A call for suggestion goes out to all of you technophiliacs (fucking sp wants to change that to necrophiliac well its close enough) out there. I want to have a Network Attached Storage. The question is... Make or Buy one? I have made a short look around and I think making my own is the best idea however I want educated opinions on the matter before I jump in and spend some cash for what will effectively be putting together a cheap itx/utx computer and shoving in it 4-5 drives of TB or more. Probably use http://www.freenas.org/ for the OS too. Also is it worth it to raid the drives or just job them? Sure JOB will give more space however the NAS will be a file server, movie streamer, as well as a backup. The HD's in there will be NAS approved drives for longevity. WD Red drives probably. Read a few articles that suggest them.
I built a NAS with FreeNAS and to be completely honest, I completely regret doing so, but mostly because of one really buggy plugin (I'm talking to you Transmission). FreeNAS is a great OS to start with. You can access it from your system but I don't think it is all that user friendly as people make it seem. I would definitely look into Ubuntu Server with NFS if you decide not to opt for FreeNAS. Build a NAS or buy one. Doesn't really make a difference (maybe cost-wise) but if you do decide to build one, get something with an Intel Processor as you can easily monitor temperatures of it without having to go into fucking BIOS everytime you want to look at temps. (I used an AMD APU, so many regrets). EDIT: Also if you're running it 24/7, which I assume you are, make sure you get a case with dust filters as it can very dusty in a few weeks depending on where you place the system. The plug-ins in FreeNAS are like easy mode for most people and there's plenty of shit online to help you if you get stuck setting stuff up. If you know anything about terminal commands, it's a big plus with FreeNAS.
I was thinking an atom cpu. Low power, no fan needed, tiny board. I was thinking of using freenas or puppy. I frigging love puppy. I also thought about having it download my torrents too. I am unsure if I want to open ports for that but, its not off the table. I thought about getting an off the shelf one too because some of them come with free apps you can install in them to do quite a few things. The downside of the less then $180 versions is that they have issues like overheating, being built in such a way that you actually have to open up the damn thing to add a drive to it (the cheap cheap ones), it likes to freeze often after only a month, or my favorite that I read... steams drop often.
I would like to know, is the main purpose of these nas things to just be able to stream movie/music/whatever to your phone or tablet? I have trouble thinking of the use of such a thing for one person otherwise. As a data center for multiple people to use for reasons, sure it sounds great, but just one person?
Atom CPU sounds fine. Puppy is awesome. For torrents, you don't really need to open ports. Best part about it is that it's similar to a seed machine so if you're on a service like IPTorrents or w.e your seed ratio is probably going to be very high. Torrenting on a NAS is great, only problem is the shitty plug-ins (haven't tried BTSync or anything other than transmission, my issue was when I restarted the NAS the torrents would redownload even though I removed them from the torrent list).
The thing with off the shelf NAS's is that the cheap ones really suck in terms of functionality and stability. I got the 8TB version of this and it's way more than people are willing to pay, but it has huge storage with a choice of RAID configurations (I chose the default so it has a fault tolerance of 1 disk without losing data). The Synology OS is quite impressive though. I have configurable user access, download station, video and film management, video streaming, ftp access, automatic backups to AWS Glacier if I wanted, 2 factor auth (for external access) and a shit load of other stuff that I never use. From my experience you get what you pay for with NAS's, and I couldn't be bothered building my own.
If you build remember software RAID isn't worth a damn. Get a decent storage card with battery backed cache or disable write caching (though you get a big performance hit for that)
Buy a HP Microserver Gen8, they are dirt-cheap and many people use them as NAS already. Starts at 160 EUR for a Celeron when you find a good deal. http://geizhals.de/hp-proliant-microserver-gen8-712317-421-a962380.html In case you go for Raid and your data is precious to you, get WD Red drives. Software Raid is fine as long as write caching is off. If you only take 3 or 4 disks, Raid 5 won't really help your speeds.
I don't think Viroman will have multiple users generating load, he probably won't spend 300$ on a proper raid adapter. My experience: Cheap raid adapter < Intel C200 Chipset raid. The abomination modular Raid controller in the HP Microserver I linked is a nice example, first two ports are directly from C204, the other 2 ports are HPs b120i controller card, that has no raid controller of it's own, it's just a passive adapter. Still, that thing will suffice for a SOHO NAS.
no, the load will be light. 1 user off and on for movie streams while a second might be on it for a few minutes uploading to it and maybe torrents. The torrent apps can usually be configured for light loads. Some light reading... https://www.adaptec.com/nr/rdonlyres/14b2fd84-f7a0-4ac5-a07a-214123ea3dd6/0/4423_sw_hwraid_10.pdf so... MB raid is fine in write through mode? I don't need high performance reads, just enough to stream 720p movies to a TV without stutters. Also, I been looking around and I like the idea of a wireless MB. I checked a few and they are pretty nice looking in features.
Even a raspberry pi can do that. I stream and transcode using my main rig, the whole thing doesn't go above 50watts under that negligible load. Have you considered upgrading your rig instead? You only need raid performance for 5+ concurrent 1080p streams.
No... I don't want to place a full tower on top of my TV center. However since you mention raspberry pi... well fuck me... http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/360/can-i-attach-a-sata-controller Well that looks fucking awesome... upgrades up to 20 drives... "Remember though, the bandwidth is limited to USB2 speeds." Ohhh.... well I don't know if I want then. ohhh.... this.. This looks good. http://www.hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php?g_code=G140448267127&tab_idx=1
