Home NAS with SSD and RAM cache possible? (I'm new to this)

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Cartuner401

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Nov 2, 2008
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Hi all,

Would like to build a simple home NAS and already have a tower and good hardware inside (Core i7, a few TBs of hard drives, etc) I do have an SSD lieing around and could upgrade my ram. Question is, is it possible to do a Raid 5 setup just for Home Media/Server and implement RAM and SSD Cache? Could someone point me to a tutorial so that I am doing this correctly? Appreciate this a lot everyone! I would like to get pretty decent performance for this setup as I have 2 4ks TVs and have 10gbit router from Linksys.
 
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USAFRet
RAM and/or SSD cache won't really help. Your music and movies won't play any faster.

Similarly, RAID 5 won't give you any real benefit.

My previous home server/HTPC was a simple Pentium G840, 4GB RAM, and a bunch of drives.
120GB SSD for the OS and applications, and ~20TB of spinning drives for media and backups.

I'm in the process of setting up my new NAS/HTPC....a dedicated QNAP box.
Does all the traditional NAS functions, as well as doing the HTPC function.
4k out to the TV if desired, on the fly transcoding, run a VM if desired, Plex server, etc, etc, etc.

Looks to be much easier than doing all that with a Windows box.
But since you already have the hardware...go for it.
But leave all the cache and RAID 5 out of it.
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corroded

corroded

Splendid
Sep 5, 2011
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I run FreeNAS and Plex for Streaming. FreeNAS for storage and Plex on a Windows box as the Streaming server.

The OS loads from a flash/USB drive and you add in however many drive you want. Works great.

Or be simpler and just use your already built Windows 7/10 machine, keep the SSD for boot and add disks and set shares on it. The side befiit of that is you can easily add the Plex server service onto the same box and have your streaming media as well.


http://www.freenas.org/

https://www.plex.tv/
 
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USAFRet

USAFRet

Titan
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Mar 16, 2013
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RAM and/or SSD cache won't really help. Your music and movies won't play any faster.

Similarly, RAID 5 won't give you any real benefit.

My previous home server/HTPC was a simple Pentium G840, 4GB RAM, and a bunch of drives.
120GB SSD for the OS and applications, and ~20TB of spinning drives for media and backups.

I'm in the process of setting up my new NAS/HTPC....a dedicated QNAP box.
Does all the traditional NAS functions, as well as doing the HTPC function.
4k out to the TV if desired, on the fly transcoding, run a VM if desired, Plex server, etc, etc, etc.

Looks to be much easier than doing all that with a Windows box.
But since you already have the hardware...go for it.
But leave all the cache and RAID 5 out of it.
 
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Solution
F

FireWire2

Distinguished
Oct 30, 2006
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There are couples things that you need to consider:
- Are you trans-coding? If yes then I5 or i7 is good, other wise you're wasted the CPU resource and end up using more electricity than it needs
- Do you intend to use FreeNAS or Windows? If you are using Windows then RAID5 is a good protection for your data and you can have a MASSIVE volume - 5x6TB = 30TB raw use-able 24TB.

Do not use your MB RAID BIOS; use driver-less Hardware RAID SPM394 or SPM393 instead. Incase the MoBo is dead, you can easily move entire RAID volume to a new Mobo

Where the OS is FreeNAS, then use ZFS instead. this will protect your data

 
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