Fast NAS

[LionsGate]

Hi, Personally I love the articles about DIY NASes. I'd really like to see a new up to date article describing a build, preferrably atom based, that could give the Synology ds411+II a run for it's money

Br LionsGate

 

[88keyz]

Personally if I was building my NAS box now I'd use something like the ASUS E35M1-I Fusion APU combo board with a case like the XCLIO Touch 320 for lots of expansion room. Then get yourself a nice quiet power supply and couple of low noise HDD's and you're all set for hardware.

Software wise you have lots of great choices; stuff that is purpose built and easy to setup like FreeNAS or OpenMediaVault, or something with a little more headroom like Ubuntu Server or Windows Home Server.

You can put together a dual-core 1.6GHz 6-bay NAS with 2 TB of storage and 4GB of DDR3 RAM for $560 whereas the DS411+II with 2 TB of storage would run you around $900 right now. Performance wise if you're running raid on the custom box you shouldn't see any difference in performance and you've got a more expandable unit to boot.

 

[iwod]

I have been thinking about it lately. I think all the ingredients has matured, it is only the recent market of HDD price and and Software that is holding things up.

A Media Server NAS, that serve as a NAS Box and Media Player.

Lian Li has made a perfect Case for nearly everyone

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811112339

You can get up 7 3.5" HDD in that tiny box. A Intel Sandy Bridge Low Power CPU that is enough to software decode 99.9% of all Internet video content. And if we wait for Ivy Bridge CPU, which has QuickSync support of 4K H.264 Hardware decode, we would have future prove all your video needs.

The Final Piece is software. Which is the hardest part. We need a Linux flavor specifically build for NAS.