System Spec for Building NAS

[thomasjay]

Im looking to build a NAS from a cheap 2nd PC (brought of ebay or similar)

I was wondering what spec pc would be a minimum and provided the greatest perfomance?

Is amd or intel best in this space?

There appears to be alot more intel based cpus for sale.

 

[Bart]

Brand of CPU doesn't really matter. Even VIA CPU's often more than suffice. I believe everything from the PIII and up will be able to act as a NAS if you use the right software. (FreeNAS, NASLite,...)

 

[crashnburn]

Brand of CPU doesn't really matter. Even VIA CPU's often more than suffice. I believe everything from the PIII and up will be able to act as a NAS if you use the right software. (FreeNAS, NASLite,...)

Are there any good guides that will help us prepare a custom NAS Box using FreeNAS or other OS and make it functionally equivalent for SERVING media to something like a Popcorn Hour, XBox 360, XBMC or PS3? e.g. Like how a QNAP or Synology NAS does.

 

[scotty]

You don't need too much on the CPU and RAM side, I think the more important thing is a beefy NIC.

You also don't HAVE to use the NAS-specific programs either (opennas). XP, Ubuntu, or just about any desktop/server OS can do it too. Lots of good free programs to set up streaming for the protocol of your choice. WMP11 supports DLNA so you can set up a media server for a PS3 (and Xbox, I belive) right out of the gate with XP. That's what I do. And you can do FTP and a variety of other things for free as well so lots of options even with just XP.

 

[thiggins]

You don't need too much on the CPU and RAM side, I think the more important thing is a beefy NIC.

This isn't for RAID, right? Can you give an example system and the performance that you got from it?

 

[scotty]

This isn't for RAID, right? Can you give an example system and the performance that you got from it?

I'm currently building a NAS out of an Athlon64 3200 machine w/ 1Gig RAM. I'd like to try various OS's with IOZone and see what I get.

 

[thiggins]

I'm currently building a NAS out of an Athlon64 3200 machine w/ 1Gig RAM. I'd like to try various OS's with IOZone and see what I get.

Looking forward to seeing your results. PM me if you want and I'll send an Excel file that I use for plotting iozone results.

I had another reader who built a RAID 5 NAS with an Athlon BE2400, 3Ware 9650SE hardware raid controller. He sent iozone data using various combinations of openfiler, FreeNAS and onboard and PCI-e gigabit NICs.

The data is a little scattered because he changed jumbo frame settings for different NICS. But he found more consistent performance from 32 MB to 1 GB files izes with openfiler. Still averaged only 40 MB/s writes, though. I'm waiting for system photos and more test data and will try to pull it into an article.

 

[HellesAngel]

Looking to build a NAS as cheaply as possible

My first post to this forum, so hello everyone.

My question is this: How much processing power do software RAID cards like the Promise FastTrak TX4310 4 Port Raid 0/1/10/5/JBOD require from the host processor?

The 'server' PC is a 1Ghz Intel Celeron based, 768Mb RAM, with an old ASUS TUSI-M mainboard running SuSE Linux 10 and I'd like to use this as a NAS with the Promise card. Currently this does all other server tasks, running the SqueezeCenter audio server, Apache, the CUPS print server, Samba and sharing files off a single disk, and it works fine. It's just the wife and I using it, so the max it will be doing is two FLAC audio streams concurrently with us looking at still pictures - not so demanding.

My plan is to add a gigabit network card and a RAID5 array of 3x 750Gb disks with one spare to this PC. All the hardware RAID cards I've seen are much more expensive and need PCIe or PCIX slots which would mean changing the mainboard too.

Helpfully Promise don't give a minimum system spec for this card and I'm in two minds about the wisdom of doing RAID on the cheap, having read several articles like yours here about hardware vs. software RAID. Perhaps it's advisable to spend a lot more and get a new server, hardware RAID, and do the job properly.

Any comments anyone?

 

[Madwand]

My plan is to add a gigabit network card and a RAID5 array of 3x 750Gb disks with one spare to this PC.

Any comments anyone?

1. There's a performance issue with any configuration of this sort on that motherboard, because you're limited to the PCI bus. The PCI bus doesn't have enough bandwidth for full gigabit, let alone gigabit and a storage controller. It'd still work, but be limited in performance. One way out would be with a more modern motherboard, utilizing on-board SATA and on-board gigabit. At most the gigabit would be integrated with PCI; good designs would have neither on PCI. (*)

2. Using card-based software RAID is not advisable with Linux. Most such devices are intended for Windows platforms, so have better support in those contexts in both directions. Moreover, the native RAID implementation in Linux is not bad, and often out-performs such efforts. So the general advice would be to scrap inexpensive board-based RAID and just get supported drive controllers and run Linux RAID on them.

(*) Despite all that, the system would still work, and as anyone would be facing performance limitations at the OS, network protocol and at the client machine levels, it's not necessary to worry about ideal hardware performance. I'm just informing you of the issue.

3. A further point is that file servers usually become important to the family -- that's where you store all your important media. Skimping on that just because you can is not the most sensible approach. Newer is not necessarily better, but hardware does age, and not very gracefully at times.

 

[HellesAngel]

Many thanks Madwand, very interesting points. After posting yesterday I stumbled across the PCI hosted gigabit ethernet discussion on this site so understand that point, but hadn't even considered Linux RAID. I did a bit of reading around and it seems the old Celeron is a bit underpowered for this, especially considering its other tasks, so a new mainboard is looking increasingly necessary, although the total expenditure is the same as the RAID card cost is replaced by a new mainboard with Linux RAID.

You're certainly right about the value of the server, or more precisely its data, to the family and that makes it worth investing in. Unfortunately terabyte+ backup systems are still expensive, so RAID5 with decent UPS seems a prudent minumum. Perhaps the now obsolete ASUS board can become a backup server...

 

[Madwand]

Perhaps the now obsolete ASUS board can become a backup server...

That is a great idea -- RAID alone is never as good as a separate backup, and having an external backup is useful for maintaining a RAID array. The main problem is keeping the backup server large enough to store at least the critical parts of the primary file server.