Getting a NAS - Build or Buy?

[JustTheTip]

Hi guys

 

After almost a year of waiting and saving to get a NAS, ive finally gotten down to properly planning it and getting the money together.

 

The question is do i build or do I buy, ive thought about doing either option in some pretty great depth.

 

My use case is fairly wide, the NAS needs to be able to handle multiple devices multiple types of media from it at once, this is ranging from Images, videos and Music, this will pretty much be 24/7. It will be written to and read from pretty heavily everyday, this will mostly consist of a shit tonne of documents and a few very large photoshop .psd files and a fair few high res jpegs etc. You get my point, its going to be used a bit more heavily than your average home NAS would be.

 

I think it goes without saying that i want to be able to expand if i need to etc.

 

So with all this in mind ive been looking myself for a little while and ive got a few ideas, but i wanted the critique of you guys, because inevitablely you will spot issues that i havent and your combined opinion is better than mine -

 

Here is my DIY NAS

 

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Pentium G4500 3.5GHz Dual-Core Processor  (£62.99 @ Ebuyer) 
Motherboard: Asus H110-PLUS ATX LGA1151 Motherboard  (£59.99 @ Amazon UK) 
Memory: Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4-2133 Memory  (£74.99 @ Novatech) 
Case: Corsair 330R Blackout ATX Mid Tower Case  (£81.99 @ Ebuyer) 
Power Supply: Corsair CX 500W 80+ Bronze Certified Semi-Modular ATX Power Supply  (£64.99 @ Overclockers.co.uk) 
Total: £344.95
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-11-10 15:19 GMT+0000

 

Here are my options for Pre-Built NAS's

 

Synology DiskStation DS916+ (8GB RAM)  https://www.scan.co.uk/products/4-bay-synology-ds916plus-desktop-nas-quad-core-intel-pentium-8gb-ddr3-25-35-sata3-2xgbe-esata-usb-30 

Synology DiskStation DS916+ (2GB RAM)  https://www.scan.co.uk/products/4-bay-synology-ds916plus-desktop-nas-quad-core-intel-pentium-2gb-ddr3-25-35-sata3-2xgbe-esata-usb-30

Synology 4 Bay DS416PLAY                        https://www.scan.co.uk/products/4-bay-synology-desktop-nas-enclosure-intel-dual-core-n3060-16ghz-1080p-4k-multimedia-streaming-black

 

All of the listed NAS's will run HGST H3IKNAS40003272SE 4TB Deskstar NAS HDD's

 

This leads me nicely onto my next question in all of this, i was originally planning on buying two of these drives and dropping them into a RAID 1 Config so that i always have a safe backup of my data, I am beginning to question whether this is necessary or not. Allot of this is due to the inherently high cost of the drives. What is your opinion on this, should I do RAID 1 or should i use another method by which to backup my data at a lower cost?

 

Thanks guys 

Spencer Skinner

 

[Sunshine1868]

Note: RAID 1 is NOT a backup. Just because the drives mirror does not mean it is a "backup". If you want your files truly backed up, you'll store them on a separate device.

 

DEFINITELY buy. Building a NAS is pointless.

@Captain_WD should be able to help with this

[JustTheTip]

Ahh right thats interesting you say that, ive always thought it was a method by which you could ensure you didnt loose a drives data if it went down because its mirrored drive would still have it all 

[Sunshine1868]

4 minutes ago, JustTheTip said:

Ahh right thats interesting you say that, ive always thought it was a method by which you could ensure you didnt loose a drives data if it went down because its mirrored drive would still have it all 

Yes and no... RAID 1 (mirrored RAID) DOES duplicate your data across 2 disks - but, because they sit in the same device, one drive is not considered a "backup" of the other. If I'm understanding your use case correctly and you are using this NAS as a primary storage to offload storage requirements from your computer, then if you really want a backup of your data, you'd get an extra device...or just store things on your computer and backup to the NAS. It really just depends on how valuable your data is to you and whether or not you have the "onboard" capacity in your machine.

