Building a NAS

Emmien · September 14, 2016

I am building a NAS out of older computer parts and some drives.

The NAS will mainly be for video storage, audio and photo backups. I want to be able to edit from it on my Surface Pro, which doesn't have a lot of internal storage, and the 128GB SD card is a bit slow.

I won't be using more than 200Mb/s video.

I want to use FreeNAS, as it seems popular and reliable.

I have read that it is easiest to run FreeNas from a USB flash drive. The motherboard I have has an IDE connector and I have several IDE hard drives from 10GB to 500GB, but most are of questionable origin and are old. Would there be any speed advantage to using these instead of a standard USB 2 flash drive? Should I get a certain speed of flash drive?

I know that data goes to drives and isn't stored on the USB drive.

Current components I have got are:

Case: Silverstone kl03

Motherboard: Intel S3200SH Server Board

Disks: For now, a single sata disk for testing, if all works I will get some reds and maybe greens

CPU: 1.6Ghz Pentium 4 Dual core LGA775

RAM: 4GB DDR2, Can upgrade to 8GB is required

Should all this work?

I plan to upgrade the CPU to a 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo soon. I also have some single core 3Ghz LGA775 CPUs. Would these be better? I thought more cores was better for FreeNAS. All support hyper threading.

Thanks.

Electronics Wizardy · September 14, 2016

Just boot off a flash drive. It will make no difference how fast your boot drive is.

Don't get green drive if you can, get reds.

For cpu, get a xeon. They are about the same price and support ecc.

Get ecc since you have a server board.

Get a xeon x3220 or simmilar.

None of these cpus support hyperthreadeing.

Normally singlethreaded is usefull as smb/cifs is single threaded for most useds.

ALwin · September 14, 2016

11 minutes ago, Emmien said:

snip

Have you considered using an external HDD instead for keeping the video files you are currently working on while use the NAS you build or buy or whatever for archiving. With a small external HDD you can edit videos anywhere.

njmyers3 · September 15, 2016

I was just planning a nas earlier, actually. Check out my build: http://pcpartpicker.com/list/ZwxQPs

I haven't included HDDs yet, as I'm still researching the best capacity, quantity, and model, but right now I would go for some 3TB WD Reds.

Good luck with your nas!

Mr_Flynn · September 15, 2016

I would just use the flash drive. The only perceivable benefit you might see (hell, ide might end up being slower than USB) would be boot times. When running, most of Freenas is loaded into system memory.