NAS build?

[LeChuck81]

I'm evaluating a NAS.
Main use will be providing DVD/BD/UHD (when it will eventually be possible) rips to the house. No transcoding, pure, raw, delivery.
I wonder if I should go with some basic Synology or build a cheap one.
Things I'm looking at:
- Raid 0;
- Easy to use interface;
- Silence.

Given the main purpose, I think the nowadays standard 1 gigabit ethernet will be plenty enough.

Any suggestion? Either a premade solution or what should I shop for?
I was thinking to an Atom mobo and some free distro but I don't know if it's worth the extra work/time to build it.

 

[SFF EOL]

Buy one unless you like software meddling. I have a few home-brewed NAS, So for example my internal CCTV is based around the Raspberry Pi 3(for the NAS) and Pi Zero (for Cameras) because that worked for my use case budget. I also have an old HP Prolient based on freeNAS, which is a powerful OS but quite demanding at times. There would certainly be a learning curve coming from Windows with both, but the Pi would probably be easier because it has great documentation and community support- the BSD community doesn’t bear fools gladly in my experience. For my use case the ability to program things was valuable, for example if there is no movement for a certain amount of time I get emailed (sounds bizarre, it means my mother may need support if she isn’t up and about). In the USA it may be that other SBC are better value although be warned none have the same support as the Pi. Also be aware the Pi is a very slow network device, it will struggle with 1080p and is happier with 720p so not for you- the ethernet shares bandwidth with USB and the 4 USB 2 sockets are sharing the bandwidth of one. So add all that up, with 4 HDD running off USB you are going to take a big hit on transfer speeds. Fine for simple file storage & retrieval but nothing else.

If you buy something like Synology (and I’d suggest second hand, in the UK at least they are quite available and save a lot of money that way) then the software is done for you- interfaced through your mobile phone with a good selection of plug-ins. You just want to stream media I think? That isn’t a big ask and so unless you really want the challenge (which really is just down to software) then a relatively cheap Synology will do the job. Probably check codec support though you do say you are doing raw so that would be at the other end.



I bought a 2 bay L220 off eBAy a few weeks ago, with 4*4TB drives in parity raid (so 4TB usable) for just over £100 2nd hand. OK that was a bargain given a WD Red 4TB is £100 in the UK but the new list price would be £250 empty I think (something like that). It came with lots of plug-ins, some paid some free, but out of the box it has more than I need.



If you were tending towards more NAS/Server functionality I think it would be different.

 

[LeChuck81]

I don't particularly care about transcoding. Nowadays, TVs, Android box or consoles are all capable of reading almost everything.
What I'm looking for is a networked hdd. My Fritz!Box offers that through an USB port but it doesn't come nowhere close to the USB bandwidth capability, not even 2.0. So, when you start reading high megabit per second files, it simply cannot deliver it. And this is in a single file use scenario, if you want to read two files concurrently, you better settle for something low. While I'd plan on ripping my DVDs, BDs and, eventually, when the code will be hacked, UHDs too.
Gotta look into a basic Synology, it will probably cost me more or less the same as building one from scratch and I will save on the work.

Any suggestion on a model?

 

[SFF EOL]

The one I bought second hand was a Buffalo, not Synology but it is still good so definitely consider them as well. It does Plex/Kodi/Torrents and lots of things I don’t need with plug-ins which the last owner installed- and all much easier than my home brewed versions to set up.

Second hand ones tend to be 3.5” drives, which doesn’t actually seem to make the case that much bigger, new ones will be 2.5” but you save money going with 3.5” drives and again second hand they are usually already populated- stick it in parity RAID to offer some resilience as you shouldn’t trust the drives after the thing has been kicked half way across the country by the postage service.. One of my drives failed quite quickly (although the software monitors the drives so I didn’t lose data as it warned me).

But I’m not best placed to recommend as I don’t follow my own advice and end up making my own, which isn’t cheaper unless you have parts lying around and don’t mind ugly and like I say introduces to the naked joy of *nix command prompts.

If you want fast ethernet then go with the SoHO or SMB Synergy models- they can usually be spotted because they have 4 and 6 bays, the home have 2.. You get better CPU/Memory with SOHO and you get that and faster/ more NICS with SMB with attendant increase in price (in the UK, £150/£250/£350 unpopulated). In my experience the things that can hurt are NAS are low memory and poor NICS and the CPU seems not to matter.

 

[red]

I'm a fan of the odroid HC-2s for this. They're basically an SBC on a massive heatsink that stack really easily.

I have four of them running in a gluster cluster and I'm deliriously happy with them.

 

[ermac318]

If you aren't looking to do anything fancy (VMs, transcoding, 10GbE, etc) then I recommend buying a cheap NAS device. I've been running my own for years but that's because I have to. Plenty of people use the simple ones from WD, Synology, QNAP, etc. There are ARM-based devices from those companies that are super low-power which are also great. There's even this crazy DIY solution.

There's also another simple option: use a NUC or other tiny PC with external USB3 drives or drive enclosure. This depends a lot on how many disks you need. An Apollo Lake or Gemini Lake NUC for a couple hundred bucks could be an HTPC plus a media server.

 

[LeChuck81]

First of all, thank you both @red and @ema211293 for your replies ☺
I'm not looking at anything fancy, I'm only looking for a networked storage for iso images of my DVD/BR(/hopefully, in the future, UHD BR) collection, so I can access it from PCs or Kodi machines/TVs (I love you can install Kodi on Android TVs) without the hassle optical disks' involvement bring with it, plus the simultaneous access a network storage offers.
Raid (specifically Raid 1) is a first step solution to mitigate possible disk failures, given the amount of time and data involved.
I was looking for a DYI solution since, as you can see, my needs are very low, it's really only a Raid 1 solution connected to the local lan. I tought a DYI solution would be cheaper, allowing me to spend a bit more on HDDs. Given I was looking at WD's Caviar Red as my HDDs of choice (too fancy for the pupose?), any penny I can save on the rest of the hardware will be appreciated.

