DIY NAS Advise for beginner

[WhiteFinger]

OK it's December 2011 and i was wondering what to get my self for Christmas after a lot of searching the net i came across NAS servers which seems a great idea as i would like to leave my PC on 24/7 for my web site and be able to access all my stuff all the time and my current PC is a self built POWER GAMES machine, so don't like leaving it on too much.

So i thought just get one of these little babies and just leave it on after a lot of searching i fell in love with Qnap and decided this was the make i wanted but with so many to choose from with so many price difference i became very frustrated, I was looking around the £200 mark so was left with I'ver the

QNAP TS-119P II with a 2.0 GHz CPU but only one hard drive so no room for expansion or RAID

or the

QNAP TS-412 Turbo with four bays but the CPU is only 1.2GHz and 256MB DDRII RAM

Now i think its important for me to have many drives so the QNAP TS-412 seems to be the one for me at £260 but the spec just puts me off.

So then i thought perhaps i just will build my own
Needs to be low power and quite
But as powerful as possible in-order to satisfy my fear of bottlenecks and lags
Needs to have many Sata ports for room for expansion

So i assumed for low power and quite i would need an ITX board but i seem to be going round and round in circles as i like the Asus Atom D525 AT5IONT-I Mini ITX Motherboard but it for one im thinking its perhaps a little over the top for what i need but then it only has two Sata ports and there is nothing wrong with over the top but two Sata ports and the price!!!!

So can anyone recommend a good motherboard that's low power but as powerful as possible with many Sata ports. But With a good brand name as im a bit of a snob

 

[stevech]

take a look at Synology's DS111 or DS111J. The latter is a bit lower in cost. These are single-drive. The eSATA port can be used to do a backup.

 

[travisco_nabisco]

Based on what you have said, you probably want to go with a prebuilt NAS. If you are building one from scratch you have to consider the load that the OS you put on it creates, and this most often puts the Atom based boards out of contention.

Generally speaking more RAM and a faster CPU only come into play when you are either, running a lot of addons on the NAS, or you have a lot of different users accessing the same NAS at the same time.

Hope that helps.