Need advice on new NAS build

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koolman007

Junior Member
Sep 1, 2008
21
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Hello, I am in the market for my very first NAS storage solution.
Having read posts on different forums I have decided to go for a custom build storage.
Here are the parts that I will be using:

Corsair 430W Builder Series £36
ASRock H81M-HDS Intel Socket 1150 Motherboard £36
Intel Celeron G1820 2.7GHz Socket 1150 Dual Core £26
Corsair Vengeance 4GB DDR3 1600MHz Dual Channel £38
Cooler Master N200 Mid Tower Micro-ATX Chassis £31
WD Red 3TB SATA III 3.5" HDD Drive x1 £87
Total = approx. £260

My main concerns with this build are space, heat and Power consumption. I will be adding a second HD later on as I am on a tight budget.
Now my question is that will this setup be better than an similarly priced QNAP/Synology/Buffalo in terms of streaming HD movies, downloading etc or I am better off getting the ready made solution ?
Please advice. Thanks
 
mvbighead

mvbighead

Diamond Member
Apr 20, 2009
3,793
1
81
I'd say your build looks fine to me. I would figure the CPU architecture you used would be quite a bit better than most NAS solutions which tend to be super budget based (Atom and the like).
 
dave_the_nerd

dave_the_nerd

Lifer
Feb 25, 2011
16,991
1,620
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You're building a system to hold a single hard drive? That makes me a bit nervous. (HDD failure is a fact of life and must be embraced, not feared.)

Otherwise, nothing to say - a fine build. Except:

1) For future growth, I'd want a motherboard with more SATA ports. At least six, since that's how many HDs the case can hold.

2) Most NAS operating systems use RAM for read/write cacheing - more RAM is not wasted. 8GB might offer you some performance boosts.

What are you using this for? How many client PCs, etc.?
 
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S

smitbret

Diamond Member
Jul 27, 2006
3,382
17
81
koolman007 said:
Hello, I am in the market for my very first NAS storage solution.
Having read posts on different forums I have decided to go for a custom build storage.
Here are the parts that I will be using:

Corsair 430W Builder Series £36
ASRock H81M-HDS Intel Socket 1150 Motherboard £36
Intel Celeron G1820 2.7GHz Socket 1150 Dual Core £26
Corsair Vengeance 4GB DDR3 1600MHz Dual Channel £38
Cooler Master N200 Mid Tower Micro-ATX Chassis £31
WD Red 3TB SATA III 3.5" HDD Drive x1 £87
Total = approx. £260

My main concerns with this build are space, heat and Power consumption. I will be adding a second HD later on as I am on a tight budget.
Now my question is that will this setup be better than an similarly priced QNAP/Synology/Buffalo in terms of streaming HD movies, downloading etc or I am better off getting the ready made solution ?
Please advice. Thanks
Click to expand...

Depends.

Unless the media streaming is going to require transcoding (and thereby a beefy CPU), then you won't get much benefit from a Home-Brew over an Off The Shelf. I would probably just invest in an inexpensive NAS enclosure. There area a ton out there from $125-$200 that would fit your needs.
 
iwajabitw

iwajabitw

Senior member
Aug 19, 2014
828
138
106
Actually bought a HPdc7800 refurb off of newegg with win 7 pro. Has a core 2 duo in it. Upgraded to 6gb ram, pulled the DVD out. Left enough space for 2- 1TB WD Blue. Unit runs off of a 80gig, the 1tb's are mirrored for file backups for all of my music and other computers. SETI runs 24/7 and media player stays open for home streaming. Never misses or bogs down, and it sits right out on my entertainment center vented well. I rdp in from my laptop to check its status. Under $300 for everything.
 
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K

koolman007

Junior Member
Sep 1, 2008
21
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0
I will be mainly using it for streaminghight bit rate movieson my Tele or laptops etc. I haveread that high bit rate can cause problems on low end NAS drives. Also I am on a tight budget hence the single drive. But if I can a good enclosure for cheap I can add two drives to it plus it might save on power bill on the long run. Any suggestions on a good enclosure ?my budget is around £300.
 
I

inachu

Platinum Member
Aug 22, 2014
2,387
2
41
Sounds like your NAS should have 3 drives. 1 slow with the largest storage space. One very fast and one that is regular.

