NAS Recommendations

Guitarcal · December 18, 2020

Hi All,

I am looking to build a low power NAS for file storage and surveillance footage. I am targeting 20 TB of available storage after RAID. This should give me plenty of room for growth.

I was recently given older unused server grade hard drives and ram which I am hoping will start my build.

x20 Dell Constellation ES.3 3TB

x8 Dell Cheetah 15K.7 600GB

x16 PC3L 14900R 8GB Ram sticks

My priority is low power (low running cost) NAS. Would I be better off purchasing an all in one NAS such as the Synology or continuing a build with the above hardware?

If the above hardware, what case, motherboard, and CPU would you recommend? I believe my memory is ECC so I might be able to take advantage of this in a more advanced configuration? Is FreeNAS my best bet? Can I set up cache with the 15K drives in raid?

If I go the all in one route, and my total budget is $800 US, which brand and model would you recommend? Should I use my existing drives, or bite the bullet and purchase newer larger drives so I don't need as many?

Budget (including currency): $800 US

Country: USA

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Storage Backup and Surveillance

Other details (see above)

Thanks!

Master Disaster · December 18, 2020

You're never going to be able to build something as low powered as a prebuilt.

AFAIK Synologys use about 50w when being accessed and less than 15w when at idle.

Your old server will be in the mid hundreds just to run the OS.

Guitarcal · December 19, 2020

Thanks, that makes sense.

Any alternatives to recommend over the Synologys?

If I still go the build route, what hardware is recommended to utilize the drives and memory listed above.

TargetDron3 · December 19, 2020

Buy a prebuilt. Don't use the 15k cheetahs. If you want low power and low noise, the parts you have aren't going to do it. To power all of those drives, along with a cpu and motherboard, you are going to have a big computer with a lot of noise and heat.

Good luck finding a raid card that can handle 28 drives. That many drives typically requires a dedicated disk chassis running over a SAS connection or fiber connection to a main server.

For $800 buy a 4 bay synology and put 4x 10TB hdd in RAID 1 if you think RAID is a backup solution.

You should buy 2 NAS with as close to 20TB in each and set them to mirror each other.

Raid isn't a backup. It's for fault tolerance. If you lose your raid card you are usually screwed.