[JustTheTip]

1 minute ago, Sunshine1868 said:

Yes and no... RAID 1 (mirrored RAID) DOES duplicate your data across 2 disks - but, because they sit in the same device, one drive is not considered a "backup" of the other. If I'm understanding your use case correctly and you are using this NAS as a primary storage to offload storage requirements from your computer, then if you really want a backup of your data, you'd get an extra device...or just store things on your computer and backup to the NAS. It really just depends on how valuable your data is to you and whether or not you have the "onboard" capacity in your machine.

Yes and no to that one too ahaha. I will be offloading allot of my data onto the NAS, yes. But its main purpose for me is to allow me to access all of my data anywhere on any device without stuff like dropbox or onedrive etc. Essentially a glorified data distribution system with a purpose of backing up and primarily storing allot of my data. All of my sensitive data which i cant afford to loose it currently stored on my onedrive but i dont have the upload capabilities to work solely off onedrive, nor the space on onedrive. Currently i only get onedrive through my college because of the courses i study etc, so i dont really want to rely on it.

 

How would be the best way, asides another device, to cover my back if a drive were to die to die for example 

[Sunshine1868]

its the "access from anywhere" that is tricky... yes, it is possible to host your own "cloud" storage service.... but doing so can open you up to security vulnerabilities. you may be better off buying OneDrive - that way you can pay for what you use rather than speccing out an over the top NAS for way too much, or not speccing out enough storage and falling short later.

[Mikensan]

Unless you want to get fancy with it - using it for block level storage or as a datastore for a hypervisor - or directly hosting virtual machines on it, not much advantage in building it yourself. I would argue you can expand to as many disks as your case allows (just throw in a HBA for more ports) without a penalty whereas a premade solution you're limited to daisy chaining units (penalty of cost). Another downside to premade is you're paying more money for what you're getting. It does however save you on energy costs. I do like the approach majority of premades are taking - using dockers instead of vms for things like plex or couch potato.

 

If you want a learning experience and enjoy tinkering, I'd say do it yourself. If you just want a turnkey solution with warranty - buy premade.

 

That said what you've listed thus far looks good. If you wanted to go with ECC memory to make the ZFS gods happy (If you went that route), you'd just need to get a different motherboard as that processor supports ECC. Also 16gb of ram is definitely future proofing but you wouldn't need that much.

[JustTheTip]

I've considered doing it, but for the kind of stuff i want to do, its not appropriate. especially considering the majority of what i want to do is still within my network

[JustTheTip]

18 minutes ago, Mikensan said:

Unless you want to get fancy with it - using it for block level storage or as a datastore for a hypervisor - or directly hosting virtual machines on it, not much advantage in building it yourself. I would argue you can expand to as many disks as your case allows (just throw in a HBA for more ports) without a penalty whereas a premade solution you're limited to daisy chaining units (penalty of cost). Another downside to premade is you're paying more money for what you're getting. It does however save you on energy costs. I do like the approach majority of premades are taking - using dockers instead of vms for things like plex or couch potato.

 

If you want a learning experience and enjoy tinkering, I'd say do it yourself. If you just want a turnkey solution with warranty - buy premade.

 

That said what you've listed thus far looks good. If you wanted to go with ECC memory to make the ZFS gods happy (If you went that route), you'd just need to get a different motherboard as that processor supports ECC. Also 16gb of ram is definitely future proofing but you wouldn't need that much.

Yeh as for building it, it would be fun and very flexible for sure, its just the ease of use that comes with a pre built is somewhat attractive hahaha, ill be honest FreeNAS isnt the most user friendly OS ive ever used, especially compared to the synology system 

 

[Mikensan]

@JustTheTip - yea definitely Synology is going to be a lot easier. Especially if all you want to do is share your data on a windows network. I think getting a plugin working via docker is going to be much easier too. Once you've gotten used to FreeNAS it becomes easy too, there's only a finite amount of things you will do and eventually learn how to do them well. I wouldn't say it is a steep learning curve either - I'm not a unix/linux/bsd guy and I'm able to stumble around FreeNAS pretty well.

 

However FreeNAS 10 - now that's going to make the UI a whole lot more beautiful and streamlined. It'll still be a hair more "complex" but they certainly are making strides to make it easier. Lookup FreeNAS 10 state of the union. 

 

With premade you'd only have 2 vendors to deal with when you need warranty service - Synology and HGST.

