NAS built from old free parts as experiment, tips needed

computer1up · September 18, 2015

My second topic here on LTTF, so this is going to be a fun one.

I've got a load of hardware for free, like 7 1TB Samsung HD107J's, an old XFX RAID card (I think from when Powermacs where still a thing, G5's to be more specific), and an Intel Atom 230 mini-itx board, and possibly a Corsair CX430 PSU.

This is quite old hardware by today's standards, however as I'm currently saving up most of my money to buy a new laptop, and I don't have a job as a 17 y/o computernerd, I almost can't afford to buy anything else for the nas right now.

So I was thinking to build a nice first time NAS for me, but I need some advice on it.

First off, it's cooled by a little heatsink that you would normally put on some kind of big transistor in an audio amp, with a tiny, max. 30mm fan on it, which makes one hell of a noise. I was thinking about making passively cooled, but I'm quite unsure what my best possibilities are here. A normal socket 775 cooler won't fit, as there are no mounting holes (only two brackets to hold a clip into place). But, I have some old server heatsinks laying around here and there, like one out of a Dell Poweredge 1800, or one of a HP DL380 G5.

Second, I was thinking about how many drives to put in the system and what RAID I should choose. I have 5 sata ports on the RAID card, so max. 5 1TB drives. But then I don't know what would be best for redundancy, performance and capacity.

Third, I want to put the latest edition of Windows Server on it (or maybe 2012, I haven't decided yet), but I need my NAS to be very quiet at night, as I don't want to be disturbed by it in my sleep (has to stay in my bedroom, since all important computers are there on a gigabit network which is nowhere else in the house, and I don't have space anywhere else). This means I want it either in stand by, or make the drives spin down at night, only going back on when a local computer accesses it. Is this possible?

Last but not least I was thinking if it would be good to put a separate drive in the system as a bootdrive (I don't have any extra SSD's).

I'm very curious to find out what you guys think about it.

The Cool n00B · September 18, 2015

I'd recommend a RAID 10 if possible. I combines striping (and speed) from a RAID 0 and the redundancy of a RAID 1. RAID 5 and 6 are also really good bc the array will be completely fine in a drive failure. A RAID 6 is a little better than a RAID 5, but either way 5 and 6 are both generally the most secure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels

dom1310df · September 18, 2015

I have a modified off-the-shelf NAS, with 4 2TB drives in raid 10 (via ZFS) and a separate el cheapo 64GB SSD with the OS on. On the face of it, with the components you have you could make something similar to mine. IMHO, you could either:

Use 4 drives in RAID 10 and the 5th for the OS
Use the 5 drives in raid 5, and optionally add an extra drive for the OS.

On my NAS, the drives only spin while being read/written, but I'm unsure whether that's a feature of my NAS/OS/HDDs, or a standard feature.

If there are screws holding the cooler brackets down, you could remove them and use the screw holes to attach a new cooler. Can you post a pic of these brackets?

computer1up · September 18, 2015

Thanks for the quick replies guys! I will post a picture tomorrow Dutch time, as it's pretty late right now.

As for RAID, I discovered that my card would only support 0, 1 and 5 (XFX Mac 5-Port SATA PCI). So RAID 5 it will be.

By the way, I believe that card was originally supposed to have a PowerPC ROM on it, but it has been flashed with an Intel ROM later on (still got the same card but with the Mac ROM). That's pretty funny, isn't it?

computer1up · September 19, 2015

The images are included as attachments, as I still have to find out how the My Media thingy works.

Basically, the cooler is held on by some brackets that are put on the board a bit like headers, so no screwholes. But I just might go full Linus and strap something on with cable ties...