NAS on the cheap

[bobdole369]

Looking for NAS with redundancy on the cheap! Prefer RAID5 but will settle for mirrored drives. Would like iSCSI support but thats just an extra that goes beyond the goal of the system. Essentially backup for digital pictures, and storage of data off-PC for 5 client PC's (wifes, own, 2 laptops and an HTPC). Performance is not a priority - redundancy is.

And since the NAS itself won't be in production for forever - it would be incredibly awesome if it used a standard filetype/partition in the unlikely event of chassis failure.

Current solution is a dell precision 650 with openfiler - (p4-era xeon with a single CPU) - unit limited due to MB failure to 1.5GB RAM, also using an ancient rocketraid card which is not supported in RAID mode in Openfiler, so OF sees the drives individually - and using software RAID5 to create a volume. Wife gave me 90 days to get rid of the freakin beast.

Likely to put 4x2tb drives in it - current solution is 4x 320GB drives and completely full.

 

[alfa147x]

Bookmarked.

Budget?

 

[Lonyo]

Are you only looking for pre-builts or have you considered a DIY box using something like Zacate/Atom + a RAID card and running Linux?

 

[bobdole369]

Considering everything - budget <$400 for the NAS, and $600 for (up to 4x 2TB drives)
No more than $1000 total.

Boy would it be nice to run USB for more externals too (have a slew of them.)

Req: NFS and CIFS shares.

 

[nanaki333]

buy a cheap $30 case from newegg that supports 4+ drives (convert 5.25 to 3.5), put an atom or your p4 in it, install freeNAS, all done.

 

[Silenus]

buy a cheap $30 case from newegg that supports 4+ drives (convert 5.25 to 3.5), put an atom or your p4 in it, install freeNAS, all done.

Basically this...except I'd do OpenIndiana+NappIt. Tremendous feature set including comstar iscsi. Also suggest zacate (E350) board instead for 8GB ram, better CPU performance and more SATA ports available. Can make a really nice budget NAS from that setup.

 

[wirednuts]

p4 cpu's would work great if you have extra money to piss away to your power company.

its tempting to use those old cheap boards, but honestly a zacate system will pay for itself over a year or so.

thats why when i went the cheap nas route, i used a via c3 processor. i didnt even think it would work, and while it is a bit on the slow side, it has been serving up my hd movies, running bittorrents and hosting skype 24/7 for months now. all on like 20w load.... i love it!

 

[sjzrifdsa]

I'm looking for it,too.

 

[Silenus]

p4 cpu's would work great if you have extra money to piss away to your power company.

its tempting to use those old cheap boards, but honestly a zacate system will pay for itself over a year or so.

thats why when i went the cheap nas route, i used a via c3 processor. i didnt even think it would work, and while it is a bit on the slow side, it has been serving up my hd movies, running bittorrents and hosting skype 24/7 for months now. all on like 20w load.... i love it!

This is actually close to spot on. Figure your NAS runs 24/7, and arguably is idle much of the time the power difference between an older p4 and a zacate with a few drives is probably double at least. I'd figure in the 30ish watt range for the zacate and at least 60-70 idle on an older P4 (maybe more). In NY where I am power is roughly .210 KWh...so the the power savings would in fact pay for a zacate board and memory in probably a year and half, maybe less!

 

[kmmatney]

I've been happy with WHS. Data redundancy is great, and you can add random drives (including external drives) into the drive pool. My system started out cheap, built with leftover parts and hard drives, but I've been upgrading as I go. You can remove any drive and replace it with another one (of any size), and it will rebuild and rebalance the drive pool automatically. The new version of WHS supports RAID, although I prefer the older drive extender, which is more flexible.