Help me Build a NAS - Suggestions Needed

vercetti

vercetti

Forerunner
Guys,
I am planning to build a small NAS within my home.


Budget 10k
Can move to 16k (without harddrives) if the bang for buck is great


Below are my main uses:

  • Centralize music and store everything in one location.
  • access to music, movies & ebboks from phones as well as laptops.
  • Control downloads through the internet (via my phone if possible)
  • Make my printer wireless
  • Compatibility with PS3, xbox and Wii so that the NAS gets detected in the consoles
  • low electricity cost


A friend of mine have suggested the below to me:
Synology DiskStation 2-Bay (Diskless) Network Attached Storage DS212j
Amazon.com: Synology DiskStation 2-Bay (Diskless) Network Attached Storage DS212j (White): Electronics


Its got amazing reviews all over. Below is a review in youtube:
Review: Synology DS212J NAS in-depth Review - YouTube




I just want to check out options if I can get any before I take the plunge.



Guys, any suggestions?
Are there any NAS with USB 3.0 ports?
@sidz2bt , @dinjo , @ALPHA17 , @Gannu
 
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i would suggest building a system based around the pentium g645.
i bought one such system 2 days ago for 7k (pentium g645+GB B75M-D3H).
it has a very low electricity footprint and can do all of the thing you have mentioned above.
filezilla server can be setup so as to allow access to all files via phone or tablet.
 
On the mentioned NAS:

You will need to upgrade RAM to 1Gb, else it will be very sluggish
Consider cost of HDD's as well

In India, Buffalo LS-QVL/E Network Attached Storage, Compare and Buy latest NAS Devices Online in India: bitFang.com is a good price for a 4 bay diskless NAS, if you want to see a two bay, bitfang has some other diskless options in the 10k price range.

If you are going to access it over wifi, you will rarely get speeds over 3/4 mbps

If you are considering over wired lan, you will need to consider a gigabit switch (~3k for a 8 port one with jumbo frame support), else you will get a peak speed of 9.x mbps for file transfers

The electricity footprint of a readymade 2 bay NAS unit is max 40W hence super ideal for downloads. Almost all now support uPNP, so compatibility is a piece of blue cheese.

If you go for a microITX board etc, you are looking at 100W+ power consumption values while running, plus the need to setup everything from scratch and maintain the same. Such units are best run on Linux as well. Dont forget to use RAID 1 if you want to preserve data, will be best with two identical drives. Consider the cost of this as well.
 
CuBox , TonidoPlug FTW, they will give you max performance those NAS are just a cover up and works well within limitations.

Or just pick a Arm supported device.
@varkey
 
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axeman said:
If you go for a microITX board etc, you are looking at 100W+ power consumption values while running
Click to expand...

You're joking, right?

I have an Asus board with a Athlon 4000+ CPU and 7 hard drives, which is 1/10th the cost of a 8-bay NAS and draws under 50W 24x7, moving up to about 75-80 when two or more hard drives are running.

My older Atom dropped both those numbers by 10W. Including power supply inefficiency. The bulk of the consumption is due to the old 640 WD Black I use as an OS drive. The basic platform draws no more than 30W at idle.

NAS unit hardware draws around 10-15W, and each drive about 12W. If a NAS keeps its drives online all the time you will basically get close to 40W consumption, and the saving is not much unless you are continuously hitting the NAS all the time. I doubt that is the case for home users.

You can't add up the TDP and max power consumption of everything and think it draws all that power all the time. It doesn't work like that - at least not if you've heard about power saving.

The biggest issue of a PC being used as a NAS is uptime and OS security, which I admit are not always the most trivial of issues. But power consumption is not a compelling argument and neither is cost, because importers here tend to fleece retail buyers when it comes to devices like NAS, which cost easily 1.8x their international prices. This basically brings a PC back into the equation.

For home use, simple USB drive units attached to a router will provide decent speeds (I get 10+ MB/s out of a similar device on my WNDR3700), and for those who use NAS more as media storage (as I suspect is mostly the case on these forums), a x86 configuration is very viable, specially if using recycled and old hardware.

Unless you have 6-7 users constantly needing to have remote file access, a NAS is questionable in a home environment.
 
The easiest solution is buying a nas, it's ready to go. While if you wanna assemble a system, you decide how much power you want plus adding os. Thus its money saved = time invested.
 
I use a 4-Bay eSata Enclosure attached to a Seagate GoFlex Net with a SATA to eSata cable. The Seagate GoFlex Net/Home is a device with 1.2 GHz ARM processor, 128 MB RAM, Gigabit ethernet and supports port multiplier feature as well. I run debian and get about 30 MB/s write and 30-40 MB/s read speeds.

It will do pretty much everything you need and will stay below your 10k budget too.

I believe @Akshay7g has the same setup! :)
 
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