Building v buying a NAS

[ntagger]

Hi all,

I've been toying around with the idea of lifting a few WD Reds from my current machine and putting them in a NAS of some sort. This would allow me to access the files from both laptops, iPads, and a android box for my tv and run plex on the NAS..

So my question is - is it better to buy a empty NAS, say a WS my cloud ex 4, or building my own and put freeNAS on it?

Are there any enclosures that will allow you to run free NAS from a USB stick, or do I pretty much need to get a new news system w/ mobo, ram, power supply etc to do this.

Any advice would be appreciated .

Cheers

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Hi all,

I've been toying around with the idea of lifting a few WD Reds from my current machine and putting them in a NAS of some sort. This would allow me to access the files from both laptops, iPads, and a android box for my tv and run plex on the NAS..

So my question is - is it better to buy a empty NAS, say a WS my cloud ex 4, or building my own and put freeNAS on it?

I'd build your own - provided you have an established history of building systems that are stable and reliable. I've had cheapo rigs that worked "ok" for desktop use day to day, but extended uptime would cause problems. Wouldn't want to have to reboot your server every couple days.

But yeah, you save some money, and there are a lot of choices for NAS OS's out there (I'm not sold on FreeNAS, personally.)

If that's not your thing, a prebuilt is a nice way to solve the problem without thinking too hard. I built my own, when my dad wanted one, I pointed him at a Synology.

Are there any enclosures that will allow you to run free NAS from a USB stick, or do I pretty much need to get a new news system w/ mobo, ram, power supply etc to do this.

As far as I know, no; no prebuilt NAS enclosure I'm aware of allows for selecting alternate OS's or boot devices. There are probably some higher-end ones that do, but at that point you're probably better off buying a full size used server and filling it with hard drives. (You can get used Lenovo Thinkservers on eBay for a couple hundred bucks.)

 

[Binky]

A purchased NAS gets you a nice and small case, for a lot more money. I don't use plex a lot, but I'm pretty sure that transcoding with Plex can take more CPU power than some NAS boxes can provide. Depending on what you're looking to do, you may be forced to build your own (more powerful) server.

You could run a virtual server, if you have an existing system that can run 24/7 or at least during the times that the family will access it. I have multiple virtual servers running on top of Win8/Hyper-V and it works great.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

A purchased NAS gets you a nice and small case, for a lot more money.

There are quite a few NAS-oriented cases out there that are compact and attractive.

Chenbro SR30169, Silverstone DS380, CFI A6039, or even this monstrosity.

And that's just if you want hotswap bays. If you don't, the Fractal Design Node 304 and Node 804 are both nice.

If you just want a one or two bay NAS, well, yeah, you could attach a Raspberry Pi to a boring old 2-drive USB enclosure and have, well, a perfectly adequate small NAS for around $100.

 

[mvbighead]

I'd agree with dave. A self built one will give you a plethora of options. If one method or piece of software doesn't suit you... simple, try a different kind. And price wise (minus the actual disks), you can usually get something reasonably powerful and power efficient that you can load just about anything onto:

PCPartPicker part list: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/Zx9VK8
Price breakdown by merchant: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/Zx9VK8/by_merchant/

CPU: AMD 3850 1.3GHz Quad-Core Processor ($30.95 @ SuperBiiz)
Motherboard: ASRock AM1H-ITX Mini ITX AM1 Motherboard ($44.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Memory: Team Elite 4GB (1 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory ($16.99 @ Newegg)
Memory: Team Elite 4GB (1 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory ($16.99 @ Newegg)
Case: Antec NSK4100 ATX Mid Tower Case ($27.99 @ NCIX US)
Power Supply: EVGA 430W 80+ Certified ATX Power Supply ($24.99 @ NCIX US)
Total: $162.90
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2015-09-09 17:49 EDT-0400

The above isn't uber powerful, but it should be very power efficient. Another option would be the J1900 type of Intel board/CPU combo:

http://www.amazon.com/ASRock-Q1900M...?ie=UTF8&qid=1441835519&sr=8-2&keywords=j1900

Trouble is, many of them only have two SATA ports, so if you want more than that you'd need to add on a SATA card of some sort.

