Home NAS

[FedericoIT]

Hi guys, I am building a new home NAS. My budget is about 230 €, and i will use it with Plex, Backups and File sharing with 4 users. A wanted to go with unRAID as OS, with two 2 TB Hard Drives, a 30GB SSD (as a boot drive), a couple of 350GB drives and maybe I'm going to expand the system with a couple of 2TB drives.

 

A friend of mine can sell me for 200€ an ASRock H97 Anniversary, 8GB of DDR3 RAM and an Intel i5 4460 but without any case or PSU.

 

The alternative i have thought about is an ASRock FM2A88X+, an AMD A4-4020, a Corsair VS450, 8GB of RAM and a Zalman T5 case, all for 210€. 

 

Which configuration do you think I should take?

 

Federico

[paddy-stone]

Tough call, it's down to personal preferance is all. I would probably go with the i5 as it's got more scope for re-purposing the PC down the road if you decide you want a better NAS. I just bought an HP proliant gen 8 and is plenty for my needs as a media server and backup location... I also backup to another network location too, so in the event of a failure the chances of it hitting my PC/NAS/other network location at the same time are very remote. Anyway, the gen 8 has 4 drive slots, psu etc obviously... so just need to add OS and drives, is pretty quiet mostly, can sleep with it going even as it's in my bedroom.. so if you were wanting one for a cupboard this would easily fill your needs... I got mine during their cashback promotion, so cost me £165 - £55 cashback = £110 all-in, then add hard drives, I happened to have a 2TB and 1TB drive going spare, so that's all I have in there for now while I am still learning about NAS etc, then I will upgrade to 2x3TB NAS drives and have room to expand further later.

[FedericoIT]

24 minutes ago, paddy-stone said:

Tough call, it's down to personal preferance is all. I would probably go with the i5 as it's got more scope for re-purposing the PC down the road if you decide you want a better NAS. I just bought an HP proliant gen 8 and is plenty for my needs as a media server and backup location... I also backup to another network location too, so in the event of a failure the chances of it hitting my PC/NAS/other network location at the same time are very remote. Anyway, the gen 8 has 4 drive slots, psu etc obviously... so just need to add OS and drives, is pretty quiet mostly, can sleep with it going even as it's in my bedroom.. so if you were wanting one for a cupboard this would easily fill your needs... I got mine during their cashback promotion, so cost me £165 - £55 cashback = £110 all-in, then add hard drives, I happened to have a 2TB and 1TB drive going spare, so that's all I have in there for now while I am still learning about NAS etc, then I will upgrade to 2x3TB NAS drives and have room to expand further later.

Thanks a lot for your reply!

Hope to read some replies also from others.

Federico

EDIT: Which model do you have? The micro server?

[FedericoIT]

Nobody?

 

[Rob_LC]

unRaid boots from a USB stick, but you can use a small SSD to store your Plex docker, so that the HDD drives can spin down when they are not used.

I don't use plex, you should ask over in the unRaid forums or have a read there about how much cpu grunt you need.

[79wjd]

6 hours ago, Rob_LC said:

unRaid boots from a USB stick, but you can use a small SSD to store your Plex docker, so that the HDD drives can spin down when they are not used.

I don't use plex, you should ask over in the unRaid forums or have a read there about how much cpu grunt you need.

A pentium can handle 1-2 transcoded 1080p streams, and an i5 can handle about 4. If they're not transcoded or the end client does the transcoding, then there isn't really a server side cpu bound limit.

[FedericoIT]

3 hours ago, djdwosk97 said:

A pentium can handle 1-2 transcoded 1080p streams, and an i5 can handle about 4. If they're not transcoded or the end client does the transcoding, then there isn't really a server side cpu bound limit.

Thanks also to you.

 

So I just found out a build for 243€ that supports ECC memory.

