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Combined gaming system and NAS. Doable?

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Yes, what you want is feasible.

Now, I don't run Macs, and won't have anything to do with that monopolist's kludged PCs, however, the website that you referred to does seem to prove that a NTFS machine can be used as a server for a Mac.

The performance hit on the host server is a matter of speculation. I would time back-ups for down time on the server machine. You may be able to play games in the foreground, but depending on the load on the CPU n the game you may see a significant performance hit.

Yes you can use different HDs for storage. I boot off a 128 GB SSD, use a 640 GB WD Caviar Black for (Some) games and apps, and have two Seagate 1.5 TB, two Samsung 2 TB and a Hitachi 3 TB for server purposes. You can run the NAS directly from Win 7. I bought all of my HDDs before the Thailand flood.

Getting this in under your budget will be a challenge depending on your HDD and GPU. You are looking at: $220 CPU, $50 + for a case, $125 + for a GPU, $100 + for the OS, $100 + for the mobo, $200 + for the HDD(s), $125 + for the SSD, $75 + for the PSU, $20 for a DVD, etc.

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First of all, thanks in advance and sorry for the length of this post. So, my wife and I have been happily using a 2 bay NAS from synology, but we're starting to run out of room. Instead of upgrading to a 4 bay NAS, I had the brilliant idea of creating my own NAS. Then, after thinking about it, I realized that I could use an upgrade from my current gaming laptop. So, I guess the main question is, is it feasible to create a modern, medium-fast gaming system (I'm looking to spend around $1000-1200), and then spend a bit more to add on a few more hard drives, and use that as an effective NAS for my wife's laptop (mac)?

Can the processor (most likely i5 2500k) handle doing time machine backups in the background while I am using the computer and/or gaming on it? Does Windows 7 even make this feasible? It would also be used as a fileserver, so there will also be network access to shared files, which I know shouldn't be much of a problem. My main question is the feasibility of time machine with windows 7, and the load on the system. According to this link, the setup shouldn't be too bad.

http://hciguy.wordpress.com/2010/06/16/using-time-machi...

Also, would it be possible to mix and match drives? So ideally I would have an SSD for the windows speed boost thingie (I forget the real name), a fast-ish hard drive for gaming, and then 4 slower 2 tb drives that would combine via RAID for the functionality of the NAS, and could tolerate a disk failure. Any thoughts on software requirements to manage all this, and whether I would need a hardware raid controller separate from the motherboard would be appreciated.

Thanks!
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momotiki the short answer is YES its doable.

I have a 720BE running my gaming system and have no issues with it also being used for NAS for 2 Laptops 1 HTPC and my xbox. I am using a 120GB SSD for OS and a 2 TB Storage drive. been stable for over a year. I think it is important to get a reliable Router though, I had alot of issues with my wrt160n as it would drop connections when bit-torrenting at the same time as large data transfers.

PS. Also if you can wait till spring for the HDD upgrade you will save MEGA $$$ , in the meantime I bought a Blu-ray Burner to back up my downloads and such (25GB per disk)

Also you would probably get better performance from just running an SSD as your OS drive (120 GB) plus keep 3-4 of your favorite games, put the rest on your storage drives, and yeah run 'em in raid if you want, as long as you have the SATA ports you shouldn't need a RAID card.

Wow, sorry for the multiple posts! The computer I was on earlier was telling me that it wasn't successfully posting. Will delete the duplicates if possible. Sorry! And thanks for the quick responses.

When you say no issues, does that mean while a backup or transfer was going on you could play games without an issue? Just clarifying.

funguseater said:
momotiki the short answer is YES its doable.

I have a 720BE running my gaming system and have no issues with it also being used for NAS for 2 Laptops 1 HTPC and my xbox. I am using a 120GB SSD for OS and a 2 TB Storage drive. been stable for over a year. I think it is important to get a reliable Router though, I had alot of issues with my wrt160n as it would drop connections when bit-torrenting at the same time as large data transfers.

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