 

[Binky]

There are quite a few NAS-oriented cases out there that are compact and attractive.

Chenbro SR30169, Silverstone DS380, CFI A6039, or even this monstrosity.

Agreed, but when the case costs $150, I think you're into the "a lot more money" range.

Ignoring the much larger size and no fancy hot swap bays, you can build something like what bighead linked, or grab a TS140 on sale for $200. It all depends on whether you need the smaller and more attractive case.

If used and low powered is an option, the HP N54L can be had pretty cheap and it is very small.

Edit: If the TS140 is an option, they are on ebay today for $285 and this is the upgraded Xeon model (overkill). You may need hard drive rails/mounts, so be sure to research this first. Search ebay for 'ThinkServer TS140 5U."

 

[lupi]

Bought a WD one recently when they had a decent % off such that I only paid about $70 for the enclosure itself over the cost of the drives.

 

[ntagger]

But yeah, you save some money, and there are a lot of choices for NAS OS's out there (I'm not sold on FreeNAS, personally.)

I think I'd prefer the flexibility of building my own, so what NAS OS would you recommend over freeNAS?

Edit: If the TS140 is an option, they are on ebay today for $285 and this is the upgraded Xeon model (overkill). You may need hard drive rails/mounts, so be sure to research this first. Search ebay for 'ThinkServer TS140 5U."

This sounds like a pretty good option actually, although I wasn't able to find it at that price (there was one xeon w/ 500gb drive for $310). I looked at the Lenovo website and the new ones seem to have i3's, is that correct? Do these ship with windows server software generally?

 

[dave_the_nerd]

I think I'd prefer the flexibility of building my own, so what NAS OS would you recommend over freeNAS?

FreeNAS is in this funny middle-space where it's got more features than a typical consumer NAS like a Synology, but it's harder to configure. Meanwhile, in order to try and make it a consumer-friendly(ish) NAS OS, the developers stripped out, hid, or cut off a lot of the more interesting features that the base OS (FreeBSD) could offer, but which weren't completely devoted to their concept of a lean, mean, enterprise/SMB NAS product.

They also made, IMO, a questionable move using FreeBSD Jails as the basis for their plugin architecture. I had a LOT of trouble with those when I was using FreeNAS. And their community isn't very n00b friendly.

For a home media server, I like unRAID. There's a cost for the full license, but the way their "RAID" works is slower, but actually quite ideal for low-power-use systems. There's also a nice WebUI and a fairly large number of extra features that make it possible to use unRAID as the core of a pretty decent home server, if performance isn't critical.

If you want to use ZFS (underlying file system and disk management), the easiest way to get it is probably NAS4Free. It was an offshoot of the FreeNAS project a few versions back, and has stayed more n00bie-friendly and consumer-oriented.

Otherwise, I'd just install the generic OS of your choice (Windows, some Linux distro, etc.) and go to town. You can configure any of them to do anything a purpose-designed NAS OS can do, and more, and you can do it with an OS you're already comfortable with if you want.

 

[Binky]

I think I'd prefer the flexibility of building my own, so what NAS OS would you recommend over freeNAS?

This sounds like a pretty good option actually, although I wasn't able to find it at that price (there was one xeon w/ 500gb drive for $310). I looked at the Lenovo website and the new ones seem to have i3's, is that correct? Do these ship with windows server software generally?

I found it easily, again.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Lenovo-Thin...3-500GB-HDD-/291140796467?hash=item43c9580033

These may have hot-swap drive caddies (that may NOT be included). I'm not sure if that's only the TS440 or the TS140 as well. The more I think about it, that might be the TS440 only. My TS140 does not have any fancy caddies.

I run the i3 version which is easily powerful enough for what you need.