As any of the other US members who may be reading this knows it's tax return season! Expecting a decent amount of money, I've started planning out ideas to turn my current HTPC into a NAS due to some shifts in my device layout. My needs are less of a device for playing media and more for a 24/7 on storage device for other devices to access and play media from. The current hardware is: ZOTAC 880GITX-A-E motherboard 3GHz Athlon XII 2GB DDR3 1333 RAM Silverstone SG06 case 300W PSU, came with case 120GB HDD So it's fairly powerful, I don't expect any problems on the hardware side and in fact would likely end up underclocking the CPU a bit. The SG06 is designed with just one 3.5" bay but it seems fairly easy to mod in one or two more drives, the stock HDD cage wastes space with a dedicated 2.5" slot and there's space on the side for a dual slot video card which I'm not using. For software I'm planning to run FreeNAS. My main concern is how to organize my storage to provide the best data protection while still remaining cost effective. My main PC has a 160GB SSD (which I'll be leaving out of storage capacity calculations as it's not used for that) and 1TB HDD, one of the driving forces for buying a NAS is to expand my storage capacity while also taking better care of my data. The two most appealling options which I've come up with are: Option 1: Three 2TB HHDs in RAID5 in the NAS. Cost is about $360 (using 5400rpm drives to save money). This would give me a total of 5TB of storage, 4TB of which is redundant and the ability to have up to 1TB of backed up data and 3TB of unbacked up but still redundant storage. I can gain between 3-4TB of storage depending on what level of protection I feel is necessary. Option 2: One 1TB drive in the main PC (7200rpm) and 2x2TB drives in RAID 1 in the NAS (5400rpm). Cost is again about $370. This option would give me a total of 2TB of storage with a redundant backup. I gain only 1TB of storage, but it's well protected. Option 3: The budget version of option 2, one 1TB 7200rpm drive in the main PC and a single 2TB drive in the NAS. Cost is about $250. This gives 2TB of data with a non-redundant backup. There's also Option 3.5: a single 2TB drive in the NAS for a total of 1TB backed up storage and 1TB unbacked up for $120. This gains only 1TB of storage, lacks redundancy compared to Option 2 but is the cheapest. For obvious reasons Option 1 has my most attention. A lot of my storage is used by movie rips which to be frank already have a form of backup in the case of a physical disk. The only files which I really need backed up are family pictures, school work and personal files, and video game saves, all of which is easily less than a terabyte. The rest I'm okay with losing in the event of accidental deletion, corruption etc. so the massive amount of storage gained (which is still redundant, so it's a little safer) is very appealling. Does anyone more savvy on the storage world have any input on on what might be a better idea? If I'm not backing up all of my data would I be better off simply forgetting redundancy as well and getting more storage for my money? And is saving money on 5,400rpm drives going to impact me at all performance wise on a gigabit network?
