Planning a NAS

[HelplmChoking]

Hey guys, I found a Pentium 4 630 in a wardrobe while visiting my parents, along with a stock heatsink.

What would be a recommended build to act as a NAS for both file storage as well as backups for both mine and my girlfriend's computers (her's is a 27" iMac). Ideally it will need to be 4-8TB to hold everything.

 

I already have a case sorted, and LGA775 socket motherboards are cheap and easy to find, but I need some advice for the rest of the machine.

[KuJoe]

At 84W TDP I wouldn't bother building a NAS out of that unless electricity is free/cheap where you live. If you only need something for file storage and only 4-8TB then you can buy something much better and cheaper than if you were to try to build a complete PC from that 630, not to mention it will be more quiet and cheaper to run than it also.

 

I personally recommend Synology for personal NAS's and you can pick up a 1-bay (DS115) for $160 shipped (US) and a 4TB drive for another $160 shipped (also US). Now this won't offer you redundancy but if it's just for backups then you'll need to decide how many backups of your data do you want (I have 2 1-bay Synology NAS's replicated to each other weekly and synced to 4 off-site servers in real time along with an external USB backing one up nightly, but that's overkill for most).

 

EDIT: Just ran some numbers and it's not as bad as I originally expected, still a waste of money though.

 

1-Bay Synology NAS = ~12W

P4 630 = ~68.25W (just the CPU)

 

It costs me $1.15/Month or $13.83/Year to run my NAS 24x7x365.

It would cost me $6.55/Month or $78.67/Year to run just the P4 630 24x7x365 not taking into account any other hardware you add to it.

 

For $78.67 per year, you can find a some really nice off-site storage that's a lot better protected than anything you can build (in terms of infrastructure redundancy and security).

Edited January 1, 2016 by KuJoe

[HelplmChoking]

At 84W TDP I wouldn't bother building a NAS out of that unless electricity is free/cheap where you live. If you only need something for file storage and only 4-8TB then you can buy something much better and cheaper than if you were to try to build a complete PC from that 630, not to mention it will be more quiet and cheaper to run than it also.

 

I personally recommend Synology for personal NAS's and you can pick up a 1-bay (DS115) for $160 shipped (US) and a 4TB drive for another $160 shipped (also US). Now this won't offer you redundancy but if it's just for backups then you'll need to decide how many backups of your data do you want (I have 2 1-bay Synology NAS's replicated to each other weekly and synced to 4 off-site servers in real time along with an external USB backing one up nightly, but that's overkill for most).

Thanks for the heads up. Our power bill is pretty good, and I was only going to use this CPU as I already had it, a cooler and some RAM (maybe) lying around. As it is, if its not economical to use it as a NAS I'll keep sharing drives from my own machine for that purpose

[KuJoe]

Thanks for the heads up. Our power bill is pretty good, and I was only going to use this CPU as I already had it, a cooler and some RAM (maybe) lying around. As it is, if its not economical to use it as a NAS I'll keep sharing drives from my own machine for that purpose

 

I just updated my post with some actual numbers, I'm basing it off my electricity costs ($0.13341 per kWh) so it might not be so bad to use it in a build since you have it already.

 

If that's the case then check out that unRAID software Linux keeps pushing or FreeNAS is another good option if you want something out of the box (if you want to get super nerdy then you can roll your own option with Linux + OwnCloud or SyncThing or many of the other file sharing options out there).

 

I would aim for at least 2GB of RAM if you can find it because some backup software these days will cache files to RAM depending on the setup so better safe than sorry.

 

The CPU is definitely sufficient for a NAS, my Synology's only have ARM CPUs and both under 1GHz so you have plenty of processing power there.

 

For the hard drives I would get at least 2x drives in RAID1 or 3x drives in RAID5 just for redundancy because hard drives do fail eventually. With that CPU you'll be fine running software RAID if your motherboard doesn't have FakeRAID so no need to get a RAID controller unless you really want to or you need the SATA ports (if you do RAID5 the parity calculation will cause a CPU hit but with that CPU you won't notice unless you're running other things on the NAS). Consumer drives will be just fine if you do RAID, just grab the cheapest SATA drives you can find and you'll be good.

 

I would recommend at least a 1Gbps NIC but this would be based on your network setup so get whatever your network can handle, if you're doing wireless from all of your devices then 1Gbps is overkill but a PCI card is pretty cheap also. Keep in mind the sizes of the files you'll be backing up, if it's mostly <100MB files then you won't need a lot of network throughput but if you've got >10GB files then go for the 1Gbps or faster network in case you need to restore quickly (backing up won't matter much since it should be in the background, but restoring a 20GB file you NEED RIGHT NOW can take ages over wireless). Just remember that the max real throughput you'll see over a 100Mbps port is around 11-13MB/s while a 1Gbps port will be over 100MB/s.

[Streetguru]

Hey guys, I found a Pentium 4 630 in a wardrobe while visiting my parents, along with a stock heatsink.

You're better off with a low power AM1 based NAS over that

the short of it is that you'll want freeNAS, hard drives rated to run 24:7, and you should really probably use ECC RAM with like an i3 build, but that's naturally going to be more expensive

[KuJoe]

You're better off with a low power AM1 based NAS over that

the short of it is that you'll want freeNAS, hard drives rated to run 24:7, and you should really probably use ECC RAM with like an i3 build, but that's naturally going to be more expensive

 

All of those would be ideal but not required for essentially just an networked hard drive for backups. If he's using software RAID then the cheapest consumer drives are good enough (although you can get some refurbished Enterprise drives for pretty cheap at places like Newegg). The ECC RAM and anything more powerful than an Atom or Celeron processor is overkill for a NAS unless you are running some mission critical processes on it or using it for other tasks like transcoding.

[Peter Smyth]

In the Windows setting son my laptop, it is possible to set the SSHD to power down after a certain time (different from PC sleep) to save power and drive wear. Would that be possible on a FreeNAS of unRAID if you don't have good drives for 24/7 use?

[KuJoe]

In the Windows setting son my laptop, it is possible to set the SSHD to power down after a certain time (different from PC sleep) to save power and drive wear. Would that be possible on a FreeNAS of unRAID if you don't have good drives for 24/7 use?

 

I don't have any experience with either (I can confirm that Synology does offer this feature) I did find this guide for FreeNAS: https://www.pretzellogix.net/2015/02/04/how-to-get-freenas-9-3-to-spin-down-your-idle-hard-drives/

 

If you're concerned about running hard drives not designed for 24x7 use for long periods of time you can grab a refurbished NAS/Enterprise drive for near the cost of a brand new consumer drive with a decent warranty. As long as you're running some form of RAID (1, 5, 6, 10, 01, 50, or 60) or have additional backups you should be fine.

[Peter Smyth]

I don't have any experience with either (I can confirm that Synology does offer this feature) I did find this guide for FreeNAS: https://www.pretzellogix.net/2015/02/04/how-to-get-freenas-9-3-to-spin-down-your-idle-hard-drives/

 

If you're concerned about running hard drives not designed for 24x7 use for long periods of time you can grab a refurbished NAS/Enterprise drive for near the cost of a brand new consumer drive with a decent warranty. As long as you're running some form of RAID (1, 5, 6, 10, 01, 50, or 60) or have additional backups you should be fine.

I don't have my own NAS yet, but thanks for linking the article, it's very easy to understand. The writer doesn't understand power and energy usage though. I've been playing with power settings on my laptop to increase battery life and make it quieter for use in lectures.