Building a new NAS

[Nebor]

So I'm looking to build a new NAS for home. I have a pretty small budget, so I don't want to go with the Synology 5 bay... So far I'm thinking either the Netgear Ready Nas Ultra 4 or Ultra 4+. The difference is a single core atom vs a dual core atom for about a $90 price difference.

Then I'll stuff it with 4 3tb drives. The Netgear is compatible with all the major brand's 3tb drives, so I should be able to build it out for around $1100 total. I looked at the Thecus 4 bay as well, but it only supports Hitachi 3tb drives, and doesn't seem as feature rich.

Any thoughts or suggestions?

 

[Emulex]

sounds good to me. I have had good luck with the qnap atom based product. (cisco nss324). Just upgrade the ram to 2gb. 1gb has problems.

avoid ntfs (its userspace). avoid USB (userspace). Avoid ESATA (usb on qnap!?!wtf).

you realize those 3TB are not high reliability drives like the RE4 or RE4-GP drives so raid will be sketchy at best. I'd do jbod or raid-0 with consumer level drives and backup your stuff. MOZY is built into the qnap/cisco device.

raid-5=no

 

[Nebor]

I was planning on using raid 5 or "raid x" on the netgear box. That should eliminate any issues of the drives being "unreliable" as you say....

 

[Nebor]

Slick deal: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...tag=slickdeals

I got 4 of them.

 

[novasatori]

have you considered hp microserver?

that's what I've been leaning towards

 

[Nebor]

Ordered the Netgear Ultra 4. Didn't think the plus was worth the extra money.

 

[Nebor]

Got all the parts put together... I used an old WD 200gb drive to boot the NAS and download the newest firmware. Then shut it down and put in all the 3tb drives. Now it's formatting and "resyncing" the drives. It said 13 hours until completion about an hour ago... now it says 8 hours. I'll post some pictures when it's done and in it's final resting place.

 

[Nebor]

Well it looks like it's done now. I was a little disappointed to see that I ended up with only 8.3tb of usable space. If I had known that, I would have gone for the 6 bay version so I could have had ~13tb of usable space.... Oh well, I guess that's what you get when you act rashly.

 

[Nebor]

Pics as promised:

This is how the hard drives came to me.

The trusty old 200gb WD I found in a drawer for loading the firmware.

Unboxed drives.

In the racks.

Ready to go

In the network cabinet.

Quietly overheating out of sight!