NAS hardware

[Venom20]

I'm fairly certain that almost anything can be used to build these. A friend of mine will be replacing his e350 in his HTPC as soon as the e450's come out (don't ask me why). That being said, he said that he's more than willing to give me his e350 for free. So naturally I'd like to use that.

this is what he'll be giving me - a E35M1 -I deluxe
I'll probably throw in this RAM (gskill value (2x4gb)) and use this case (Antec three hundred)
I have a few optical drives around here, I'm also fairly certain that I won't need them again after the OS is installed, so I"m not worried about that. I also have extra monitor/mouse/keyboard laying around. The only other thing I need is a power supply. I'm figuring that 500W should be more than sufficient. Perhaps I"ll pick up an Antec Earthwatts somewhere, any recommendations on a PS?

I'll be using freenas, so my OS will be on a 4gb usb stick. I already have 2 1.5TB green drives kicking around to start with for now. I'm planning to add more HDD's when I need the space. I wouldn't imagine that I'd have more than 6 HDD's when it's completed. So That's why I'm thinking of 500W for the power instead of 400W. Thoughts?

 

[LurchFrinky]

I built my NAS from spare parts and measured wall power with a borrowed KillaWatt.
45W Sempron, 2x1Gb memory, 400W non-modular psu, and two 3.5" IDE drives on a pci RAID card - 81W at full load.
I undervolted to reduce heat (100% fanless), and am now looking at 50W while transferring files with FreeNAS. CPU usage maxes at 15% in my system, I can't get it any higher as a NAS.
You can estimate 5W per HDD, so even 6 plus your 18W CPU plus system overhead will probably take you to about 80W at full draw. I use the 80W PicoPSU in my system and I love it. If you want some extra cushion, I would suggest the 120W PicoPSU.
You may have to customize the SATA power cables or buy molex -> SATA adapters, but you will have plenty of power available.
Any psu over 250W will be operating outside the efficiency curve on your system and will be serious overkill.

 

[Venom20]

hmm, interesting. Good to note, thank you.

 

[wirednuts]

I'm fairly certain that almost anything can be used to build these.

Correct!

Im not kidding, my server is a cyrix c7 800mhz box. Pita to setup, takes forever, but once its done and running its just fine runnin XP. I even run torrents and skype on it 24/7. It works surprisingly well and the power consumption is negligible

 

[rdb4133]

I was using an old HP DC7600 SFF PC I picked up off eBay for around $50 shipped as my "NAS" with WinXP Pro for a while and it worked great.

It's a great way to repurpose old PC's for sure. You can also run something like Amahi or FreeNAS but I personally prefer just using standard XP because at least you are using a standard NTFS file system while with the above mentioned OS's you are going to have to run a Linux file system of some sort.