Looking for a >16TB NAS

[cs02rm0]

I'm thinking of building a NAS. I'm looking for something fairly compact, low power and quiet. It won't be very heavily used, it needs to be able to expand to more than 16TB, 24 or 32 should be fine.

Here's a spec list for a starting point:

U-NAS NSC-800 £214.80
RocketRAID Controller £130.10
8x3TB WD Red HDD £99.66
Zalman heatsink £22.22
1U PSU £62.57
Kingston SSD 60GB £43.92
SFF8087 to 4x SATA £9.56
Asrock E3C226D2I £155.62
2x8GB Crucial ECC £157.19
Intel i3-4130T £101.81

Total £1695.07 for 24TB.

I'm intending on installing some undetermined flavour of Linux on the SSD, with the drives available as JBOD to use ZFS. Not sure if there's a cheaper alternative to a full blown RAID card to get the extra SATA ports for that.

I also gather that the PSU is quite loud so I'd appreciate any advice on a quieter one.

I've tried picking a low power CPU and ECC RAM - it wasn't easy to find an mITX motherboard that seems to support Haswell and ECC RAM, I haven't found another under £500 which makes me a little nervous - I could probably get decent odds on (i) the motherboard dying some day or (ii) the board not being produced anymore in a few years, if that.

Budget isn't well defined, it's for my business so it broadly costs what it costs, but if I can get more value for money by putting time into building it that's preferable - I'm not convinced a prebuilt system with 2GB of RAM, AMD processor, non-EEC, a proprietary OS, etc. will give me that, but I'm here to have my preconceptions corrected! Thanks in advance for any advice.

 

[drtweak]

The Atom may also be a good choice. A lot of the Low Power NAS's for Home, Buiness, and enterpise use run on the Atom NAS's. If all your running is linux for the OS and your not running any kind of games or anything and its strictly file storage 2GB is fine. Having 16GB Vs 2GB won't help with file transfer.

The Rocket Raid is a fairly good controllers. And if you plan on putting any kind of files that are important then i would strongly reccomend you do a hardware raid and not use ZFS.

thats my 2 cents

 

[cs02rm0]

Thanks. The ASRock C2750D4I looks like it might be a good call, seems hard to find in the UK though.

Why RAID over ZFS out of interest, and which RAID?

Not quite sure how far I'll be stretching it yet, generic NAS is the key thing, though I'm sure I'd be running various proxies and caching services. Perhaps even a Java app server or two if it can take it.

 

[drtweak]

Ah yea if your going to be running like a mini web/java server I'd stick with the i3 or something better just to plan for the future.

And that RAID over ZFS is just me.

ZFS is better for data integerity but to swap out a failed/failing hard drive you have to play with it a little. Yes you can setup a hot spare which is probably HIGHLY reccomened. Just with a RAID it does it all automatically and you don't have to check it. Only delt with ZFS once but I didn't care for it a whole lot. I guess i'm just old school and like a good expensive raid controller handling my data.