 

Oh yea one more thing I meant to originally say - mirrored drives are a decent solution to recovering your data in the event a disk dies. The caveats are when you buy disks in groups/pairs - they're usually made from the same batch. This means if 1 goes then your chances of another from that batch dying is slightly higher. The other is if an external factor causes the disk to go bad (e.g. power surge) then it would zap the other drive too. The other downside is you don't get the true backup experience of "oh no I deleted this file by accident" - live data in any sort of redundancy config isn't a true backup for this reason.

 

I would plug in a USB drive to your synology (assuming thats what you get) and setup backup jobs to it. That way you can recover to a specific date and it sits outside of the synology. The nice thing is, depending on how large "critical" data is - you don't need a 1:1 backup solution. I have something around 7TB of data but only 300gb I would consider critical.

[JustTheTip]

1 hour ago, Mikensan said:

@JustTheTip - yea definitely Synology is going to be a lot easier. Especially if all you want to do is share your data on a windows network. I think getting a plugin working via docker is going to be much easier too. Once you've gotten used to FreeNAS it becomes easy too, there's only a finite amount of things you will do and eventually learn how to do them well. I wouldn't say it is a steep learning curve either - I'm not a unix/linux/bsd guy and I'm able to stumble around FreeNAS pretty well.

 

However FreeNAS 10 - now that's going to make the UI a whole lot more beautiful and streamlined. It'll still be a hair more "complex" but they certainly are making strides to make it easier. Lookup FreeNAS 10 state of the union. 

 

With premade you'd only have 2 vendors to deal with when you need warranty service - Synology and HGST.

 

Oh yea one more thing I meant to originally say - mirrored drives are a decent solution to recovering your data in the event a disk dies. The caveats are when you buy disks in groups/pairs - they're usually made from the same batch. This means if 1 goes then your chances of another from that batch dying is slightly higher. The other is if an external factor causes the disk to go bad (e.g. power surge) then it would zap the other drive too. The other downside is you don't get the true backup experience of "oh no I deleted this file by accident" - live data in any sort of redundancy config isn't a true backup for this reason.

 

I would plug in a USB drive to your synology (assuming thats what you get) and setup backup jobs to it. That way you can recover to a specific date and it sits outside of the synology. The nice thing is, depending on how large "critical" data is - you don't need a 1:1 backup solution. I have something around 7TB of data but only 300gb I would consider critical.

Ahh yeh just taken a look at FreeNAS 10 looks pretty nice if im honest, tempts me even more, its as you say the warranty and lack of support so to speak within FreeNAS that concerns me allot. Ahh right yeh thats a good point specifically backing up critical data is probably a good call  hahahaha, hadnt thought like that.

 

Out of curiosity what solution do you use for your NAS?

[b1uew01f]

Some of the points here make it look a lot scarier than it actually is.

 

The question simply has to be, is learning to use linux/debian (even if your using freeNAS) and the complexities behind storage and networking something you are interested in doing? You can go from having never had your own diy NAS before to having a network storage solution within an hour or two at most, theres plenty guides out there, but it will take years to 'learn' effectively the stuff that otherwise synology et al. is doing behind the interface.

 

If its not something you want to 'learn', buy prebuilt. Id encourage the former though.

[Captain_WD]

16 hours ago, JustTheTip said:

~snip~

Hi there

 

My two cents on this: both self-built and pre-built NAS solutions have their pros and cons. 

- Self-built NAS devices offer a wider variety of parts, customization (both hardware and software), upgrade-ability, longer warranty on some parts and the joy of putting everything together yourself. On the other hand, it is a far more complex process to set it up and manage it, usually takes far more research to make a good balanced system for the budget and you don't have overall support on the device. 

- Pre-built NAS devices are very simple and easy to setup, manage and use, are designed to be a low-powered small systems specifically for this purpose, everything is put together to work at optimal performance and power for the price and you get full support on the whole device from the manufacturer. Pre-built NAS devices don't really offer much customization and freedom when it comes to the software, though. 

 

If I understand correctly you need a NAS mostly for sharing data and media between different devices on your network. You should be able to do this with both a pre-built and a self-built NAS.

 

Could you provide a bit more detail on what data exactly will be stored on the NAS and what devices will be accessing it? 

