Summers here and time to build again. I need some help in putting together a basic NAS and want to do it myself. I have a great ammo box that I picked up from fleabay that I'm positive would work nice as a little NAS box. However, what I need is a good recommendation for a mobo for this. The box measures 20cmx30cm so a mITX or even a PICO would fit with ample room for hard drives. Any suggestions for something that will be on 24/7 also being used as a media streamer? caveat- I've asked this before in the past and feel I'm repeating myself, but tech changes so fast I thought I would start a new thread. Plus my laziness has hindered me before but now I need to do this build for WAF reasons.
1) What is the box height? 2) How many disks do you want inside? 3) What is the maximum power consumption that you want to achieve? 4) What is the target price you have in mind?
Exactly as yogev_ezra said. For example in performance for price, nothing can really beat H61+G620 (=lowend socket 1155 mobo and CPU) combination.
Hmm, You guys missed the dimensions, but it's fair questions and a good way to start. 20cmx30cm is the box 4 disks maximum (most mobos I looked at only have 4 SATA so that would be max anyways correct? Since it would be 24/7 I would like to keep it as low as possible, but I can give up some watts for better performance (but I certainly don't want to go to the deep end) Price for the mobo or for the total NAS? I won't be getting 4 disks right away, I'll be starting with 2 and adding more later, so cost for the mobo can be €100-115 with the disks coming in at another €150 (that's about the price for 2 F4's here) and I have no idea on a PSU or what that costs either.
1) With H61 board i meant mITX of course. 2) many mITX mobos have PCI-E x16 slots too, so you can put even a 8-port PCI-E raid controller here, bringing it up to 12 drives or even more if you find a more port card. I don't know the swedish prices, but i try to show them with ours (which are rather high, so it should be ok) : 1) MSI H61I-E35 - 58,18 €, 4 SATA, mITX, PCI-E x1 2) ASUS P8H61-I - 77,56 €, 4 SATA, mITX, PCI-E x16 + INTEL Pentium G620 - 61,92 € (dualcore, no HT, no Turbo, Sandy Bridge). That is 120.1-139.48€. In case you don't need that much power, your other option is the Atom D525 based GIGABYTE D525TUD - 81,98 € or the AMD E350 boards (around 100-110€). + of course all of them require DDR3 RAM, so you need to buy that as well. Your biggest issue won't be the board i'm affraid, but the power supply. If you think about picoPSU, think again. 1-2 hard drives maybe, but for 3 or more you are out of luck. No picoPSU can handle that startup current.
1) I did not miss the dimensions - I asked what is the height, and you still did not provide this 2) The maximum for Mini-ITX board is 6 disks as far as I know (but you can fit more disks if you use an add-on PCIe, miniPCIe or PCI card). The maximum amount you can fit will depend on the box dimensions, height included 3) If you want the cost as low as possible and the power consumption as low as possible with 24/7 operation, then I can suggest either SuperMicro X7SPA-H-D525 (6 SATA on-board) or ASUS E35M1-I DELUXE (5 SATA on-board + 1 eSATA)
Ouch, I'm really sorry, I was giving height but you probably wanted all 3 dimensions too. Mea Culpa! Box is H20cmxL30cmxW14,5cm. I'm thinking for now the max amount of disks I would want is 4. If I feel I need more than I can reassess then. I'm new to RAID as well , so throwing more disks in there would only confuse me until I was able to grasp the intricacies of a proper raid set-up and do it right.
Not wishing to distract from building your own NAS, however having worked with them for several years and having delved deeply into their hardware and software configurations, I'd recommend purchasing a dedicated unit from a trusted manufacturer... QNAP, Synology, Netgear do good products at very reasonable prices - just buy the enclosure and add the discs you want. Just my 2p of course, and good luck if you do decide to build.
The question is what he wants. Because dedicated NAS boxes are good only up to certain requirements. For example do you want to use it as a webserver and have the latest Apache and PHP on it ? Sorry, you can't do that. The latest ipkg version of PHP is 5.2.x, no PHP 5.3.x for you. Do you want MySQL 5.5 ? Sorry, only MySQL 5.1. Do you want PostgreSQL 9 or 8.4 ? Sorry, only 8.2 for you.
If you know what you are doing, then I don't recommend a pre-built NAS, as building the NAS yourself will give you much more flexibility and also cheaper price. For 4 disks, the ASUS E35M1-I DELUXE seems like a solid choice (it's fanless and has digital video output in case you want to use your NAS as HTPC as well).
That Asus is pretty nice, but I couldn't find the height of the board anywhere as I'm limited to putting that all inside the box. My guess is 4 cm? That sound about right? Otherwise are there other suggestions for mobos that onboard raid as well?
The SuperMicro board mentioned earlier has RAID, but it does not have digital video output (if you need that). Yes, the board height is around 4-5cm, don't know for sure, but that leaves plenty space for you (I am treating the 14.5cm as the height, and 20x30cm as the base for the board). But you need to leave some space for PSU as well.
