Friday, October 10, 2014

DIY budget NAS build: Hardware side

I've been thinking of getting myself a NAS for some time now.

But off-the-shelf NAS look way too expensive than it's worth. Besides, building your own sounds like such a nice little personal project. That said, I don't have money to burn so I'll be going for a budget build that serves well without breaking the wallet (too much).

So here's the fruits of my "research" based on what's available.

Processor: AMD Sempron 2650
Motherboard: Asrock AM1B-ITX
Memory: AData 4GB PC3-12800 DDR3
Storage: 2 x 3TB WD Green, Silicon Power Touch 01 8GB
Power Supply: Cooler Master Elite Power 350W
Casing: BitFenix Prodigy

Basically, I've attempted to make a low-priced build while maintaining good performance. I'm trying to keep a small footprint while having the option of installing 3 or 4 storage drives for RAID5/6 hence the choice of casing. This being my first NAS build I don't really have an idea what the performance will be like but I'd think a NAS doesn't generally require a lot of compute power.

At the moment, I'm thinking of running Ubuntu Server on this build for the Btrfs support. That's why I only have 2 hard disks for this build. Btrfs RAID5/6 is still very very experimental so I'll be doing a simple RAID1 first and moving over to RAID5/6 later when Btrfs support improves or, as storage requirements dictates.

Any suggestions out there?

Updates:

Based on feedback I've reduced memory to 4TB. I can always add it back later if it's needed.

Casing's been changed to a BitFenix casing which supports up to 5 3.5" hard disks but looks quite a bit larger than the Cooler Master I'd picked earlier.


No comments:

Post a Comment