 

Just to throw another option for pre-built NAS devices, check out WD My Cloud series and see if any of them cover your needs and fit in your budget. 

Personal NAS.  

Prosumer NAS.

 

Regarding the redundancy, it really depends on how many storage drives are you looking to use, how much data safety you'd want, how much storage space you'd need and what solution and OS are you going for. RAID1 is a good choice for basic data redundancy. Mind that, as @Sunshine1868 pointed out, RAID is by no means a replacement for a backup so if you have important data on the NAS I would strongly recommend keeping a copy of it on another storage drive that is not connected to the NAS. 

 

Let me know if you have any questions! 

 

Thanks Sunshine for the mention! 

 

Captain_WD.

[JustTheTip]

1 hour ago, Captain_WD said:

Hi there

 

My two cents on this: both self-built and pre-built NAS solutions have their pros and cons. 

- Self-built NAS devices offer a wider variety of parts, customization (both hardware and software), upgrade-ability, longer warranty on some parts and the joy of putting everything together yourself. On the other hand, it is a far more complex process to set it up and manage it, usually takes far more research to make a good balanced system for the budget and you don't have overall support on the device. 

- Pre-built NAS devices are very simple and easy to setup, manage and use, are designed to be a low-powered small systems specifically for this purpose, everything is put together to work at optimal performance and power for the price and you get full support on the whole device from the manufacturer. Pre-built NAS devices don't really offer much customization and freedom when it comes to the software, though. 

 

If I understand correctly you need a NAS mostly for sharing data and media between different devices on your network. You should be able to do this with both a pre-built and a self-built NAS.

 

Could you provide a bit more detail on what data exactly will be stored on the NAS and what devices will be accessing it? 

 

Just to throw another option for pre-built NAS devices, check out WD My Cloud series and see if any of them cover your needs and fit in your budget. 

Personal NAS.  

Prosumer NAS.

 

Regarding the redundancy, it really depends on how many storage drives are you looking to use, how much data safety you'd want, how much storage space you'd need and what solution and OS are you going for. RAID1 is a good choice for basic data redundancy. Mind that, as @Sunshine1868 pointed out, RAID is by no means a replacement for a backup so if you have important data on the NAS I would strongly recommend keeping a copy of it on another storage drive that is not connected to the NAS. 

 

Let me know if you have any questions! 

 

Thanks Sunshine for the mention! 

 

Ahh right, yeh all fair points.

 

What scares me most away from the idea of building it is the complexity of FreeNAS and the lack of support for it in some areas, Especially when things go wrong.

As for the actual build process, im an experienced PC builder as it is so the hardware side is no issue for me.

 

I dont know if it is unnecessarily nerves about it because as it goes im a fairly techy guy ahaha. Kind of have to be, being a computer science student, its not like i dont have the ability to understand, just nervous about how hard it is.

 

The use case would range as i say.

 

As for the devices using it - 

3 Laptops (One of which will be accessing it outside the network most of the time)

2 Workstation Desktops

1 All-In-One Pile of shit family PC ahaha

2 Phones 

 

As for the data on the NAS -

All of my college work and projects, thats only like 20GB but ALL sensitive data

All of my brothers design work, this will be about 1.5TB, a good chunk of which is sensitive, thats all mixed JPEG's and .PSD files, all very large files 

All of the family movies and shit like that so thats 2-300GB

All of my music so about 40GB

All of my photos so again about 100GB, also stuff i dont want to loose

All of the games i dont play but cant be fucked to re download when i do want to play then + Mods aswell. So about 1 TB tops

All of OS ISO's i keep for any VM work that i do, 50-100GB

A butt tonne of program installers for when i do PC resets etc, so again about 20GB probs 

And probably about 200GB more is misc bullshit 

 

Thanks 

Spencer Skinner

 

 

[Captain_WD]

1 hour ago, JustTheTip said:

~snip~

 

Lack of support is one of the biggest cons on self-built PCs and NAS devices. Mind that there are many enthusiasts who can help in case you are in trouble. 

 

Building a system should be both hard, complicated and fun, if you have experience with this.

 

For your college work I'd recommend keeping a backup on an external flash drive or an external HDD besides keeping them on the NAS for extra safety. 

For your brother's data I'd recommend something like WD By Book or WD Elements Desktop again for backups and additional safety. 

