Recommendations for NAS improvements

[LeviBW]

I am looking for recommendations on how to improve my home NAS setup. I initially set it up using the limited knowledge I have of network storage, but I have a feeling there is a more optimal way to have it configured.

 

This is the hardware I have right now :

- 5 mismatched 1TB consumer-grade hard drives

- ASUS P9X79 mobo

- Xeon E5-2690

-16gb RAM

-120gb SATA boot SSD

 

The system is running windows 10 home. I am using Microsoft storage spaces to pool the drives. Drives are in a "three-way mirror" configuration which allows for 2 drive failures without any data loss, I chose this because of my less than ideal drive selection and therefore higher chance of drive failure. This setup gives me a total usable capacity of 1.5TB. It does about 85MB/s read and 80MB/s write (will include disk benchmark results below).

 

I am looking for any suggestions on how to improve this setup, mostly software/configuration wise. I had considered using unraid at one point but never ended up doing it, maybe that's a good option. I don't really want to spend a ton more money on hardware, this is meant to be a very budget build, but I'm not opposed to buying a raid card on eBay for example.

 

I also have a 500gb SATA SSD that I wanted to use to accelerate the spinning disks but when I built the server I couldn't figure out how to do that in conjunction with storage spaces and I haven't spent the time to figure it out yet.

 

Please let me know if you have any suggestions on how to make this server better whether it be faster speeds, better redundancy, more usable capacity, or something else.

 

[Windows7ge]

I would look into an OS like FreeNAS. It costs nothing. ZFS is really nice. Downside is you won't be able to use that SSD to speed up reads/writes as a NAS but if you're only on a 1Gbit network it'd be quite the waste of an SSD anyways.