Some advice on these NAS builds please

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kenzo86

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Hi guys, I want to build my own UNRAID media server (plex) and was wondering if you could help me out with a £3-400 budget.
It will be for home use with 1-3 users. HDD will contain backed up BR/DVD movies. I've know that I need a mini-ITX (low power consumption), a CPU with low TDP, and that ECC ram may help? I plan on starting with 3x3TB drives and then working up from there (will need a fair few sata ports 6) As for storage, do NAS HDDs make a big difference, or will desktop HDD suffice? (Seagate 7200 3TB)
I already have a PC case with 13 HDD bays (Thermaltake Armor Series VA8000BWS) which accompanies a 700watt PSU, but if you can suggest a better case, then your opinions are most welcome.

My primary reason for doing this is because I want to centralise my media (movies/tv shows) so I can access it across the house via plex/transcoding (brothers pc/mine/fathers/living room). I will be using sabnzbd/couch potato and sickbeard and I would also need to transfer content from a seedbox server to the NAS box via FTP.

Any thoughts on either of these builds i quickly came up with?
http://imgur.com/mMFVZWM

Your help is much appreciated
 
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ronintexas
I would suggest WD Black hard drives or WD Red hard drives (the black are slightly higher performing and have a 5 year warranty - the red are optimized for NAS units). For streaming - I have found that 1 processing core per stream + 2GB RAM per stream works best for me (so you would be looking at 3 cores + 6GB RAM if all 3 people were streaming at the same time).

I have an HTPC that has been running for 2+ years now - including a digital cable card tuner that has 3 tuners for live TV. It is an AMD build - 6 core processor with 8GB of RAM and an inexpensive AMD GPU (one 4TB HDD and a 300GB HDD for the OS).

The 700W PSU is a bit of overkill - unless you are running about 20 hard drives..... It will also defeat the purpose of going...
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ronintexas

ronintexas

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I would suggest WD Black hard drives or WD Red hard drives (the black are slightly higher performing and have a 5 year warranty - the red are optimized for NAS units). For streaming - I have found that 1 processing core per stream + 2GB RAM per stream works best for me (so you would be looking at 3 cores + 6GB RAM if all 3 people were streaming at the same time).

I have an HTPC that has been running for 2+ years now - including a digital cable card tuner that has 3 tuners for live TV. It is an AMD build - 6 core processor with 8GB of RAM and an inexpensive AMD GPU (one 4TB HDD and a 300GB HDD for the OS).

The 700W PSU is a bit of overkill - unless you are running about 20 hard drives..... It will also defeat the purpose of going with the lower wattage CPU/mobo.
 
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kenzo86

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Thanks a lot for taking the time to reply. When you say "optimized for nas units", what do you mean? Many say it is just a gimmick and to buy the lowest priced drives? Some even suggest WD green
 
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ronintexas

ronintexas

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The Red drives are designed to run 24/7 and serve up files. WD put algorithms for drive performance for that purpose (programming on the controller card). The WD black drives are optimized for desktop high performance - and still work great for a "home server". The green drives are optimized for energy savings - and do not work well in a server environment - especially if you have RAID involved (which you don't). The blue drives are the least optimized drives - and are for general purpose desktop use.

There will be "fan boys" of all types of drives (just as there are for AMD vs. Intel - but let's not go there.....LOL), and I will admit I am a bit shaded towards the WD drives. I have 5 computers, 3 of the have 100% WD black drives, one has a WD blue (this was a testing machine, and my wife uses it for web surfing) and the laptop wasn't my choice....it came with the drive.

I rotate my drives - they usually go for 5 years as a primary operating system drive and/or data drive, then I retire them to the data backup/non-critical use group. The theory behind it - my OS/data drives are the most reliable, backup/testing drives are the least reliable. Most people are shocked by that answer - backups are important!!!! They are - but the theory is that the chance of a primary drive dying at the same time frame as a back drive dying is very, very slim (we aren't talking production boxes here). Over the last 25 years or so of home computing, I haven't lost a single file due to multiple drives dying.

BTW - important stuff - like wedding photos, photos of the kids, stuff that can't be replaced - I have on cloud backup as well....there is no way to replace them....my MP3s and digital files (i.e. HTPC files) can be replaced and would cost too much to backup to the cloud.
 
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