Another smaller external storage drive for your photos' backup.

 

All of this doesn't seem to be that demanding on the NAS's side as you will be using it mainly for storing and data sharing purpose. Pretty much any NAS should do the job. 

 

You seem to need about 4TB of usable storage space. That leaves you with a few options: 

- 2x4TB HDDs in RAID1

- 3x2TB or 3x3TB in RAID5

- 4x2TB in RAID10 or RAID6

 

This depends heavily on your solution, budget and preferences regarding the capacity, number of drives and general storage configuration. 

 

Let me know if you need any additional info or help on this! 

 

As a solution to all of this you can check out WD My Cloud Mirror with 2x4TB in RAID1 mode as a solution. 

If you prefer to have more features and better-performing hardware I'd recommend checking out WD My Cloud EX2 Ultra or WD My Cloud EX4100. 

 

Let me know if you want additional info on these solutions.

 

Captain_WD.

[JustTheTip]

34 minutes ago, Captain_WD said:

 

Lack of support is one of the biggest cons on self-built PCs and NAS devices. Mind that there are many enthusiasts who can help in case you are in trouble. 

 

Building a system should be both hard, complicated and fun, if you have experience with this.

 

For your college work I'd recommend keeping a backup on an external flash drive or an external HDD besides keeping them on the NAS for extra safety. 

For your brother's data I'd recommend something like WD By Book or WD Elements Desktop again for backups and additional safety. 

Another smaller external storage drive for your photos' backup.

 

All of this doesn't seem to be that demanding on the NAS's side as you will be using it mainly for storing and data sharing purpose. Pretty much any NAS should do the job. 

 

You seem to need about 4TB of usable storage space. That leaves you with a few options: 

- 2x4TB HDDs in RAID1

- 3x2TB or 3x3TB in RAID5

- 4x2TB in RAID10 or RAID6

 

This depends heavily on your solution, budget and preferences regarding the capacity, number of drives and general storage configuration. 

 

Let me know if you need any additional info or help on this! 

 

As a solution to all of this you can check out WD My Cloud Mirror with 2x4TB in RAID1 mode as a solution. 

If you prefer to have more features and better-performing hardware I'd recommend checking out WD My Cloud EX2 Ultra or WD My Cloud EX4100. 

 

Let me know if you want additional info on these solutions.

 

Captain_WD.

In the case of building my own NAS, would i have to be looking at getting a dedicated RAID Card for anything other than RAID 1? Because the more i think about it, the more im attracted to the lower cost and higher flexibility, because if i put my mind to it i can make it work. As for the use of external HDD's for extra backup of sensitive data, ill definitely take a look at the WD gear. 

 

He used to use a WD My Book when he was at Uni i think, but him being him, he managed to kick it and destroyed the power socket on it. #FeelsBadMan. I managed to recover the drive and he uses it as a storage drive in his PC now hahaha.

 

I also forgot to mention, as time goes on, of course the use of the NAS will increase etc. I will also begin to start using it as my main media server aswell, streaming movies from it. So trans-coding is a thing, possibly from 2-3 different devices at once. Although i doubt again that will be much of an issue.

 

If i am to build it myself i will use ZFS De-Duplication, dont know if that going to have a massive performance hit asides memory. Another thing will be, ill be having all individual areas with Username, password protection etc i doubt again that will be much of an issue. And automatic backup from 2 PC's and a laptop will happen aswell at some point in the future.

 

Thanks 

Spencer Skinner 

[Captain_WD]

23 minutes ago, JustTheTip said:

~snip~

I wouldn't say you definitely need a RAID expansion card. Depending on the Os used, you may not need one at all as the OS itself could manage the storage pool. Depending on which OS you choose you could see potential configurations and if you need a RAID controller or not. 

 

For transcoding you could check out WD My Cloud PR series here and here as they have quad-core CPUs and can do transcoding on the go. 

 

You should face issues in general with these things, regardless of which option (self or pre-built) you'd go with.

 

Captain_WD. 

[JustTheTip]

Ahhh right so say something like FreeNAS would have a system already in software to manage the storage setup, hopefully ahah, ill have to check.