Depending on the case you might want to also invest into hard drive heatsinks.
 
S

smitbret

Diamond Member
Jul 27, 2006
3,382
17
81
koolman007 said:
I will be mainly using it for streaminghight bit rate movieson my Tele or laptops etc. I haveread that high bit rate can cause problems on low end NAS drives. Also I am on a tight budget hence the single drive. But if I can a good enclosure for cheap I can add two drives to it plus it might save on power bill on the long run. Any suggestions on a good enclosure ?my budget is around £300.
Click to expand...

I don't know of any currently available HDD that would have a problem streaming video at virtually any common bitrate. The cheapest HDDs available right now can do almost 90MB/s; the highest bitrate Blu-Ray video peaks at 45Mb/s. There are 8 bits(b) in a Byte(B). Math says that a cheap HDD could do 16 Blu-Ray streams at those speeds, but in the real world even a Western Digital Green could serve up Blu-Ray streams to 3 or 4 locations simultaneously.

A cheap NAS enclosure may be limited by the CPU speed and the particular ethernet adapter, but even the least expensive should be fine for a couple of streams at the same time. My WDTV Live Hub had a gigabit ethernet adapter but could never get more than 80mbps because it just didn't have the processor power. It also never choked on any video file that I ever played back.

I would guess that you aren't going to stream more than 2 Blu-Ray rips simultaneously so, even an inexpensive NAS enclosure would fit your needs. If you wanted to future proof a bit, you could look at an inexpensive Synology NAS.

If you really want to build your own and plan on expanding in the future you should consider something like an unRAID system. They are focused on media serving and can be built from old parts you have lying around. A $50 single-core Sempron is enough for these.

www.lime-technology.com

(I have no clue why you would even worry about having 3 different HDDs of different speeds)
 
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K

koolman007

Junior Member
Sep 1, 2008
21
0
0
I am thinking of either getting a an Asustor 202te (cheapest Intel atom nas I can find for £193 or a Zyxel 325 v2 for £94. Is it worth spending extra for the Asustor ? On Smallnetbuilder benchmarks they perform pretty much similar.
 
S

smitbret

Diamond Member
Jul 27, 2006
3,382
17
81
koolman007 said:
I am thinking of either getting a an Asustor 202te (cheapest Intel atom nas I can find for £193 or a Zyxel 325 v2 for £94. Is it worth spending extra for the Asustor ? On Smallnetbuilder benchmarks they perform pretty much similar.
Click to expand...

I had no idea that little Zyxel was that inexpensive. I don't have any experience with either of these but if it were my money if I was just looking for a storage appliance and I didn't need/want hot swappable bays then the Zyxel would probably be where I put my money (and then I'd spend the extra $$$ on HDDs).

Two others you may want to consider:
Synology DS213j
Qnap TS-220
 
dave_the_nerd

dave_the_nerd

Lifer
Feb 25, 2011
16,991
1,620
126
crashtech

crashtech

Lifer
Jan 4, 2013
10,682
2,280
146
That CPU has a 25W TDP, so I would think with mainboard, drives, fans, and ODD you might exceed 33W under heavy load, but would be well under that most of the time.
 
I

inachu

Platinum Member
Aug 22, 2014
2,387
2
41
smitbret said:
I don't know of any currently available HDD that would have a problem streaming video at virtually any common bitrate. The cheapest HDDs available right now can do almost 90MB/s; the highest bitrate Blu-Ray video peaks at 45Mb/s. There are 8 bits(b) in a Byte(B). Math says that a cheap HDD could do 16 Blu-Ray streams at those speeds, but in the real world even a Western Digital Green could serve up Blu-Ray streams to 3 or 4 locations simultaneously.

A cheap NAS enclosure may be limited by the CPU speed and the particular ethernet adapter, but even the least expensive should be fine for a couple of streams at the same time. My WDTV Live Hub had a gigabit ethernet adapter but could never get more than 80mbps because it just didn't have the processor power. It also never choked on any video file that I ever played back.

I would guess that you aren't going to stream more than 2 Blu-Ray rips simultaneously so, even an inexpensive NAS enclosure would fit your needs. If you wanted to future proof a bit, you could look at an inexpensive Synology NAS.

