Need help building NAS

[jtdaman]

Hi Guys,

I would like to put together a NAS box to store my movies/pictures/music on it. I have currently purchased 4x SAMSUNG Spinpoint F4 HD204UI drives and I would like to use these drives in my NAS box.

Here are some general things I want this NAS box to run:

1). FreeNAS
2). Motherboard/CPU recommendation. I would like to be low power and low noise. Maybe like an atom?
3). What type of RAID controller should I be running if any? I don't really care about speeds, but I don't want it to take eternity to read/write. I am thinking of hooking up a HTPC in the near future to stream movies off it, while other people can access files off the NAS if needed. Would like to run RAID5.
4). Budget - Less than $700 if possible for all of this

I don't want to buy prebuilt NAS boxes because I think they are really expensive and overpriced. I feel like I can build something for the same price, but better performance.

 

[Emulex]

prebuilt (drobo,qnap) disregard drive error data and handle the issues on their own. this is worth alot. you can mix and match all types of consumer drives.

With a proper raid controller you must use TLER(or similar) drives which are far more expensive.

I'd just do no-raid honestly. or windows vail/home server DFS method.