thinking about NAS

[JQam]

Building a NAS been on my mind lately.  I thought about buying new but I was looking at my old parts and thought I could just roll with it for  now.

 

I have a FX8320 and a ASRock 970M with 24 GB DDR3 that my daughter was using for Roblox and Minecraft.  I have since set her up with newer hardware. If I went that route I would just have to get a bigger case, power supply and storage drives.  Does that seem feasible?  At this point I would just be offloading media onto it and have no other plans at the moment.

[Tanks]

11 hours ago, JQam said:

Building a NAS been on my mind lately.  I thought about buying new but I was looking at my old parts and thought I could just roll with it for  now.

 

I have a FX8320 and a ASRock 970M with 24 GB DDR3 that my daughter was using for Roblox and Minecraft.  I have since set her up with newer hardware. If I went that route I would just have to get a bigger case, power supply and storage drives.  Does that seem feasible?  At this point I would just be offloading media onto it and have no other plans at the moment.

Honestly, yes, in its most basic format, building a "NAS" can be done on just about anything. 
Like anything, the more features you go for, the more resources it consumes. 

But honestly, that would suffice for what you are talking about here. 

Doing things like virtualization/heavy container use or media transcoding could start to tax that processor a bit, but for the actual filesharing part of NAS that should be fine. 

I am seeing people report solid performance within the last year on a similar processor for the major out-of-the-box NAS solutions like TrueNas and SCALE. And those are heftier than other solutions 

[voyager_]

For a NAS that FX8320 will work well, being older hardware it will use more power then modern hardware but probably not enough to really notice. I used that same chip in an unraid server for years and it handled plex and a few other minor things very well and I never had a stability issue. If you decide to go the plex route you can always throw in an older GPU for the transcoding and for drives depending on how many you want you can get an LSI 9207-8i in IT mode pretty cheap and you may want to use an ssd as a cache depending on the OS route/setup you go with. But that is a very solid chip and 24Gb Ram is more then enough for a basic nas even if you through in a minecraft server or add plex. Later down the road if you decide you want more you can always move to newer hardware if it's too much for what you have now.

[JQam]

1 hour ago, voyager_ said:

OS route/setup you go with

Thanks. At this point, I'm not sure what route I'm going.  I just know I want some file sharing ability for the family.  I'll probably start out with four drives of something for the storage. I just noticed I have six sata ports so I should be good for now.  I'm not even sure how much storage I'm shooting for.

[LIGISTX]

31 minutes ago, JQam said:

Thanks. At this point, I'm not sure what route I'm going.  I just know I want some file sharing ability for the family.  I'll probably start out with four drives of something for the storage. I just noticed I have six sata ports so I should be good for now.  I'm not even sure how much storage I'm shooting for.

I’d look at unraid for this. Unraid is perfect for the “I want a NAS, but I don’t know exactly what it actually went yet” situation. It does cost money to buy, but it’s a one time cost, and in the realm if homelab/NAS/server stuff, the price they ask is extremely reasonable for what it provides. 

[JQam]

Now what about hard drives for a normal residential NAS?   Are there good companies to source used drives from?  I was thinking about going with four 8 TB drives.

[LIGISTX]

9 hours ago, JQam said:

Now what about hard drives for a normal residential NAS?   Are there good companies to source used drives from?  I was thinking about going with four 8 TB drives.

I wouldn’t run used drives. People do it, but I never recommend it. Most PC parts are pretty resilient to damage, harddrives are not one of those parts.