NAS Build Part Recommendations

[XylimirGaming]

Hello everyone,

 

So I have built PCs in the past but have never built a NAS. Therefore I have no idea what is suitable when it comes to component selection. 

 

I plan on building a NAS to put in my house that will stream media via Plex (the plan is for it to stream within my house and to my devices while I am away at college). All of my media is already in MP4 format so transcoding will not be necessary. (This means I shouldn't need a very powerful computer right?) I have tested streaming via Plex already within my house on the same network and it works great. (I have 83.51 Mbps down and 89.74 Mbps up so that should be more than enough right? Also my college has 63.3 Mbps down and 28.3 Mbps up so that should plenty as well correct?)

- Budget: $300 (not including hard drives so just for the case, motherboard, ram, cpu)

- There will only be one user streaming from this NAS

- 4 3.5" Drive Bays (I plan on putting in 4 4 TB WD Red Pro drives set up in two sets of Raid 1 for 8TB of redundant storage)

- 1 2.5" Drive bay (I already have a spare SSD i will use for the OS, and really I could just stick this in the case somewhere so a mount is completely necessary)

- Small form factor (I've only worked with ATX and Micro ATX but I believe Mini ITX would be the way to go??)

 

Any component suggestions or information on the topic would be greatly appreciated. Also if there's any information I forgot to mention please ask!

Thank you all so much!

[manikyath]

honestly, you could look into the asrock mini itx boards with embedded processors, they should be good enough for what you're doing.

 

as for case... my home server is running from a prebuilt case with hard drives just double sided tape'd in place and it does just fine (and is surprisingly quiet)

[Captain_Sisko]

http://www.freenas.org/hardware-requirements/

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/hardware-recommendations-read-this-first.23069/

 

TL;DR

Intel and ECC are recommended. Ram is about 1 gig per tb of storage. 

 

If you're planning on buying 4 4tb red pro drives, that's already $840. I don't understand why the normal red drives aren't good enough and why you aren't using raid 10.

 

The Fractal Design node 304 can hold up to 6 hard drives in a mini-itx form factor. 

[XylimirGaming]

Thanks manikyath but I'd like to stay away from embedded processors. Just for the sake of replacing/upgrading components and keeping my options open. And am not ballsy enough to attach mechanical hard drives with double sided tape haha

[XylimirGaming]

Captain_Sisko would there be a big difference in performance if I just used plex with windows 7 rather than freenas? Also I probably will go with normal red drives instead of red pro and I will only get 2 4TB red drives to start (my media collection is currently about 1.5 TB so I just want to have the option to expand in the future) If I set up the first two drives as RAID 1 would it be possible to reconfigure as RADI 10 once I get the other two drives in the future without messing up my data on the first two? As for the RAID 10 i see that that would be better. Sorry I haven't used RAID for before so this is all new to me. Thanks for the help