NASBird

[4dd0]

Due to the shortcomings of Synology DS1010+ (General poor performance), I have wanted to build a new NAS for some time now. A fatal power outage a couple of weeks ago, ended up killing two discs in my old DS1010+ (Thankfully without causing loss of data). The incident forced me to speed up the process and this is what I came up with..

 

 

Chassis: Silverstone DS380 (The Silverstone DS380 is a well-designed case. Small, yet easy to build in.)
PSU: Silverstone SFX 450w 80+ Bronze (non-modular)
Cooling: 3 x 120mm Noctua NF-P12 (Silverstone includes three fans but I swapped them for Noctua for the most quiet operation possible)
Motherboard: SuperMicro A1SRi-2758F (I have used SuperMicro for SOHO solutions the last ten years and I have nothing bad to say. SuperMicro's quality and support is legendary.)
Memory: 16 GB Kingston  SO-DIMM 1600Mhz ECC (4 x 4 DIMM)
Controller: LSI 9211-8i (IT-mode)
Drive: 8GB Sandisk Cruzer Fit (For the OS... I know I know.. 2 GB is plenty for FreeNAS but the 8 GB version was on sale and cheaper than the 4GB version. \o/)

Storage: 8 x 2TB Western Digital RED (Raid-Z2, for media files)
Storage: 3 x 120GB Kingston SSDnow (Raid-Z, for personal files)
OS: FreeNAS 9.2.1.5
 

 

 

The finished build

 

Almost done...

 

Test run...

 

All the parts and some extra stuff..

 

 

[qwertywarrior]

you could have gone with a thecus (N5550)

it offers best bang for the buck

 

but building one is fun though

 

 

also i just noticed you own lots of 2TB drives

why not go with 4TB red drives instead ?

[Hackzzila]

Nice

[4dd0]

you could have gone with a thecus (N5550)

it offers best bang for the buck

 

but building one is fun though

 

 

also i just noticed you own lots of 2TB drives

why not go with 4TB red drives instead ?

The N5550 has only space for 5 drives and eSATA/USB expansion just isn't suitable for a NAS solution and the CPU is only an Atom D2550. Scalability, Stability, security and performance doesn't meet my requirements.

 

My current solution holds 11 drives with space on the mainboard for additional 3 drives.. With some DIY one could fit the additional three drives into the chassis and still maintain an acceptable air flow. In other words, the same amount of drives, minus one, as three N5550's.. With that in mind, my current solution is a lot cheaper ;-)

 

Another factor is the software. FreeNAS is more versatile than any current proprietary software solution.

 

Regarding drive size.. First, I don't have the need for that much storage at the moment. Second, from my work, my experience with > 3TB drives  is that the fail ratio is too high for my taste at the moment.