I have a hefty file server which actually used to be my workstation for a while, although I no longer need/use it as such.

Its way over the top spec, noise and heat wise to be used as a file server:

Lian Li PC-V2000 full tower server case
Tyan K8WE dual Opteron motherboard
2 x AMD Opteron 246 (2.0GHz)
2Gb Corsair PC3200 Registered/ECC (4x512Mb)
XFX 7800GTX 256Mb
Supermicro 8port SATA300 controller
5 x 500Gb Western Digital drives
4 x 300Gb Maxtor drives


I no longer have a need for such a high memory bandwidth/multi threaded system as my work takes care of my needs on that front.

Id like to sell off the bulk of it and use the dosh to finance a 4-8 drive NAS, as that is all I really need it for (media server).

Has anyone seen a particularly well designed NAS? Important factors:

1) Design (I love the look of my Lian Li, which basically copied the Mac Pro case - would be great if theres a NAS in a similar style)
2) Cooling
3) Noise - If its silent enough, wouldnt mind not hiding it away
4) Network - Gigabit, would be great if I could expand to include a wireless N card?

I think 4 drives would be a minimum, 6 ideal, 8 a bonus (depending on price).

With the price of 1Tb drives now around 92 quid inc VAT Im inclined to sell all my drives and fill it with them.

Itll be used 90% of the time as a media server for music, TV & movies, although I wouldnt mind also using it for Exchange and FTP perhaps?

Any recommendations for products or sites?

What kind of NAS setup do you use?


// edit

On a side note, should I be thinking about Windows Home Server? Or is that a waste of time.

its a nas mate... just use linux something like "freenas", its free doesnt require anything more than that.

True.


Cant seem to find an enclosure I like, Im leaning back towards a normal case.

Lian Li PC-A17B - this looks interesting, midi modular tower, looks pretty discreet. Supports 9 drives with decent cooling.

The NETGEAR ReadyNAS Pro looks very nice, although the three options they show seem to come with drives.

For the love of your god, please dont invest in a NAS with one of the most painfull software setups to use.

What about a NSLU? Just buy some USB caddies for your drives, or usb hard drives. Stack em up and voila.. nice simple NAS solution.

I use NasLite.... I even paid for it !

(only software I cen ever remember paying for!!!)

its awsome... I had to shut my system down the other day to add an extra drive... but I checked the uptime before I did.... and it was 261 days :-)

really easy to use, and runs on any old pos, mines a 1gig P3 with 1.5gig of sdr (because thats what I had lying around)

Im only on 100mbit lan right now but I get a steady 11mb/sec transfer speed... people on gigabyte get more like 50+mb/s :-)

really easy to setup, and can boot right from a CD, HD or a memory stick....

http://www.serverelements.com/

can just drag and drop through the windows network thing.... or if youre transferling a lot you can ftp it... much better having an ftp queue going that you can start and stop.... it runs half a dozen different proticols so everything you should need....

Just looked at NasLite. Pretty expensive for what it is to be honest. Perhaps just a minimal install of debian or BSD with webmin or something on it would be a cheaper way of going about it.

Think im going to try freenas out on my mini-itx box. Remove the CD Rom once its up and running and see what happens

its about £15 irrc ?

its pretty lite on features, but its compatible with any old piece of crap and it runs fast as hell !

(faster ftp transferes than freenas etc....)

speed isnt everything... not at first anyway.... then when you start moving 200gig around at a time you start to think it is....


p.s. I tried out a few other things before I went with naslite... they didnt crash a lot... but naslite hasnt crashed once in ~4 years... its never been unreadable, never had a corrupt file... its pretty boring really... I forget its there half the time because its so rare i think about it...

I dont suppose anyone knows of one that supports LDAP so that I could set up file permissions based on Active Directory accounts?

I think buffalo NAS drives intergrate with AD.  Have a look.

So Ive been looking through all the dedicated NAS enclosures.... theyre either far too expensive, too noisy once theyre setup or cant support enough drives.


I think Im just going to build one using the Lian Li PC-A17 I mentioned above. The drives wont be squashed together (1 5.25" slot per 3.5" drive) so cooling shouldnt be a problem. I reckon I should be able to keep the entire rig near silent as well. Have the drives spin up only when in use (theyve all been chosen for their quiet operation Western Digital 500Gb WD5000AAKS & Samsung 1Tb HD103UJ).

Ill use the Enermax MODU82+ PSU and replace the four 120mm fans with Nexus ones running at 5v.

Intel is launching their new mainstream chipsets this month; P45 and G45 with the ICH10 IO hub. Particularly got my eye on one of the Gigabyte ones, the examples Ive seen so far all come with at least 10 SATA ports onboard whichll be enough for the 9 drives of course. Onboard graphics will do the trick.

Im hoping I can run one of the new Wolfdale Core 2 Duos passively using a Thermalright Ultra 120 Extreme.

If all goes to plan I should be able to leave it in the corner of my lounge

if I were you....

Id miss out on all the new gear and run freenas/naslite/etc in the same case, but with some old MB... you can pic up a good server quality 12port sata card on ebay for sub £50

as long as youre running a gigabyte network drive througput will be the limiting factor, not the spec of the pc...

on the NasLite forum people are getting 70Mb/s from computters running at 500mhz

(mines a PIII at 1300mhz but I run it at 1000mhz so its easier to cool!)

Agreed with knighty. I installed freenas this morning. Love it. Has been up all day, and I have power and accoustic rules turned on so it is quiet.

Requires 128mb ram (to do firmware upgrades... 32mb normally), a 500mhz pc, and some IDE stuff.

I have it installed on a usb stuck and it boots (takes ages as my usb stick is usb1.1) and seems as stable as a rock, does every sharing scheme you can think of.

Edit:

Just copied about 3GB of files across, transferred at 45MB/s across my network.

Dont have FTP configured on it yet just using samba shares. Also appears to pick up hot plugged USB devices and NTFS, whcih means (in theory.. yet to try it) that my USB hard drive I have a lot of stuff on, formatted in NTFS can be read and shared when its plugged in

It also supports IDE cards I have two... so in theory I could have a 12 IDE drive NAS with support for an additional 8 USB drives using just the board and chassis I have with the odd cards I have laying around.

Also as its a VIA Nenimah thing it has an embedded RNG and AES encryption chip, which means If I turned on the disk encryption it supports my CPU wont be tasked with decrypting things Its uber efficient.

The bigggest thing Ive noticed about it was just how quick it was to set up, and get booting from a USB key, means I can throw away the DVD-ROM I have in there, or move it to my main pc, and just install additional hard drives.

usb drive formatted in ntfs works a treat. Just using it now to access my old backups.

One thing the smart output has highlighted is that one of my drives is in a Pre-fail state... think i need a new one lol.