 

[BaK]

I did a DIY raid 1 build based on an Asrock J3455 ITX ($77 on newegg): https://smallformfactor.net/forum/threads/sg05-nas.10125/
I don't think you can go cheaper, furthermore if like me you already own the other parts (RAM, PSU, case) to complete the build.


PS: in the first post you specify RAID 0, not 1

 

[Valantar]

I've always found NAS hardware to be rather ridiculously expensive given the limited hardware and features available, so I've always gone for DIY Windows-based solutions (mostly out of convenience - there are other OS options better suited to the job out there - such as FreeNAS - I just haven't bothered to really get into how to set them up), and I've been relatively happy with them. I've had some issues getting password-free sharing to work previously, but with Windows 10, everything is problem-free.

I don't know how much storage you need, but there should be plenty of suitable cases out there, and any low-end ITX board with an onboard CPU ought to work when you're not transcoding. I house mine in a Fractal Node 304, which is rather large, but fits six drives. I'm sure there are nicer options out there if you look around (or don't need that many drives).

 

[ermac318]

First of all, thank you both @red and @ema211293 for your replies ☺
I'm not looking at anything fancy, I'm only looking for a networked storage for iso images of my DVD/BR(/hopefully, in the future, UHD BR) collection, so I can access it from PCs or Kodi machines/TVs (I love you can install Kodi on Android TVs) without the hassle optical disks' involvement bring with it, plus the simultaneous access a network storage offers.
Raid (specifically Raid 1) is a first step solution to mitigate possible disk failures, given the amount of time and data involved.
I was looking for a DYI solution since, as you can see, my needs are very low, it's really only a Raid 1 solution connected to the local lan. I tought a DYI solution would be cheaper, allowing me to spend a bit more on HDDs. Given I was looking at WD's Caviar Red as my HDDs of choice (too fancy for the pupose?), any penny I can save on the rest of the hardware will be appreciated.

Go look at SnapRAID assuming you are using more than 2 drives. If your files aren't changing, and they are big media files, then SnapRAID is perfect for your use case and requires much less CPU power, is much more compatible (individual drives are just ordinary drives, so you can pull them out and put them in another system), and allows individual drives to spin down when not in use. I've used it for like 6 or 7 years and it's great.

 

[LeChuck81]

Good news!
I remembered I had hid somewhere an old PC. Specs are these:
- Mobo: Asus A8N-Sli
- CPU: AMD Athlon X2 some GHz (I will check the exact model)
- RAM: 2x 1GB DDR (Crucial or Corsair)
- GPU: Sapphire 1900x AGP
It seems I have quite the hardware already to build a NAS from scratch.

I'll need an ATX (???) case, something with 4x swappable 3,5" bays and a cheap 80+ Bronze PSU to power it all.
It won't be the most energy efficient nor the quietest NAS possible, but I will save on almost everything hardware related, HDDs aside.
I would take any other suggestion anyone can spare.
I'm mostly interested on a (cheap) NAS oriented case, with easy swappable 3.5" HDD's bays and how much wattage the PSU should have to power the system and, in time, up to 4 hdds.
Also would it be reasonable to look into a quieter, more energy efficient AGP GPU?

 

[SFF EOL]

You don't need a GPU really, just use the GPU while you set up then run headless.
EDIT: God that stuff is old, I realise you have to use what you’ve got but the last time I built a NAS out of this age of kit was probably 2009? I had the benefit of onboard graphics which meant no need of dGPU. Although as I say you only need graphics for the first set up, after that it is headless (unless it crashes catastrophically).



Once you get it set up you can underclock the CPU to save power. Since it is an ATX mb I’m not sure you’ll find a great range of ‘NAS friendly’ cases but an old case will tend to come with a lot of 5.25” bays that can be repurposed. It seems the mb also support 1+0 RAID which is handy.



Personally I tend to just fit 4 times 4TB drives because that is a cost effective balance and it will give you RAID10 which is again a cost affective RAID- unless you have some particular use case that suggests otherwise. Since I only need 4 SATA ports I can use an ITX motherboard and one of the ‘not very’ ITX cases and they are relatively cheap on eBay. Not sure where you live but a quick eBay gives me this in the UK,

Asrock FM2A75M-ITX mini ITX Motherboard with AMD 3.9GHz Quad Core CPU 8GB Memory £79.



That would build a NAS. I get SATA3 (4 slots) and USB 3.1 (handy for adding extra back-up drives), 8GB isn’t enough memory for freeNAS ZFS but it is usable.



Say £30 for a ITX/mATX type case, and about £400 for the disks. Obviously you may not chose to use the disks, instead using whatever you have to hand.

 

[LeChuck81]

Not sure if the computer would boot up at all if no GPU is detected, hence the AGP GPU.
I really don't need anything else other than the NAS booting up and sharing via LAN the files on the HDDs with as close as possible to no bottleneck on data access. No transcoding, no scheduled backups, nothing else.
I'm looking at an iso's storage device accessible from the local network, no strings attached.
I'll start with 2 hdd in Raid 0 and eventually will be adding 2 more in a Raid 1+0.
Considering I'm gonna rip iso images of my DVDs and BDs collection (and, as soon as a way to do it is discovered, my UHDs also), I'll need A LOT of space A.K.A. pricey HDDs. So, whatever I can save on this project, will help me buy the HDDs.