. Have you thought of which RAID array you're going to use for your system? 

Probably RAID 1 or RAID 5, it's mostly for movies and games storage, maybe some overflow files

[Hiitchy]

Just now, SaltanSupreme said:

Probably RAID 1 or RAID 5, it's mostly for movies and games storage, maybe some overflow files

I was thinking of doing RAID 5 for the same idea, but if I were to get a 4TB drive, I'd have to get another 4TB so it could mirror the same files on another drive right?

[ProjectBox153]

That's more than enough for a home NAS. You don't even really need NAS drives. 

[knightslugger]

Just now, SaltanSupreme said:

Probably RAID 1 or RAID 5, it's mostly for movies and games storage, maybe some overflow files

not with two drives will you do a RAID5. you're looking at RAID 1 or 0. RAID 1 will get you half the total capacity with a single drive failure before catastrophe, and 0 will get you full capacity with no protection whatsoever.

[SaltanSupreme]

14 minutes ago, knightslugger said:

not with two drives will you do a RAID5. you're looking at RAID 1 or 0. RAID 1 will get you half the total capacity with a single drive failure before catastrophe, and 0 will get you full capacity with no protection whatsoever.

I would add more drives lol for RAID 5 it depends on my budget at the time which I'd go with. i need new drives either way since they aren't exact matches in the system I have presently

[knightslugger]

4 minutes ago, SaltanSupreme said:

I would add more drives lol for RAID 5 it depends on my budget at the time which I'd go with. i need new drives either way since they aren't exact matches in the system I have presently

IMO (and MO only) ZFS is a better way to do it. If this is for non-essential files RAIDz1 will be fine, but for files you would hang yourself for if you lost them (metaphorically speaking), i recommend RAIDz2 at a minimum.

[AshleyAshes]

Mine is built out of a mish mash of parts, including the old motherboard to my 2500k workstation from once upon a time.  the idea is sound.

 

 

[pyrojoe34]

Hey so I've set up a couple NAS systems with older hardware without any issues (It used to be an Athlon x64 Dual Core with 4GB and I just upgraded to an FX8120 with 16GB of RAM). I use FreeNAS (11) and it's pretty easy to do. I don't use RAID since it's 1 of 4 redundancies I have of my data (so it's not a big deal if a drive fails) and it reduces chances of complications. I have the OS on a USB stick and set up a 2TB drive, a 320GB drive and a 250GB drive. The 2TB drive is set up as a basic Windows SMB share and holds my personal data, the 320GB drive has it's own SMB share that functions as a guest drive so I can share things with people without giving out my password, and the 250GB drive contains a Ubuntu VM for messing around with stuff before I try it out on a real system. I also will be adding another drive with PLEX media at some point as a remote media server. If you want to access the NAS remotely (over the internet) I found the easiest solution is to set up a VPN into your network, connect to it, then just use the NAS as if you were local.

 

Anyway, if your goal is just a basic NAS you don't really need to bother with RAID or anything fancy (this shouldn't be your only backup anyway). I just set up each drive as it's own share/Dataset and map the drives to my PCs so they function like a basic network HD as far as my PCs can tell. Even with one of the drives being an old IDE I still get Gb transfer speeds most of the time since the ZFS works really well by caching the data to the RAM so no bottlenecks appear (unless I'm transferring huge amount of data and the RAM gets filled up and can't dump to disk fast enough.) I might even add a space 32GB SSD I have laying around as a cache for the main SMB share to help with larger data transfers.