Hardware for a NAS

[Giulio Ruello]

I have some old PCs laying around and wanted to build a nas for home use. I don't exactly know what's inside those but I need to know what kind of hardware I need for the nas and if it's better/safer to get hardware controller for RAID.

[zed_is_not_dead]

What will you store on it? What's going to be your usage?

As for the RAID, most mobos don't support more advanced RAID setups, like RAID 6, so for those you're going to need a controller. But for RAID 1, your mobo's controller should suffice. Just you know, check the specifications of the motherboard.

(citation needed on all of that though, I'm not much of an expert)

[Giulio Ruello]

1 minute ago, zed_is_not_dead said:

What will you store on it? What's going to be your usage?

As for the RAID, most mobos don't support more advanced RAID setups, like RAID 6, so for those you're going to need a controller. But for RAID 1, your mobo's controller should suffice. Just you know, check the specifications of the motherboard.

(citation needed on all of that though, I'm not much of an expert)

I just need it for backup, there are some files I must keep safe, I also don't need particularly fast data transfer, thank you anyhow.

[NelizMastr]

7 minutes ago, Giulio Ruello said:

I have some old PCs laying around and wanted to build a nas for home use. I don't exactly know what's inside those but I need to know what kind of hardware I need for the nas and if it's better/safer to get hardware controller for RAID.

A RAID controller is only needed when your motherboard has insufficient ports or features. If all you're going for is storage, you won't need a lot of power. A Core 2 Duo class CPU is more than plenty. The most important thing is a fast network card. Don't bother with a NAS over Wi-Fi, go ethernet. 1 gigabit is the minimum, don't bother with 10/100 as your transfers will cap at just 10MB/s.

 

Edit:

 

RAID wise, your use case should be fine with a RAID1 (mirror). Get two drives that mirror eachother and back up to that. Also occasionally plug in a USB HDD to back-up the RAID.

[Giulio Ruello]

Also, guys, may I ask you what's the difference beetween different kind of RAID?

[zed_is_not_dead]

1 hour ago, Giulio Ruello said:

Also, guys, may I ask you what's the difference beetween different kind of RAID?

RAID 0 (or striping) - Two drives are combined into one. You sacrifice redundancy for additional speed.
RAID 1 (or mirroring) - One drive mirrors the data of the other drive. You sacrifice a bit of write speed for redundancy. If one drive fails, you'll still have data.
RAID 10 (or 1+0) - A combination of the two.

Other RAID types are more advanced and you can easily research them via Wikipedia or something.