Hardware Suggestions for NAS

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shanester

Weaksauce
Joined
Mar 1, 2011
Messages
70
I'm in the process of determining which hardware to use for building my NAS. I have built PC's before, but I am lacking the experience in regards to what hardware works best with ZFS and the many SATA drives required to build this.

The use case for the NAS are:
1. Movie (DVD/BD) Rips
2. Music
3. General file storage/home directories for the household
4. Data store for ESX

I want the server to be:
1. "Low Cost"
2. Low Power
3. Room for expansion

My initial plan is to use 5 - 2TB Samsung F4 drives in a ZFS RAID-Z1 config for my data. I haven't decided on options for the OS installation but am open to options.

Based on the use case and requirements what components would you recommend?
CPU?
MB?
Case?
Cards?

TIA!!
 
We need more info. How many drives do you wish to be able to add in the future? Do you mind Rackmount cases? Whats your budget? If that with or without drives?
 
After doing some research, I think this would be a great bang for your buck Case

Fractal Design Define XL Link

It has room for 10 drives plus you could add a another 4-5 drives in the 5 1/2 external slots
 
Vengance_01, thank you for your input regarding the case. I'm not sure as to how many more drives I would need in the future. I thought about the Norco 4220, but I think it may be a bit overkill for now.

I have no budget, however I need to be cost conscience. For example, I would not purchase a Xeon X7550 for this rig when a i3 would suffice. I will not purchase something, attempting to save $$ sacrificing overall performance.

Any other suggestions are welcome!
 
Vengance_01 I have a small lab at my house with too many old physical servers and want to get rid of my vmware 2.0 server. One day when my money tree grows (lol) I will have two esxi servers clustered.

This NAS box will be the foundation of my computer environment so it is important that I choose the right options (hardware & OS).
 
All my servers are towers, but I do not have a preference. I do understand that do to drive expansion/capacity it might be easier to configure something in a 3U or 4U case.
 
If you want to virtualize a storage server on ESXi (all-in-one) you should
use a mainboard capable of vt-d or IOMMU (hardware virtualisation)
to pass-through a controller with disks - otherwise performance is bad.

I would prefer a SuperMicro 1156 board with 3420 chipset (opt.with SAS controller)
or a 1155 board X9-SC..-F (use always -F types with IPMI for remote mamagement)

You could use i3 class CPUs but vt-d usually requires Xeons


Gea
 
curious have you done any reading yet in the forum to get ideas? "low cost, low power and expandable" to store music & movies describes almost everyone so you'll find many existing threads with answers to your questions.
 
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