Building a PC-based NAS

[Turick]

Are there any good guides out there? I'm not sure what to aim for with processing power, ram, power supply specs, using on-board controllers vs a separate raid controller, etc.

I need it to be windows 7 based, which isn't my first choice, but it will need to serve some additional duties that are dependent on windows 7. The main purpose of the NAS is simply streaming video to multiple clients.

It seems like software RAID might be the cheapest and easiest way to go... I've come across some software like FlexRaid, but I'm really not sure what other options may exist.

Can anybody offer any adivce?

 

[coxhaus]

If you want windows based then you might look at Microsoft Home Server 2011. It is fairly cheap but would not make a good workstation. If you need a workstation and it needs to be Windows 7 then you are probably looking at using window shares. You would create a share and allow other machines access.

RAID is a way to create large drive spaces or to add redundancy to physical hard drives.

 

[Turick]

Well, I quit being an idiot and realized that the buffering issues I was seeing was not due to my gig-e network getting saturated, but the terrible performance of the NAS itself. If I can get better NAS performance, I should be fine. So I decided to the FreeNAS route and have the following parts on the way:

ram Ddr3-1333 4Gb/512Mx72 Ecc Cl9 Server Memory
ram Kingston 4GB 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10600) ECC System Specific Memory Model KTH-PL313E/4G $85
mobo SUPERMICRO MBD-X9SCL-F-O LGA 1155 Intel C202 Micro ATX Intel Xeon E3 Server Motherboard $152.99
cpu Intel Pentium 2 LGA 1155 Processor BX80637G2030 $63.49
psu Seasonic 360W 80PLUS Gold ATX12V Power Supply SSR-360GP $59.99
case NZXT Technologies Source 210 Computer Case (Black) $34.72

I picked up the RAM used, that's why it's mismatched, but the total system cost came in under $400 which is a nice savings from the Synology DS412+ I was considering at $600. We'll see how the performance stacks up once it's all done, but it has to beat the performance of my Netgear ReadyNAS.

 

[Kris404]

I suggest looking at OpenMediaVault for custom NAS. It almost has the same UI as the older QNAP OS.

 

[Turick]

Interesting... haven't seen this before, although it looks very similar in the interface to FreeNAS. Any specific advantages to this over zfs/freenas? I've also recently seen a lot of talk about Synology DSM, but the process for getting it up and going is a bit wonky and I haven't had any success testing it on VirtualBox. Not to mention the lack of support.

 

[stevech]

FreeNAS is very crude as compared to Synology/QNAP and their feature sets and GUI.

 

[00Roush]

Just figured I would chime in and mention NAS4Free as an OS. It actually is the forked version of original FreeNAS. In my testing I have found it provides better performance out of the box and in my opinion the web interface is easier to use. For some reason FreeNAS 8 and 9 versions have not given me the best performance. Even have tested on different hardware setups and same result.

You never mentioned how many disks you were going to setup.

If you do go with FreeNAS or NAS4Free let us know how turns out.

00Roush