D-I-Y NAS Drive Help!!

[ditavs]

Hi guys I was wondering if you could save me a little research time as this isn't an area I have allot of knowledge in.

I have recently been toying with the idea of getting a NAS Enclosure and getting a RAID 5 array going to give me some security over failing drives. After looking at the price of NAS Enclosures I simply can't afford one at this moment in time however I have a bunch of spare equipment I would like to use to make a DIY NAS drive. The equipment I have got spare is as follows:

* Intel D201GLY2 - ITX Motherboard with onboard CPU + VGA, mobo has (x2) SATA Ports capable of Raid 0/1
* 1Gb of DD2 PC4200 Ram
* (6x)500Gb SATA Samsung Spinpoint Harddrives
* (1x)250Gb IDE Hitachi Harddrive
* (1x)4 Port SATA RAID5 Controller PCI Card
* 120W Pico Power supply + AC Adapter.
* Wireless 802.N WiFi Dongle

So hopefully with the above equipment I can build a nice little NAS drive and save myself a few quid. It will be used to serve various media streamers throughout the household with audio, pics, avi+mkv's,work documents aswell as serving my work laptop. All this will eventually be via a CAT6 gigabit network....or Wireless N for the time being.

So my original thoughts were to setup a 1.5Tb RAID 5 array using 4 of the 500Gb drives combined with my controller card and then a further 500Gb/1Tb RAID0 or 1 array via the motherboards sata headers. I will then run my operating system via the 250Gb IDE Drive.

My questions are what is the best way of going about this? I could just install XP and setup some network shared folders but someone had said Linux might do a better job, also heard of this FreeNas program thats out there but not looked into it much.....would it be possible to make one big RAID5 array using all x6 500Gb drives via the controller card and mobo headers using FreeNas? Setting an FTP up on this system again is also quite appealing, my company also has a website...is there anyway I could encorperate the sites FTP on my nas? I know lots of nas drives have torrent clients built in....is there a way of tying in usenet newsgroups?

I have some experiance using standalone NAS drives and a bit of FTP knowledge but I have never touched Linux before or anyform of software based NAS solutions such as FreeNas.

Any help you can give on this matter is greatly appreciated....I have all my bits, just wanna do a little research so I dont have to do any jobs twice!

Thanks in advance!!!

PS: If any of the equipment listed above isn't suitable for the job please suggest a replacement. I have a bunch more stuff I'm boxing up to sell on so have more kit at my disposal, I picked the list above thinking the spec is acceptable and would offer a near silent solution and very energy efficent....although I'm pretty sure that pico psu wont cut it so I will stick in a standard 400W ATX type.

 

[ditavs]

Hmmm....ok! Just been flicking through a post on here where people are recommending dual and quad core setups, so thought I best come back and list the other equipment I have available. However try and keep in mind I'm wanting the lowest power consumption and quietest system possible that can stream 1080p mkv files to my media streamers....surely a quad setup is complete overkill for that?? Anyways....

Q6600 Quadcore cpu
820D Intel Pentium Dual Core
MSI P7N SLI Platinum Motherboard
Gigabyte GA-G33M-DS2R mATX Motherboard
1x1Gb OCZ DDR2 PC6400 RAM
2x2Gb G.Skill DDR2 PC8000 RAM
150Gb WD Raptor Harddrive
Enermax 800W Modular PSU
Coolermaster 450W PSU
Intel 8800GT Graphics Card
2 Port SATA RAID0/1 PCIEx1 Card
......have a bunch of other stuff such as cases, various fans, various hdd's etc

My plan was to sell off all my mid/high end stuff + current laptop and replace with NAS enclosure/DIY joby and media streamers to all plasma's and a high end laptop for all my surfing work etc. I just don't get the time anymore to use all the high end overclocked noisey stuff anymore lol so time to streamline. The NAS will be in a bedroom idealy so really needs to be quiet

Cheers

 

[00Roush]

Well the ITX setup you mentioned in your first post would probably work okay but in my opinion it is too limited.

The Gigabyte board you listed might work pretty well and provide a good platform for low power usage. You might need to consider a more current CPU for it though as the quad is a bit much and the 820D is not the most efficient CPU. Just some food for thought.

For what you are looking at doing a single core or dual core CPU would be just fine. My opinion is a quad is only necessary if you plan on pushing huge (300+ MB/sec) amounts of data through the machine or if you plan on doing lots of video transcoding.

I think currently the most ideal platform for a quiet low power consumption NAS is either the Intel Core i3's or one of the AMD Athlon II X2's on a current generation motherboard.

As for an OS... XP would work just fine as would Linux or FreeNAS. The difference is XP might be easier to setup. But generally XP costs money so most people just use Ubuntu (or some form of linux) or FreeNAS. Also I believe XP is only able to serve 10 connections at a time.

00Roush