Just to clarify, the goal here is to build a fairly cheap, but still powerful and flexible computer whose sole purpose is to store data in a redundant manner. I am shooting for at LEAST one terabyte, with one drive redundancy and a hot-swappable drive. This would require four drives total, three in a RAID5 and one standing by in case another one fails. I’ll probably do a separate post on RAID, as I find it fascinating.
The title is a question because I’m still not sure what specifications I’m going for. I just started pricing stuff out, so the specifications will change depending on what I can afford. So here’s what I know so far:
- Standard ATX motherboard. Probably LGA775 socket. Nothing fancy, just something with like 8 SATA ports, and a chipset that is highly compatible with……everything. I usually try to build these things to be flexible, in case I want to use it for something else. Although I’m planning on using a software-based RAID, I’ll probably still try to find one that has a fairly good RAID chipset. Also, a compatible integrated video card. This thing is going to be “headless” so it doesn’t really matter anyway.
- Processor: A cheap dual-core. I don’t think this machine is going to be needing a lot of horsepower, and as long as I get a fairly decent motherboard, I should be able to replace this with something else, like a quad-core or the like if I want to re-purpose the machine.
- RAM: Probably 2 gigs. Maybe one, depending on price. Anything more would probably be overkill. I’ll have to look at the FreeNAS specs to see if it’s worth going any higher.
- Power Supply: yes (800 watts? something like that.)
- Hard drives: I already have three 500 GB hard drives, so for now I’ll probably get one more. Ideally, they should be from different manufactures and production runs. More on this later.
- Hard drive trays. These would be cool, but not necessary. It would let me add and remove drives without opening the case. They also require an external 5.25″ bay, whereas normally hard drive just use an internal 3.5″ bay.
- Case: I just looked at cases on Newegg. I will need one with, preferably, 6 to 8 external 5.25″ external drive bays. This would let me have an optical drive and a bunch of hard drives. Although I’m just starting with four drives, I would like to expand it to more later on if I so desire. So a server case would be cool, but most of them are either too expensive or ugly as Sin. I might have to settle for a 5 bay one, in which case it would probably be fairly cheap.
I think that’s pretty much it. I’ll probably do one post on the theory behind NAS devices and RAID technologies, and then another one with pictures once I decide on parts. Then another one for assembly and setup.
800 watts? Is that because of the number of drives? I wouldn’t think you need that much power since you don’t have a video card. Just a thought…
Typically a hard drive only uses about 10 watts per drive, but a safe assumption is 15 per hard drive. However if you use a psu with more watts than you require you have more room to upgrade.
I just build a quad core server right before graduation, and got a server case. Edwin the thing is… server cases are LOUD, REALLY LOUD. A friend of mine and I built an enclosure to deaden some of the noise. Regrettably it needs to have more sound proofing put in because it is still rather loud. I would suggest an Antec tower enclosure such as:
http://www.antec.com/us/productDetails.php?ProdID=15300
only because it has 6 3/5″ drive spaces + 3 external. As it is intended to be a NAS, you could place brackets on two hard drives and place them in the 5.25″ slots and still have the standard dvd/cd rom/rw for backup / install etc. If I was going to rebuild my server, i would have choose to do it that way, since it would be much quieter.
That was a rough number. I didn’t really think about it at the time. (Hence the question mark)
So maybe 500-600W?
Plus I could retask it in a machine that needed that much, if I needed to.
Hurray for feedback!
Edwin,
You don’t need 2GB of RAM for FreeNAS… At the moment the recommend amount is 256 and the 0.7 preview needs 512 if you want to use ZFS. So even if you want to future proof this 1GB will be more than enough.
I have a couple of tutorial videos on http://www.learnfreenas.com showing how to setup RAID 5 and also a preview of ZFS.
Thanks,
Gary
Edwin,
From what I read about ZFS, it is awesome. You most likely could get away with 600W PSU, especially if you were using a non server case. The Antec Earth Watt series or some name similar to that is doing exceptionally well in my server, I have the 1000W one.
I played with ZFS a bit when I test drove OpenSolaris a month or two ago. I’ll agree with chris, it was awesome.