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Home Server / NAS

Tags:
  • NAS / RAID
  • Systems
  • Servers
September 5, 2014 5:41:57 PM

Hey everyone!

After pondering options for data backups, I have decided to look into putting together a home server mainly as NAS. The purpose of this will be to back up files, and to be accessible from outside my home network so that I can grab files with my laptop and do backups from my laptop from elsewhere. There will be no media run from this computer, nor games played on it.
My intention is to run 2x (2-4)TB drives in RAID1 in this server, possibly with the option to add more and switch to RAID5 (although I heard that RAID5 is possibly a bad idea on small arrays with large drives). The server will run 24/7.

I intend to run some undecided flavor of linux on this server. Perhaps Ubuntu or Mageia.

Priorities:

1) 2+ full size HDD bays
2) Small case/footprint
3) Low power usage
4) Good cooling / component longevity
5) Low price
6) Performance

Budget: 500$ CAD including shipping and tax for the bare system, not including the storage drives.

Location: Canada.

Preferred retailers: In descending order, Amazon.ca (prime eligible), Newegg.ca, Directcanada.ca/NCIX.ca, Amazon.ca (non-prime).

I have two options for setups put together (without the actual storage drives included), one Intel using a Celeron G1610, one AMD using the 5350. Both are in a mini-ITX Cooler Master Elite 110 case. These are the setups:

http://ca.pcpartpicker.com/p/k3Cy8d
http://ca.pcpartpicker.com/p/VLkTFT

The price on PC partpicker is identical, but the AMD one is actually an insignificant number of dollars cheaper on newegg because of a combo deal with the case.

I am presently leaning towards the AMD build as the processor looks to have a ~40% lower power draw, and the performance is not so much lower for it to be a concern.

One part in both builds I am wondering about however is the PSU. 430W is obviously extremely overkill, but I want to have a quality PSU that will not die on me, and the seasonic S12II ranks in tier 1 on the forum list of PSUs.
One possible other option is the SeaSonic SS-300ET available for 40$, saving 15$ off the build. However, I can't find easy information about the quality of this; is it also of decent quality and suitable for this purpose?

What do you guys think, and are there any other suggestions?

Next, the storage solution. I want RAID1 for the redundancy / ease of drive failure recovery, not because this will be my only copy of mydata and I will be using RAID1 as backup. The data will live on my main desktop, this server, and important bits will be periodically backed up to USB HDDs and dropbox.

That being said, is RAID1 a good option? Should I instead look at RAID5? I have been reading some horror stories about there being a large chance of 2TB+ drives failing during an array recovery when a single drive fails out of a 2TB drive. Further, I understand RAID5 will take a significant length of time to rebuild the array once a drive fails, whereas RAID1 can just keep going on a single drive. Can anybody shed some light on this?

Finally, the drives themselves. I was looking at the backblaze blog post that indicates hitachi and WD drives are far more reliable then seagate, although I have not had a problem with seagate in the past four years on my desktop.
I am looking into either Hitachi / HGST Deskstar 3 or 4TB drives, or getting the same capacity in WD red. Any comments?

Thanks for reading, and thanks in advance for the help!

Edit: Clarity

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