Building a NAS, need suggestions

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dsmilees

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Mar 18, 2014
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It's late into my freshman year of college, and I'm slowly running out of my spending money for the year, so this will be a semi budget build.
Up until this point, I've been using an old pc as my NAS with two 750 gb drives for my laptop and gaming computer. Over spring break this week, I've learned that they're dying quite quickly, so I need to build a new NAS within the next few weeks. The computer is also old and getting quite slow (2gb ram, intel E4500 core 2 duo, etc). It is also larger than I need, and can only fit two hard drives anyway. I'm open to any suggestions on my new build.

So far I'm planning on the white fractal design node 304 case, with a weak Intel i3 processor (probably the i3-4330).

I'm looking for the cheapest itx motherboard with at least 6 sata III ports, 8 would be preferred but 6 is good.

I'm also open for suggestions for the power supply, ram (I would prefer 8 gbs), hard drives, and what I could put in the pci-e slot.For now I'll probably only pick up one 3tb hard drive, but once I get a job over the summer I'm planning on throwing in at least two more and forming a RAID 5. Also I'll probably expand the use of the server in the future, since I really love linux.
 
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Yeah I didn't literally mean Seagate NAS drives. That's just the label I used referring to that class of drive between consumer and enterprise. Seagate just does a better job of directly marketing but has marginally higher failure rates.

I would stick with The Red drives over Seagate.

3TB drives will be okay as well, but you may consider using 2TB drives if you're going to want to use more than 10-12TB total.

The difference in base rebuild failure rates is going to be 1-2% higher with 18Tb over 12TB, but it should still be okay if you're...
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TyrOd

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Aug 16, 2013
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Don't use consumer hard drives. Even with NAS drives 9TB RAID 5 isn't great. RAID 6 starting with 4 drives would be okay, but would require a dedicated card.

I would suggest sticking with 1-2TB NAS or enterprise drives if you're limited to RAID 5 with 6X2TB drives being the upper limit that would stretch to reliably.
 
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dsmilees

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Mar 18, 2014
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I was planning on using 3tb WD red drives. Is there any reason to stick to the 2tb size instead?
I could be persuaded into seagate NAS drives, but I've always preferred Western Digital.
 
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TyrOd

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Aug 16, 2013
527
0
11,160


Yeah I didn't literally mean Seagate NAS drives. That's just the label I used referring to that class of drive between consumer and enterprise. Seagate just does a better job of directly marketing but has marginally higher failure rates.

I would stick with The Red drives over Seagate.

3TB drives will be okay as well, but you may consider using 2TB drives if you're going to want to use more than 10-12TB total.

The difference in base rebuild failure rates is going to be 1-2% higher with 18Tb over 12TB, but it should still be okay if you're diligent with keeping an eye on drive status and keep a spare ready to rebuild if a drive falls out for any reason.
 
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