 

Yeh i meant to split that paragraph up, the only thing i was asking with building myself specifically was with ZFS De-Duplication. The other stuff is possible with both pre built and scratch built. 

 

Thanks for the help so far, ill do a little more digging tonight, and get back to you with any other questions ive got.

 

Thanks again 

Spencer Skinner

[Bananasplit_00]

buying a NAS is easy, you could get a used NAS for cheap, like $25 in my area(no drives, 500GB will cost you another $5 lol) and then get some good drives to put in it. much cheaper and easier then messing around with building a machine, that said im probably going to make myself one, like alocating a single core of my LAN PC to running the NAS or something and then just stuffing all my HDDs in it or getting a few 2TB drives

[JustTheTip]

On 10/11/2016 at 7:12 PM, Mikensan said:

@JustTheTip - yea definitely Synology is going to be a lot easier. Especially if all you want to do is share your data on a windows network. I think getting a plugin working via docker is going to be much easier too. Once you've gotten used to FreeNAS it becomes easy too, there's only a finite amount of things you will do and eventually learn how to do them well. I wouldn't say it is a steep learning curve either - I'm not a unix/linux/bsd guy and I'm able to stumble around FreeNAS pretty well.

 

However FreeNAS 10 - now that's going to make the UI a whole lot more beautiful and streamlined. It'll still be a hair more "complex" but they certainly are making strides to make it easier. Lookup FreeNAS 10 state of the union. 

 

With premade you'd only have 2 vendors to deal with when you need warranty service - Synology and HGST.

 

Oh yea one more thing I meant to originally say - mirrored drives are a decent solution to recovering your data in the event a disk dies. The caveats are when you buy disks in groups/pairs - they're usually made from the same batch. This means if 1 goes then your chances of another from that batch dying is slightly higher. The other is if an external factor causes the disk to go bad (e.g. power surge) then it would zap the other drive too. The other downside is you don't get the true backup experience of "oh no I deleted this file by accident" - live data in any sort of redundancy config isn't a true backup for this reason.

 

I would plug in a USB drive to your synology (assuming thats what you get) and setup backup jobs to it. That way you can recover to a specific date and it sits outside of the synology. The nice thing is, depending on how large "critical" data is - you don't need a 1:1 backup solution. I have something around 7TB of data but only 300gb I would consider critical.

So as per your previous comments, ive gone and done a bit of a re work to the build, what do you think of this?

 

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1220 V5 3.0GHz Quad-Core OEM/Tray Processor  (£196.96 @ Scan.co.uk) 
Motherboard: MSI C236A WORKSTATION ATX LGA1151 Motherboard 
Memory: Samsung 16GB (1 x 16GB) DDR4-2133 Memory  (£83.51 @ BT Shop) 
Case: Corsair 330R Blackout ATX Mid Tower Case  (£81.99 @ Ebuyer) 
Power Supply: Corsair Builder 500W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply  (£51.57 @ Amazon UK) 
Total: £414.03
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-11-11 22:04 GMT+0000

[JustTheTip]

On 11/11/2016 at 2:52 PM, Bananasplit_00 said:

buying a NAS is easy, you could get a used NAS for cheap, like $25 in my area(no drives, 500GB will cost you another $5 lol) and then get some good drives to put in it. much cheaper and easier then messing around with building a machine, that said im probably going to make myself one, like alocating a single core of my LAN PC to running the NAS or something and then just stuffing all my HDDs in it or getting a few 2TB drives

Where the hell do you live, like it costs shit tonnes over here (UK)

[Bananasplit_00]

19 minutes ago, JustTheTip said:

Where the hell do you live, like it costs shit tonnes over here (UK)

Sweden, a used NAS without and drives is cheap

[FroTo]

On 11/11/2016 at 2:05 PM, JustTheTip said:

So as per your previous comments, ive gone and done a bit of a re work to the build, what do you think of this?

 

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1220 V5 3.0GHz Quad-Core OEM/Tray Processor  (£196.96 @ Scan.co.uk) 
Motherboard: MSI C236A WORKSTATION ATX LGA1151 Motherboard 
Memory: Samsung 16GB (1 x 16GB) DDR4-2133 Memory  (£83.51 @ BT Shop) 
Case: Corsair 330R Blackout ATX Mid Tower Case  (£81.99 @ Ebuyer) 
Power Supply: Corsair Builder 500W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply  (£51.57 @ Amazon UK) 
Total: £414.03
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-11-11 22:04 GMT+0000

4

 

I would def recommend something server grade. And from a manufacturer that makes server gear. Would Highly recommend Supermicro. 

