Advice on repurpose of old PC as NAS

[MrGore]

Hi everyone,

 

im in need of help. I want to repurpose my dads old PC as NAS. It has a Q6600 and 4 GB of RAM (DDR2). It does not support onboard RAID but i want to make a RAID 5 with 4 HDDs á 2TB (WD Red).

I'd upgrade the RAM to 8GB

My questions are: is this a good plan and what controller should i use? 

Edit: Its for a media archive.

 

Best regards to all of you from Austria!

 

[geo3]

Forget about the RAID. Have 2 volumes one a backup of the other. RAID won't protect from accidental deletion, overwrite or file/filesystem corruption.  RAID is for minimizing downtime in the event of hardware failure. This is not really a concern in your use case.

[MrGore]

4 minutes ago, geo3 said:

Forget about the RAID. Have 2 volumes one a backup of the other. RAID won't protect from accidental deletion, overwrite or file/filesystem corruption.  RAID is for minimizing downtime in the event of hardware failure. This is not really a concern in your use case.

So 2 HDDs and make weekly backups on one of them instead of RAID? I'd need to buy 2x 6TB WD Reds right?

 

[Kered124]

You could do that. Or you could use FreeNas and build a nice little box with a small raid. While it wont protect you from accidental deletion, it has great integration with Plex for media things.

[geo3]

I run backup every 15min on my personal NAS. It only backs up changes and doesn't overwrite the old backup files so I have a history of all changes to a file(so long as they are at least 15min appart).  How many and what size drive you get is dependent on use case.  But WD reds are a great choice for NAS.

[MrGore]

2 minutes ago, Kered124 said:

You could do that. Or you could use FreeNas and build a nice little box with a small raid. While it wont protect you from accidental deletion, it has great integration with Plex for media things.

Thats exactly what i wanted to do with this old PC

BUT HOW.

ive built PCs but no servers or NAS Systems yet

[MrGore]

I own a 10TB external HDD so backup is no major isseue

 

[geo3]

1 hour ago, MrGore said:

I own a 10TB external HDD so backup is no major isseue

 

As long as you already have a solid back up solution in place it's fine to go for RAID.

[KrYpToCiD]

20 hours ago, MrGore said:

Thats exactly what i wanted to do with this old PC

BUT HOW.

ive built PCs but no servers or NAS Systems yet

If you mean using FreeNAS ( you don't know how to install it and install plex server) there are a lot of tutorials on internet. Installing FreeNAS I might say it is easier than installing windows I can say......... creating a volume is the same as the windows one but it have more options (encrypting and setting up how you want to be the layout RAID(Z2,Z3,Z5), stripped, mirrored, cached). I must to confess the fact that I've not installed the plex server because I wasn't home at the time and my brother did it, but it must be simple.

[Kered124]

On 1/5/2018 at 3:48 PM, MrGore said:

Thats exactly what i wanted to do with this old PC

BUT HOW.

ive built PCs but no servers or NAS Systems yet

FreeNas lives on a USB flash drive typically, so go buy an 8 or 16Gb flash drive. You will install the operating system to the flash drive instead of a hard drive. Plug in all of your hard drives over SATA and the setup built into FreeNas will walk you through creating storage space. There is a plugins section where you can install Plex with a couple of clicks. If you don't understand RAID configurations and what the pros/cons of each are, do a little research and make that decision yourself. Every person will give you a different answer as to which config is best and for what reasons. Try going through some of these steps and getting FreeNas installed, and post if you get stuck.