Consumer NAS

Alexffiala

Baseband Member
Messages
79
Location
United States
I'm looking to build a home NAS from scratch.

I plan on using 8x WD Red 3TB drives in raid 0. However, I may only get 4 to start. I was interested to know if it's possible to have only a fraction of the drives installed on the system included in a raid array. As in, have 3 drives in raid and one not in raid.

Also, any hardware suggestions for this build? I'll need a raid card, mobo, ram, psu, cpu and whatever else you can think of.

Thanks guys.
 
I highly recommend against using 0 for that much storage space... Do R1, use Freenas, get a decent CPU, and tons of RAM. You don't need a RAID card if you get a decent CPU and plenty of RAM while using FreeNAS.
 
I actually suggest using 5 over that for the parity, and since you have so many drives.

Disagree with no RAID card on 8 drives. You'll want a hardware controller capable of handling so many drives if you plan to give it a hefty load but I can agree with the disagreement on not using 0. If something goes wrong, you lose everything. 5 makes a lot more sense.

But we'll need a budget for the rig before going any further.
 
RAID 0 will blow up in your face. Bad idea

Also realize you can't just add disks to the RAID array after the fact, the process will require you to rebuild the RAID array which means all data will be wiped. So if you have 5 TB of data on that RAID array, you have to backup that 5 TB of disk to another location, build your array then copy the data back over.

Use either RAID 5/6 or RAID 10 depending on how much disc space you can give up.
 
Sorry, I mistakenly wrote 0 instead of 1, plan was for raid 1.

I need a raid card because no mobo has 10x sata 6gbs ports.

budget is 2k
 
Forgot to ask the purpose, because that will determine the amount of CPU power needed.

As it stands, a simple little i3 rig would do the job. IGP, quick CPU, 8GB of RAM, and a PCI-E slot for the RAID card and add a PSU to it.
 
Forgot to ask the purpose, because that will determine the amount of CPU power needed.

As it stands, a simple little i3 rig would do the job. IGP, quick CPU, 8GB of RAM, and a PCI-E slot for the RAID card and add a PSU to it.

It'll be used for mass storage of media and files.

It's content will be mostly music and videos.
 
So not so much a huge load?

Then I stick with what I was saying before unless you think it might get hammered by a lot of people.
With something so small, a nice small Gold series Seasonic would do well, and a case with proper ventilation for the drives.
 
My two cents- Go with your own and use FreeNAS. I've had a FreeNAS build before and miss it dearly. Currently I'm using a ReadyNAS Duo+ w/ 2xWD Red TBs in a Raid 1 and an external WD 2TB. Stores all of my media and the external stores my Steam library back up.

Stores all files fine, transfer rates over my switch are fine. But streaming is another story. It has a real hard time with large catalogues. Also, remote access is buggy at best.

Your own build with hardware RAID and FreeNAS is going to be your best bet, especially with storage as large as that. I vote Raid 5 as well, but take the time to look into all the RAID levels, besides just stripping. There are many other pre-made NAS that have good hardare, but they're not nearly as cost effective.
 
Back
Top Bottom