If you really want to build your own and plan on expanding in the future you should consider something like an unRAID system. They are focused on media serving and can be built from old parts you have lying around. A $50 single-core Sempron is enough for these.

www.lime-technology.com

(I have no clue why you would even worry about having 3 different HDDs of different speeds)
Click to expand...

Because the other poster was saying how one hard drive cooked the other.

Also you could always mod your nas and put a better fan inside.
 
K

koolman007

Junior Member
Sep 1, 2008
21
0
0
Seems like I have hit an other road block . guys at freenas suggest that for ZFS to work properly one should have at least 8gb of ram and not just any ram a freaking ECC ram which is not only hard to find for this board but is also damn expensive. Anyone has any personal experience with this ? I am alrdy on tight budget and can't afford to fork out £60 plus on just ram. If this doesn't work I might as well save myself the headache and do for the Zyxel solution.
 
Davidh373

Davidh373

Platinum Member
Jun 20, 2009
2,428
0
71
koolman007 said:
Seems like I have hit an other road block . guys at freenas suggest that for ZFS to work properly one should have at least 8gb of ram and not just any ram a freaking ECC ram which is not only hard to find for this board but is also damn expensive. Anyone has any personal experience with this ? I am alrdy on tight budget and can't afford to fork out £60 plus on just ram. If this doesn't work I might as well save myself the headache and do for the Zyxel solution.
Click to expand...

I run ZFS on a AMD C60 with 8TB (2 x 4TB Red Drives) on 4GB RAM. It transfers at ~80MB/S most of the time, and can stream 8GB-12GB HD Video Files to 2-3 computers at a time. Might even be able to do better, but that's the most stress I've ever put it under.

By the way, it's cheapo G.SKill Value RAM.
 
Z

zatoan

Junior Member
Sep 17, 2014
2
0
0
www.hunterfields.com
Actually bought a HPdc7800 refurb off of newegg with win 7 pro. Has a core 2 duo in it. Upgraded to 6gb ram, pulled the DVD out. Left enough space for 2- 1TB WD Blue. Unit runs off of a 80gig, the 1tb's are mirrored for file backups for all of my music and other computers. SETI runs 24/7 and media player stays open for home streaming. Never misses or bogs down, and it sits right out on my entertainment center vented well. I rdp in from my laptop to check its status. Under $300 for everything.
 
K

koolman007

Junior Member
Sep 1, 2008
21
0
0
Davidh373 said:
I run ZFS on a AMD C60 with 8TB (2 x 4TB Red Drives) on 4GB RAM. It transfers at ~80MB/S most of the time, and can stream 8GB-12GB HD Video Files to 2-3 computers at a time. Might even be able to do better, but that's the most stress I've ever put it under.

By the way, it's cheapo G.SKill Value RAM.
Click to expand...

thx sharing your experience. I think I should just pull the trigger and the the HP microserver as it got more future proof.
Can you also link the G.Skill ram that you mentioned ?
 
dave_the_nerd

dave_the_nerd

Lifer
Feb 25, 2011
16,991
1,620
126
koolman007 said:
Seems like I have hit an other road block . guys at freenas suggest that for ZFS to work properly one should have at least 8gb of ram and not just any ram a freaking ECC ram which is not only hard to find for this board but is also damn expensive. Anyone has any personal experience with this ? I am alrdy on tight budget and can't afford to fork out £60 plus on just ram. If this doesn't work I might as well save myself the headache and do for the Zyxel solution.
Click to expand...
Don't use ZFS then. FreeNAS works fine with UFS.

You could also install Ubuntu or something and use mdadm.
 
crashtech

crashtech

Lifer
Jan 4, 2013
10,682
2,280
146
Yeah, don't use ZFS with non-ECC RAM. Not to say you can't use "cheapo" RAM, but the way ZFS performs "scrubs" make ECC a much safer choice when it is used, so it's way better to use another file system if going with cheap RAM.

But I thought the ProLiant had ECC? Just less than recommended, which I have found is not big deal unless you anticipate loads like two or more HD streams concurrently.
 
S

smitbret

Diamond Member
Jul 27, 2006
3,382
17
81
If it comes with 4GB of memory, you'll be fine up to 4TB of storage. Just follow the rule of thumb for ZFS - 1GB per TB of storage. It looks like it is expandable up to 8GB.

I doubt the memory will affect how well it actually serves up the files, anyway. Even a multiple HD streams aren't going to demand much.
 
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