Help with a NAS build

[mapexlegend]

Hi, my old computer died the other day so im going to turn it into a home server / nas unit. 

 

I will be creating a simple raid 10 NAS using motherboard onboard controller, the components used in this build are as follows:

- AMD A8 5600k APU 

- Gigabyte GA- F2A85X-UP4 Motherboard 

- 4 WD 2TB Red Drives

- Seasonic S12II 430W Powersupply

- G.SKILL Ripjaws - 1066CL7D - 4GBRH (2x2GB) DDR3 Ram 

 

Or would swooping out the apu and motherboard for 

- AMD FX 4130 CPU 

- Gigabyte GA - 990FXA - D3 Motherboard 

 

Be better? 

 

Please help as I'm new to NAS/ Homeservers, Thanks :) 

[SMURG]

If all you're after is a NAS/fileserver, an APU is totally overkill. You could just get an atom board with something like a D2550 on it, whack a single 4GB DIMM onto it and you'll be fine (atoms only run single channel anyway). Jetway do a few atom boards with 4 SATA ports on them which would be fine for a software RAID or Hardware RAID if you bought an LSI card or something. Alternatively you could get a H67 socket 1155 board and get a £30 pentium or something on that, allowing you to have up to 6 drives on Intel's firmware RAID. For 24/7 use, power consumption should always be a consideration in my eyes, and the Atom is the king of power consumption.

For this reason AMD is really not a great choice for NAS/fileserver applications. They have far higher power consumption and inferior NICs, plus the Intel RAID is better anyway.

[mapexlegend]

Thanks for the advice! I'll go for a H67 and a Pentium then :)

[mapexlegend]

Having a bit of trouble finding H67 Boards in Australia, would another type of board be fine? Will sata 2 be slower versus sata 3 in a raid 10 ?

[mapexlegend]

would a raid card improve performance?

[algoat]

Will sata 2 be slower versus sata 3 in a raid 10 ?

The bandwidth of sata 3 is definitely bigger, but I don't think 4 mechanical drives would reach the limit of 375 MB/s (sata 2) in raid 10 any ways.

[looney]

The bandwidth of sata 3 is definitely bigger, but I don't think 4 mechanical drives would reach the limit of 375 MB/s (sata 2) in raid 10 any ways.

And he will likely be using a 1Gig NIC, so he doesn´t need the speed their either :p

[SMURG]

The bandwidth of sata 3 is definitely bigger, but I don't think 4 mechanical drives would reach the limit of 375 MB/s (sata 2) in raid 10 any ways.

 

 

And he will likely be using a 1Gig NIC, so he doesn´t need the speed their either :P

I agree. As for what board to get, just find one with a chipset which supports Intel Matrix RAID - H67 is usually the cheapest though (Q75, Q77, H77, Z75 and Z77 also do, as do a few older Sandybridge ones (Q67, P67, Z68))

Regarding a RAID card, with RAID 10 you won't notice much difference since there's no parity calculations. If you were after RAID 6 I might advise one, but even for RAID 5 I've found matrix RAID is fine if you don't need the CPU to be doing something apart from organising the storage.