But, I personally use the Asrock C2750D4i for 300$ its a highly cost effective solution IMO. It has everything you need for a server and nothing you don't. Add 2 x 8GB sticks to that and you have got a fully functional system for 500$.  Some of its perks are:
up to 64GB RAM (with its 4 DIMM slots)

12 SATA ports for plenty of HDDs

a very low powered Intel Avoton Processor (only 20W),

Note:

Any self-built network attached storage unit will require regular checkup and maintenance. If you're considering a self-built NAS, keep in mind that you won't be able to leave it alone. 

 

Also: 
ANY FORM of RAID is NOT A BACKUP SOLUTION. BEST PRACTICE IS TO ALWAYS HAVE ANOTHER COPY KEPT SOMEWHERE SEPARATE AND SAFE. 

I'm getting a slight hint from your posts that you're relying on this machine to be your backup.

A NAS can fail and take all your data with it. Especially with a self-built one because there are multiple points of failure.
IE: power surge and your PSU dies and fries your system, RAID card fails and your data is lost, infection by ransomware.  

 

NAS is for central storage, and ease of access. and possibly a server to host some apps. (IE: self-managed "cloud" storage, media server, download server, etc)

My personal system runs FreeNAS and I have backups that run nightly to encrypt and backup my data to the cloud (Amazon AWS S3). I also store a separate local copy at my bank's vault that I backup every bi-weekly.

 

[Captain_WD]

On 11.11.2016 г. at 4:08 PM, JustTheTip said:

~snip~

This is a nice feature to have but you should be able to manage this through a backup application by managing the backup types. 

This official KB may be of help.  

Let me know if you have any further questions! 

 

Captain_WD. 

[Mikensan]

On 11/11/2016 at 5:05 PM, JustTheTip said:

So as per your previous comments, ive gone and done a bit of a re work to the build, what do you think of this?

 

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1220 V5 3.0GHz Quad-Core OEM/Tray Processor  (£196.96 @ Scan.co.uk) 
Motherboard: MSI C236A WORKSTATION ATX LGA1151 Motherboard 
Memory: Samsung 16GB (1 x 16GB) DDR4-2133 Memory  (£83.51 @ BT Shop) 
Case: Corsair 330R Blackout ATX Mid Tower Case  (£81.99 @ Ebuyer) 
Power Supply: Corsair Builder 500W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply  (£51.57 @ Amazon UK) 
Total: £414.03
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-11-11 22:04 GMT+0000

If you plan on running virtual machines or doing some heavy lifting, that CPU is an excellent choice. However you could save yourself money by getting a G4400 (I think that model supports DDR4). Plenty powerful if you aren't doing encryption or virtual machines. (if you are and I missed that, whoops!)

 

To answer your earlier question, I use FreeNAS. I love to tinker and saved all my receipts for the individual hardware - a nuisance when something breaks but personally not a big deal to me. Already had to RMA a seagate drive, was a very easy process. Majority of the time I never touch it, haven't had any issues from their latest stable build. Early on I had some issues with it and Active Directory but as of now it's working great. I can't promise everything will work perfectly for years to come, shit happens. But in general use in a small environment, I think it is seldom something major would go wrong. But never say never :-) Otherwise there are tons of guides out there, and between LTT forum members and the history of threads @ FreeNAS's site, you're likely to find something to help.

 

For just creating windows shares (seems like your overall objective) FreeNAS is pretty darn simple. Their general guides will get you up and going in < 30 minutes if you're a slow reader. I do not think deduplication will benefit you at all, sounds like a majority / bulk of your data is entirely unique. Some / few files would be the same but I don't think it'll shave off all that much. Deduplication shouldn't be applied to the entire storage - that will certainly eat up all of your available RAM. Worse off, if it demands more RAM and you do not have it, you lose access to the volume you have it enabled on until you add more RAM...

 

I like that you chose a single stick of 16gb as increasing it is that much easier.