Interested in a NAS

[mrapoc]

Hi hi

I am now interested in creating a network for the household with a centralised NAS for storing music and films, so everybody can access and store anything they want as well as backup.

How much is one going to set me back? Recommendations?

I am looking for bluray backup as well so probably going to add at least a 1tb drive to it

[hmmblah]

What's your budget? I really like the Qnap NAS. They are more than just a file storage box as well. I've been running the 439 Pro with 4x 1TB drives at work for about a year now without any issues.

http://qnap.com/

[mrapoc]

Being a student it has to be quite cheap - at the moment all i want it for is networked storage, automatic backup and maybe web access.

I may want more features in the future, but primarily im trying to revamp my network for faster and bigger network storage

[BloomerzUK]

You could always get a cheap computer and load it with 1TB drives and install FreeNAS onto it. FreeNAS is awesome, I recommend looking into it:

http://freenas.org/

and good video with in-depth features etc:

[mrapoc]

Originally Posted by BloomerzUK

You could always get a cheap computer and load it with 1TB drives and install FreeNAS onto it. FreeNAS is awesome, I recommend looking into it:

http://freenas.org/

and good video with in-depth features etc:

[hmmblah]

Cheap NAS devices are junk. You are better off using an old PC. I built a MicroATX AMD dual core system with a few 1TB drives in a silverstone MicroATX case. The only thing you really gain in a separate NAS is ease of use and less power consumption.

Cheap NAS's are unreliable and slow. Best to be avoided IMHO.

[mrapoc]

ok so that would be done with freenas?

any kind of "minimum" specs to be looking at?

i only have a p5b deluxe / e6300 lying about - which is a bit overkill right? id be better off looking at a m-atx system with as energy efficient stuff as possible (im guessing a nas server wouldnt need much raw power so energy efficient everything would be a good move) - RAM size?

[hmmblah]

You could use freenas or anything else for that matter. FreeNAS is just a nicely put together distro of FreeBSD. You could use just about any distro and customize it to get the same kinda results. I'm not a BSD guy but prefer RH/CentOS. That said, I use server 2008 r2 just because of work.

My home server stores my iTunes library (connect to it from multiple PCs) as well as movies, user profiles and PS3MediaServer. I tried using low power parts just to keep it quiet and cheap to run.

As far as minimum specs go, you really don't need much power. 2GB will probably suffice unless you get into more than file sharing. CPU speed on a file server isn't a big deal unless you get into streaming and encoding content on the fly.

My server is as follows:

AMD dual core ~2.6GHz

4GB RAM

2x 1TB WD Green

ASUS MATX mobo (onboard Video, Gbit Network etc)

Silverstone MATX case

1 80MM case fan

Corsair Power Supply (I believe 400w IIRC)

[hmmblah]

The whole thing set me back about $500 a year ago. 1TB drives have dropped considerably since then though. I paid about $130 each for those drives.

[equk]

Originally Posted by hmmblah

The whole thing set me back about $500 a year ago. 1TB drives have dropped considerably since then though. I paid about $130 each for those drives.

freenas is amazing based on freebsd

brilliant for a iscsi target, have used it for vmware esx testing