My New NAS Box

[chunkylover53]

OK, I'm thinking about a building a home server. I have about 600GB of home video (and growing fast), 20 GB of music & tons of photos. I can access the files across my network from any PC now, but I'm tired of backing up three different PC's and dealing with multiple external drives. I thought I might build a NAS box with RAID 1 or 5, and keep all of my files there. I was going to use an old PC and do it cheap, but I want it to have at least 2GB of storage and run fairly quietly and efficiently. Here's where I am so far:

Antec 500W EarthWatts PSU (leftover from last build)
Antec Three Hundred Black ATX Mid Tower Case http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811129042
EVGA 112-CK-NF77-A1 LGA 775 Motherboard http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813188021 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813188021)
Intel Pentium E2180 Allendale http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116052
CORSAIR 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820145168
SAMSUNG Black 48X CD-ROM 2MB Cache IDE Optical http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827151161

I like the case because I can spread 4 hard drives out nicely to keep them cool. The motherboard is fairly cheap for onboard graphics and RAID support. As far as the OS, I'm going to try my hand at freenas. If that doesn't work out, I can always buy Windows home server.

Where I'm stuck is on the hard drives. I'm either going with 4 750GB drives in RAID 5 (effectively 2.25TB) or 4 1TB drives in RAID 1 (effectively 2TB). I can save some money and gain space going with RAID 5, but I am reluctant because I do NOT want to take any chances with these files. RAID 1 is easy to understand, 2GB data mirrored on 2GB of redundancy. As much as I read about RAID 5, I just can't quite understand the "re-building" concept if one of the drives goes down.

Advice?

[The Wise Monkey]

RAID 5 is probably your best bet, as it offers the best security/performance ratio. It is mostly used for servers, so you shouldn't have any problems - parity data is spread across each HD, so it can be recreated easily.

Check out this link:

http://www.acnc.com/04_01_05.html

[chunkylover53]

Thanks WM. Any thoughts on freenas? Do you have any experience with it?

[The Wise Monkey]

No, have never used that program. Looks pretty good though.

I have used openfiler, which I think is something similar, and is also very good.

[chunkylover53]

Another follow up question. I'm going to go with a different MOBO/CPU for this build. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128090

WM, I have read through that link on RAID a few times, as well as a bunch of other ones. For my first forray into a NAS, I'm going to go with RAID1. There seems to be a lot of downside to using "software RAID". The board has onboard RAID support, but I'm not sure it's the same as having a dedicated RAID controller card. Put simply, if I use the onboard RAID, is it a "hardware RAID" setup or not?

[The Wise Monkey]

It is still a hardware RAID setup as you are not installing any software to create the RAID array. Just turn on the RAID mode in the BIOS and create the array before you install the OS.

You will lose a lot of performance with RAID 1, as the data will have to be written twice, but it does offer better data security.