Advice on Home Storage Server

[ejthurgo]

Hi Guys,
Could do with some advice - I'm wanting to build a new storage server.
Currently I have a 2x2TB system running windows 7, but have filled this.

The plan is to keep this system as a media centre (but moving to Ubuntu XBMC because WMC sucks for MKVs) but moving the storage to an external device / system.

I'm wanting ideally +8TB including redundancy.

I'm not afraid of going NAS providing it's decent (I haven't had great experience with NAS before - which is why I built my current setup, but I'm hoping they're better now).
http://www.amazon.co.uk/QNAP-TS-412-Digital-Diskless-Multimedia/dp/B004LOCFUY/ref=pd_sim_sbs_computers_2
This with 3TB drives would give me 9TB on a RAID5.

However I would ideally like more scope to expand later, but the 8 bay version is £750+ without drives which is starting to get really expensive.

I actually wouldn't mind moving to a SMALL rack setup. I've been trying to figure out whether a cost-effective decent/scalable system could be built using ex-corporate components like:
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/HP-ProLiant-DL360-G5-Quad-Core-Xeon-3-0Ghz-8GB-RAM-1U-VMware-ESXi-RAID-Server-/121067514712?pt=UK_Computing_Servers&hash=item1c302fab58

Would be really interested to know if anyone runs or has experience of building anything like this?

Thanks in advance for your time.

Ed

 

[RealBeast]

Those HP, IIRC, only use (SFF) 2.5 inch drives, so it won't work with standard 3.5 inch drives.

While QNAP is very good, I often build NAS boxes using inexpensive parts plus a good RAID adapter -- usually an Adaptec 6805. You need the minimum of processing power and can run them headless from a network computer, although it is quicker to attach a monitor and set them up with the onboard video. 4Gb of ram is probably overkill, but it's so cheap why not? The case I use depends on what I have laying around, or if for a big array I'll get a cheap full tower with lots of bays or modify it. Whatever RAID card you go with -- get the kit that includes the 2 SFF-8087 mini-SAS to 4 SATA cables. They cost a lot more separately.