How powerful does a NAS have to be?

[Shaqtin]

Hey guys, I am new to the Linus tech tips forum so please forgive me if I make some stupid mistakes while uploading this topic. The reason I came to the forum was to get some opinions regarding a topic that I struggled to find alot about on the almighty Google search. My question is, what is the minimum hardware I need to run a NAS for my home. I had this cool idea that I might be able to turn my grandfathers old PC into a working NAS for me and my family to use. I thought it might be a cool project but upon further inspection I realise that his PC is really not to good (His board doesn't even have any sata port the board uses IDE ports). Anyway I was just wondering if anyone would be able to help me out and tell me just how powerful a NAS computer really NEEDS to be.

PS. I was planning to use freeNAS on the machine

Thanks heaps

Shaqtin

[Xenift]

Well an arm cortex can run 100MB/s.

 

So having an i3 do the job should be overkill.

[Lorunification]

Hi Shaqtin and welcome to the forums,

 

(CPU)-Performance wise, a NAS does not really need anything special if you just plan to dump data on it. If you, however, plan to use on-the-fly encoding for video streaming, a more potent CPU will be needed. For simple homeuse i would go with an older and cheap to get dual or quadcore core cpu (Q6600 e.g).

 

Depending on the amount of data that you plan to store on the NAS up to 4GB of RAM would be my suggestion. Starting at 512MB should work decently.

 

A dedicated GPU is not needed but you have to consider that you either need onboard graphics OR a small dedicated GPU.

 

Storage wise i suggest at least two SATA Ports so you can run at least a RAID 1 or 10. RAID 10 is more efficient. Google for "RAID 10 near far" for more info on that topic.

 

If you need anything more, just ask again here.

 

Regards

[burnttoastnice]

snip

Welcome to LTT . Remember to follow your thread so you get notified of replies

Pretty much any hardware can run a NAS. It's the network card that determines the speed though. For a NAS setup you'd definitely want something with Raid 1 capabilities for redundancy - so if one hard drive fails, the NAS continues to function.

If you're using that PC I'd recommend getting a SATA PCI card with built-in raid 1 (or better) capabilities, as well as a PCI gigabit Ethernet card. Make sure the cards are PCI as I doubt that machine has PCIe. Don't get those IDE to SATA adapters as not all of them are reliable.

[slightlyjaded]

A nas only has to be powerful enough to support the OS (usually some linux distro, or android) and be able to recognise the hard drive space plugged into it.

[AlTech]

Hey guys, I am new to the Linus tech tips forum so please forgive me if I make some stupid mistakes while uploading this topic. The reason I came to the forum was to get some opinions regarding a topic that I struggled to find alot about on the almighty Google search. My question is, what is the minimum hardware I need to run a NAS for my home. I had this cool idea that I might be able to turn my grandfathers old PC into a working NAS for me and my family to use. I thought it might be a cool project but upon further inspection I realise that his PC is really not to good (His board doesn't even have any sata port the board uses IDE ports). Anyway I was just wondering if anyone would be able to help me out and tell me just how powerful a NAS computer really NEEDS to be.

PS. I was planning to use freeNAS on the machine

Thanks heaps

Shaqtin

A dual core x86 CPU or quad core ArMv7 capable CPU. (v8 would be nice but that's a luxury).

2-4GB ram if it's your repository for your household.

How ever much storage you want.

[Shaqtin]

Thanks heaps everyone for all of the help.

[0x1e]

I have an 8 year old machine running my nas and so far not had a single problem with it.