Replace Rafiki with Timon and Pumbaa?

[Skeeter]

Bear with me, this is tech related...

 

I have a home server. I've had one for ages in various guises, evolving from Windows Media Centre to Windows Home Server, and currently running Windows 10. It is just a machine that gets my hand-me-down hardware when I upgrade (it started life in a Shuttle case running an Athlon 2100XP or something, and is currenty rocking a Q6600 and 2GBs of RAM). As its my collection of all knowledge, I call it Rafiki.

 

But Rafiki is old and loud and noisy. Its in a generic old ATX tower case with noisy fans and takes up space under my desk. So I'm looking at doing something to get it out from my spare room/office and make it smaller and quieter. I'd like to keep a Windows PC in it, as its just convinient to have a Windows PC on all the time, hosting my VPN, various other projects, uploading photos etc. Its also got 4x 3.5" HDDs in it serving as a file store for all my documents and media, and a server to all my Kodi devices, etc.

 

So my thinking is to replace it with a small, quiet, low power PC like a NUC (Timon), and then a fat NAS or something with the drives in (Pumbaa). See what I did there?

 

I'd like to hear any and all recommendations. I don't want to spend mega bucks, which I don't think I'd need to in order to get something as powerfull as the Q6600 these days. So a small PC and a NAS? Or some sort of storage array directly attached to the PC? I'd like to have the storage mapped to the PC (I currently use Stablebit Drive Pool to have the 4 drives present as a single balanced pool showing as X:\), but have the storage available over the network (I currently have a number of shares on the machine which my Kodi devices etc map to, which I've carried over from the WHS days).

 

Any suggestions welcome, thanks!

[lkarej]

It's good you explained that bc the thread title confused the hell out of me

[scottyseng]

1 hour ago, Skeeter said:

-snip-

I'd go with Timon because meerkats for the win. But really, a core i3 would easily be able to server as a solid lower power NAS for you. Or if you want prebuilt, Qnap, Synology, and I forgot the rest make really good NAS units.

 

I went the pumbaa route, it only makes sense if you want a lot of drives. I bought a used 4U 24 bay supermicro server chassis and I had to replace the PSU (too loud), fans (also too loud), and SAS backplane (It was SAS 3Gb/s or SAS 1). It still runs kind of loud for most people. However, it has 16 drives (4TB each, total 64 TB). I went overkill with the CPU with a Xeon 14 core, and while it's fun to see the CPU laugh at being a NAS (It literally never went over 3% usage), I ended up tossing GPUs in and now it's a working NAS / render node.

 

However, it is not silent at all. A good small chassis with a i3 (Or one of them Avoton Xeons) would be a good idea for most people.

[Skeeter]

I have 4x 5TB drives and I can't really see me needing more than that. I tend to sell them on and replace them with larger capacities rather than just add more. I think the most I ever had was about 6, and that was when I got lazy and couldn't be bothered to ditch a couple of 500GB ones I had.

 

I was thinking about the HP micro servers but they aren't really any smaller or quieter than my current setup. The idea of using something like a NUC and then a 4 to 6 slot NAS enclosure would mean I could put it in a cupboard or out the way somewhere, which would be ideal.

[leadeater]

11 hours ago, Skeeter said:

I have 4x 5TB drives and I can't really see me needing more than that. I tend to sell them on and replace them with larger capacities rather than just add more. I think the most I ever had was about 6, and that was when I got lazy and couldn't be bothered to ditch a couple of 500GB ones I had.

 

I was thinking about the HP micro servers but they aren't really any smaller or quieter than my current setup. The idea of using something like a NUC and then a 4 to 6 slot NAS enclosure would mean I could put it in a cupboard or out the way somewhere, which would be ideal.

For your desktop if you want to pool disks together in to a single storage volume and you can use Storage Spaces to do that, it's inbuilt in to the OS and works well.

 

For the NAS you could use a NUC and something like this AKiTiO Thunder2 Quad Mini: https://www.akitio.com/portable-storage/akitio-thunder2-quad-mini, https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00VJ4IWVU/.

 

The AKiTiO Thunder2 Quad Mini is a 4 bay disk enclosure that connects using thunderbolt, USB ones also exist, but have no RAID features but you just use software to pool the disks like Storage Spaces or DriveBender etc which ever you prefer.

 

A slightly nicer solution is a small case that supports 4-6 HDDs and low power CPU combined with quiet fans.

[samiscool51]

8 hours ago, Skeeter said:

See what I did there?

[Anghammarad]

Another option, get a case with swappable HDD brakets, put in a mini itx with onboard CPU and enough sata ports. Then you have a win 10 pc, with storage and if needed some virtualization options. 

 

Thats what I plan for when I swap the media computer. I can post a link to the case later. Gotta run now *waves*

[Anghammarad]

This is the Case around here it costs around 50-60 €.

 

Then a mobo that fits, and has, if wanted a M2 slot for System drive and 4-6 Sata connectors. In my case I would take a 6 port board because of an additional bluray drive for movies. Like mentioned above, for me it would be a mass storage, media center, and host for 2-4 virtual machines for goofing around with.

 

Options here from Asrock to Asus to MSI or Gigabyte for Intel 6xxx/7xxx cpu generation 1xx or 2xx Chipset. Some even have wireless included too. Example ASRock H270M-ITX/ac.

 

CPU depending on the workload, from Pentium up to I5 all possible. (In my case a I5 without K would be enough) 

 

With all together, Ram CPU etc you should be around 400-500 bucks. A good NAS is 300+ as well, drives not included. So I would head for the self build. Just more opitons for what to do with it.

[Skeeter]

Yeah I'm actually surprised at how expensive empty NAS systems are. I certainly wasn't expecting to pay £300 for an empty 4 bay box with a low powered chip in it.

 

An idea with the NUC/NAS combo was they could exist in different places. I.e. the NAS sits in a cupboard or the loft or something, while the NUC remains (all be it hidden and silent) in my office as I do want easy access to it for connecting any devices and restarts, etc. Obviously the down side is mapping a pool of drives from a NAS over Ethernet will be a lot slower than direct attached SATA or a thunderbolt dock.