Storage Solutions Required help in Building NAS system

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Buygamingstuff

Adept
hey friends i want to built small NAS system for my company use i have taught of following peripherals

ASUS- E35M1-M Motheboard+CPU
8gb DDR3 RAM
2Tb HDD X 6
600W Seasonic/CM650GX PSU- Have i opted for heavy PSU or can i settle for 450W or lower PSU also
CM Strom cabinet : allready have it so wont be buying new will use what i have
RAID card must support raid 5 - suggested me some best suitable option which will be low on my pocket
OS :FreeNAS
I will be using it as backup server for my small company work .
One more question regarding NAS ,does NAS take auto backup from network of all files or does it takes backup only of files which are newly added .
 
If you are using RAID 5, then its better to go for an Athlon at least. AFAIK, the cheap raid cards are "fake" RAID cards, they rely mainly on the OS to do the RAID. Plus they use the main CPU to do the calculation of parity and all. I dont think the E350 will be good enough.

If you are going with FreeNAS 8, then more RAM is good, but if you are using the older versions, then 8GB is overkill. Also remember that the drive on which Freenas is installed cannot be used in RAID.

Power supply is OK. You might have to add more drives later on, so its better to have more juice. AFAIK, 450w should also be enough. but pls check with an online calc.

RAID card will be needed iff you plan to do true hardware raid. About which card, I have no idea.

Also, you will have to configure your client machines to make them backup to the NAS. If you want auto backing and all, would recommend going WHS for 10 users or less, and if more, then SMB server.
 
For a customizable solution, FreeNAS is the way to go. Good choice of OS.
Regarding hardware, your choice is excellent the Asus E350 board is the only E350 mini ITX board having 6 SATA ports. Rest of the competition is 4 SATA ports. 8 GB DDR3 RAM is recommended RAM for FreeNAS 8 is you are going for ZFS file system. 2 TB x 6 is also great. Only thing you are missing is the pen drive. With the lastest beta release of FreeNAS, recommended size is 2 GB. I would recommend going for a good quality 4 GB pendrive. I will advice you to go for a Low power (say 250-300W) power supply because high power PSU are efficient at only 80% of their rating. Whereas low power PSU will give you a better power efficiency. Stay away from Hardware RAID. FreeNAS and hardware RAID do not go well. Also invest in a good UPS and gigabit LAN switch to fully utilise the potential of your lan. you will get better transfer speds with multiple devices accessing data of the NAS.

As far as software configuration is concerned,
go for RAIDZ, which will give you immunity against 1 Hard drive failure which will give you 10 TB or usable space. (5x2TB + 1 Parity drive). if you want more redundancy, go for RAIDZ2 which has 2 parity drives, but your usable space will then be 8 GB. For sharing files with comupters on you network, you can activate CIFS/SAMBA on freenas and the NAS will appear as a network drive on your computers. If you are using windows 7, you can even schedule backups to this network drive. Also there is Rsync which is a automatic backup function with FreeNAS.

P.S: The same mobo is used by many at FreeNAS forums without performance issues. the E350 is more than enough for parity calculations. For any more details or clarifications, head over to IRQ and freenas.org. It is a very helpful community.
 
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