 

Here is the build:

CPU: Intel Pentium G4400 3.3GHz Dual-Core Processor  (€69.00) 
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-X150M-PRO ECC Micro ATX LGA1151 Motherboard  (€129.00 @ Amazon Italia) 
Memory: Kingston HyperX Fury Black 4GB (1 x 4GB) DDR4-2133 Memory  (€22.99 @ Amazon Italia) 
Memory: Kingston HyperX Fury Black 4GB (1 x 4GB) DDR4-2133 Memory  (€22.99 @ Amazon Italia) 
Total: €243.98
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-04-06 19:56 CEST+0200

 

I would begin using Nas4Free and in a couple of months I would change OS installing FreeNAS and changing the RAM with ECC Memory.

 

What do you think of this build? Would it be a good solution?

 

Federico

[79wjd]

3 minutes ago, FedericoIT said:

Thanks also to you.

 

So I just found out a build for 243€ that supports ECC memory.

 

Here is the build:

CPU: Intel Pentium G4400 3.3GHz Dual-Core Processor  (€69.00) 
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-X150M-PRO ECC Micro ATX LGA1151 Motherboard  (€129.00 @ Amazon Italia) 
Memory: Kingston HyperX Fury Black 4GB (1 x 4GB) DDR4-2133 Memory  (€22.99 @ Amazon Italia) 
Memory: Kingston HyperX Fury Black 4GB (1 x 4GB) DDR4-2133 Memory  (€22.99 @ Amazon Italia) 
Total: €243.98
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-04-06 19:56 CEST+0200

 

I would begin using Nas4Free and in a couple of months I would change OS installing FreeNAS and changing the RAM with ECC Memory.

 

What do you think of this build? Would it be a good solution?

 

Federico

ECC RAM isn't that much more expensive than non-ECC, so why not just go with ECC in the first place? http://it.pcpartpicker.com/p/cy2j8d

 

It's also worth noting that right now, FreeNAS 9.xx doesn't support XHCI (and Skylake doesn't support EHCI), which means that you can't have FreeNAS on a USB and you would need a drive/SSD for the OS, whereas if you went with Haswell you could run FreeNAS from a USB. 

[FedericoIT]

On 6 aprile 2016 at 8:11 PM, djdwosk97 said:

ECC RAM isn't that much more expensive than non-ECC, so why not just go with ECC in the first place? http://it.pcpartpicker.com/p/cy2j8d

 

It's also worth noting that right now, FreeNAS 9.xx doesn't support XHCI (and Skylake doesn't support EHCI), which means that you can't have FreeNAS on a USB and you would need a drive/SSD for the OS, whereas if you went with Haswell you could run FreeNAS from a USB. 

Sorry that I answer you only now.

 

Thank you for the advice about the memory. I will cerainly stick with that ECC RAM.

 

Thanks for the info about the CPU and FreeNAS. I actually have some HDD at home, so that wouldn't be much of a problem. 

 

Federico

[transposedmessenger]

You don't necessarily need a SSD for boot/OS - people do that with gaming desktops because Windows boots slow as hell and loading into a zone/level is much faster. Use a USB like Freenas/NAS4Free.

[79wjd]

57 minutes ago, transposedmessenger said:

You don't necessarily need a SSD for boot/OS - people do that with gaming desktops because Windows boots slow as hell and loading into a zone/level is much faster. Use a USB like Freenas/NAS4Free.

If he chooses to go with Skylake (and FreeNAS), then he has to use some form of SATA drive (it doesn't need to be an SSD, but it can't be a USB) as FreeNAS 9.x doesn't support XHCI and Skylake no longer supports EHCI. FreeNAS 10.x will add XHCI support, but that's not rumored to release for another 8+ months. 

[transposedmessenger]

On 4/8/2016 at 5:25 PM, djdwosk97 said:

If he chooses to go with Skylake (and FreeNAS), then he has to use some form of SATA drive (it doesn't need to be an SSD, but it can't be a USB) as FreeNAS 9.x doesn't support XHCI and Skylake no longer supports EHCI. FreeNAS 10.x will add XHCI support, but that's not rumored to release for another 8+ months. 

Ah, then I will recommend NAS4Free over FreeNAS