SFF fanless RAID box

[11Blade]

I'm looking to build a small form factor NAS with twin 500 or 250Gb drives in a RAID
must be low power consumption, fan less (hate noise) and be able to install a linux
variant (SAMBA box basically). So I can turn off my monster PC's which run all the time
to share drives.

Can someone point me to a case? and a cheap motherboard solution? SMALL is better
SMALLER is best!

SMALLER AND CHEAP is better than best!

As I understand it, current EPIA mini-itx boards do not support RAID or SATA

thanks for all the pointers.

 

[MercenaryForHire]

A totally fanless NAS is suicide IMO. You'll want at least a single fan to get air moving across the hard drives. Get a 120mm and undervolt if you have to.

For a compromise between size and price, I suggest going with MicroATX. Couple that with an older Pentium III era board and chip, and drop in a standalone SATA card. Linux support should be spotless on the older hardware, so just make sure your SATA controller is supported.

- M4H

 

[11Blade]

 

[11Blade]

Actually, you are very right. I think quiet to near silent is more my requirement. microATX? you would not consider a mini-ITX system?

11Blade

 

[gaidin123]

Have you looked at and discarded devices like the Linksys NSLU2? It's not RAID, but it can take 2 usb2 drives (could be fanless 2.5" enclosures if you don't need a ton of disk space) and is probably fast enough for most home uses.

For a home built fully enclosed RAID system that's cheap, you won't get real hardware RAID. At best you will get something that has RAID on the motherboard but requires some kind of special driver to get the host OS to manage the array.

If you know linux/*BSD I'd go with their software raid and do whatever you want with a mini-itx or micro-atx board and case. The mini-itx boards are cool but finding a case that costs less than the board that doesn't have noisy, small fans and can hold 2 3.5" drives will be difficult. The nice thing though is that it is possible to get fanless power supplies for mini-itx systems. It's much easier to find cheap micro-atx cases, and boards to fit your needs though. If the box can sit in a closet or garage somewhere I'd probably go the micro-atx route. But do note that you can just chuck a mini-itx board into a micro-atx case and use larger, slower fans to keep things cool and potentially be quieter than a mini-itx case...

If you don't know *nix/BSD that well, you can try FreeNAS which is FreeBSD based and has a nice webgui to manage software RAID.

Gaidin

 

[TruePaige]

Originally posted by: gaidin123
Have you looked at and discarded devices like the Linksys NSLU2? It's not RAID, but it can take 2 usb2 drives (could be fanless 2.5" enclosures if you don't need a ton of disk space) and is probably fast enough for most home uses.

For a home built fully enclosed RAID system that's cheap, you won't get real hardware RAID. At best you will get something that has RAID on the motherboard but requires some kind of special driver to get the host OS to manage the array.

If you know linux/*BSD I'd go with their software raid and do whatever you want with a mini-itx or micro-atx board and case. The mini-itx boards are cool but finding a case that costs less than the board that doesn't have noisy, small fans and can hold 2 3.5" drives will be difficult. The nice thing though is that it is possible to get fanless power supplies for mini-itx systems. It's much easier to find cheap micro-atx cases, and boards to fit your needs though. If the box can sit in a closet or garage somewhere I'd probably go the micro-atx route. But do note that you can just chuck a mini-itx board into a micro-atx case and use larger, slower fans to keep things cool and potentially be quieter than a mini-itx case...

If you don't know *nix/BSD that well, you can try FreeNAS which is FreeBSD based and has a nice webgui to manage software RAID.

Gaidin

You have great advice man. I just had to reply to tell you that.

I read this reply and am now looking into buying one of those linksys products =D

 

[EtherealDragon]

I am not sure about installing SAMBA on it, but I use a D-Link DNS-323 NAS box with two Seagate 7200.10 500 Gig SATA drives in a RAID1 array. It is TINY, VERY quite, connects to router via RJ-45 cable, has a USB port for a printer (built in print server), has built in FTP server, iTunes server, uPnP server, DHCP server, options to power down drives in as little as 5 minutes. I really like the box.

Here is also a link for the DNS-323 GPL Info. I personally have no clue what to do with that, but I am told you can compile your own firmware with it.

Good Luck!!