NAS / UnRaid Build

[latch]

I'm looking to replace my WHS with something that has more capacity, and am thinking of building my own UnRaid (or something) machine. The thing will be sitting in a basement, so noise isn't a very big factor.

for the HDD's I'd likely get a bunch of 1TB WD Greens for data and a 1TB WD Black for parity. These are the core components I'm thinking about (prices are in Canadian $, and I don't have any brand loyalty):

CPU - AMD Athlon II X3 400E 45W - $112.99
MB - Gigabyte MA790X-UD4P ATX - $114.59
RAM - G.SKILL PC2-8000 2X2GB DDR2-1000 - $99.99
GPU - Powercolor Radeon HD 3650 - $27.99
Case - Silverstone Temjin TJ01-B - $94.99
PSU - OCZ Z-SERIES 550W 80+ Silver - $94.99

I picked that mobo because it has 8xSATA, though I'm curious if there might be a better choice.

I picked the video card because it was the cheapest and appears to be the lowest power thing I can find. The mobo + gpu are cheaper than the integrated solutions I could find which have that many SATA connectors.

The case has 6x5.25 external bays, which lets me use 2 3x5.25 --> 5x3.5 converters

The PSU was the lowest I could find rated at 80+ Silver.

 

[Syran]

This is my personal unraid box. It runs great. It currently has 11 drives installed (9 in the "array", 1 parity, 1 cache) with more room to upgrade. The drives range from 1.5TB (Parity, and a couple of the data drives) to 400GB (Cache).

Dual Xeon 2.4Ghz
2GB of ECC Ram (4x 512)
SUPERMICRO AOC-SAT2-MV8 Sata Controllers.
Corsair HX-620 PSU
Norco RPC-4020 4U Case
4x 1.5TB Seagates
3x 1TB Seagates
1x 640GB WD Blue
1x 400GB WD

The reason I posted mine was just to give you some ideas. You could probably go to an Athlon II X2 or even an just a standard X2, and probably do just fine for CPU power with unraid. I don't seem to hit it on a regular basis to upgrade the CPU.

I also like having the parity & cache drives directly on the motherboard, and the "array" drives on the controller card. You may be better off getting a controller card for this setup; and giving yourself future upgrade room.

 

[latch]

Its actually helpful to see that. I have a spare Core 2 duo 8400 w/8gigs of ram with a decent 775 motherboard and a nice p182 case.

I guess I was trying to go for a super-efficient build, and maximize my external bays + mobo SATAs.

But with that controller, and the fact that I really don't need my bays to be external, I could really save a chunk of money and just build it off of that!

 

[Syran]

The 8GB of ram is still a bit overkill. I like having hotswaps for ease, but otherwise, yeah, you are fine.