Newbie Nas!

[Mortymoose]

So it's been bothering me, that like most of you lot in here, I have all these "old" pc's in pieces laying around..... and I want to tinker at building a NAS.

I have gone through everything and written down the specs of my highest parts.

INTEL Core 2 Quad 2.4Ghz
RAM DDR2-800 2gb x 2
PSU 450W

Tomorrow I was planning to pop into my mates PC shop to see if I can scrounge a compatible Motherboard....

For I have a cunning plan my lord......

 

[garyc]

So it's been bothering me, that like most of you lot in here, I have all these "old" pc's in pieces laying around..... and I want to tinker at building a NAS.

I have gone through everything and written down the specs of my highest parts.

INTEL Core 2 Quad 2.4Ghz
RAM DDR2-800 2gb x 2
PSU 450W

Tomorrow I was planning to pop into my mates PC shop to see if I can scrounge a compatible Motherboard....

For I have a cunning plan my lord......

That processor has about three times the performance of the one in the HP N40L Microserver that a lot of people here use. It should be well up to the task. It's main drawback is being a bit hungry on electricity.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compar...vs-AMD-Turion-II-Neo-N40L-Dual-Core/1038vs476

The RAM will obviously be fine for a normal OS, but will be too little for FreeNAS in case you were thinking of going that way.

Both Windows and Linux deprecate support for older hardware, so it may be necessary to check support when selecting the OS.

Sounds like a fun project.

 

[ryan10]

Sorry for the long post, just thought I'd share a solution that's working for my needs. Maybe it might work for yours or someone else looking for something similar.

About 2.5 months ago I was looking for a NAS solution, but I didn't want to spend alot of money on it.
I was looking for a way to add more storage space and some form of data protection/ backup to my PC.

I have looked at various software like windows storage spaces, freenas, unraid, xpenology for example.
Since I only have 1 PC, that I need to use for work, games, plex server, radarr, sonarr and other stuff. I needed something very versatile.
As I was looking for different options, I came across a program, StableBit Drivepool.

Drivepool creates a virtual hard drive that combines all hard drives that you configure to be part of the pool. So you can have 1 BIG drive. It also offers various options on managing data on the physical drives themselves; Like setting space thresholds, spreading data across the multiple drives or not, data/ space balancing, duplication, etc. Without having to reformat or lose existing data on the drives.

They also have DriveScanner program that monitors hard drive health. It can integrate with Drivepool, so if it detects a faulty hard drive it will automatically start moving the data off that hard drive.

Another cool product of theirs is CloudDrive. If you have a supported cloud drive account/s you can configure them in CloudDrive and it will show up on your PC as a hard drive on windows explorer.

And no, I don't work for StableBit.
I just decided to try their software, liked it, bought it, now sharing my experience of it.

Anyways, I've got 6 drives in my PC now; 1x Samsung SSD for windows 10 pro, 1x 1TB WD Black drive for Plex program data, and frequently changing data, 4x 3TB WD Red drives for media storage, infrequently changing data.

Now that my SATA ports are all used, next would be to either upgrade to bigger drives or add SAS HBA card with pass through to connect more drives.

Oh, 1 more thing, depending on your needs and type of data you are storing. snapRAID does parity calculations on your drives/ data that has been configured. It does need 1 dedicated hard drive that should be the biggest. So if a hard drive fails, it can rebuild the data from the parity stored on the other drives. Only thing is that it doesn't work well with some of DrivePool's balancing features, so it is recommended to turn off those options.

I have been running this setup without a problem for about 1.5 months now. Even did windows 10 1903 update, no problems.

As for Plex streaming, I use nvidia shield tv. I did notice that some files would transcode on my PC when I use the normal Plex app, but if I use Kodi Plex addon, then it doesn't transcode.

Anyways, just thought I'd share. Hope you find a solution that works for you. Good luck.

 

[Mortymoose]

The RAM will obviously be fine for a normal OS, but will be too little for FreeNAS in case you were thinking of going that way.

I was, but found another 2 sticks of ram bringing me up to 8GB , My mate just sent me a WA, he has a leftover board, it still works, but the caps are a bit swollen....... Not sure what the RAM capacity is, popping over there in an hour to dig through his junk heap...

I was thinking FreeNAs, if I recall there are earlier builds that don't require a the most modern hardware...

Thanks for the input guys...

 

[newby_investor]

I was, but found another 2 sticks of ram bringing me up to 8GB , My mate just sent me a WA, he has a leftover board, it still works, but the caps are a bit swollen....... Not sure what the RAM capacity is, popping over there in an hour to dig through his junk heap...

I was thinking FreeNAs, if I recall there are earlier builds that don't require a the most modern hardware...

Thanks for the input guys...

You can run FreeNAS on 4GB of RAM, I've done it, even relatively modern versions (11.3 I think I ran last, the number jumps to mind?). It's just fine, especially for home LAN use.

Some ZFS features (such as deduplication) would bring a system with such low RAM grinding to a halt, but then you're a bit nuts to turn on deduplication anyway.

Edit: Most of the "don't even try it with less than 8 GB of RAM" nonsense comes from one guy on the FreeNAS forum who is otherwise knowledgeable but fails to understand that anyone (even ZFS developers) might have better insight into it than he does.

ZFS performance will get better the more RAM you give it. But that doesn't mean that with only 4GB it will be unusable, not in the slightest.

 

[Gtx Gaming]

This.

I tried streaming a 4k vid with Plex from my pc (4670K) to the TV and it stuttered on every split second, until I bought a 1080ti.
I was hoping that the TV would do the transcoding for me.

My plex server is pentuim G4400, plays 4k without any issues to my apple tv. 50gb+ rips.

Through g4400 does have 10bit hardware encoding, I don't think 4th gen chips had that.

 

[The_Librarian]

Just a bit of feedback. I'm running Plex virtualized in Linux Mint on Hyper-V on i3 hardware (8Gb RAM). One user it is fine, but two users it started to get choppy.

The initial VM had a weight of 8000, 1024Mb RAM and two vCPU's. I upped the weight to 9999, added two extra vCPU's and added an extra 1024Mb of RAM.

Performance now is fine. Will add more users and see what happens.

But the bottleneck is that it is virtualized on an i3 - most probably it will run fine on bare metal. The reason for virtualization is that I'm running an Unifi controller and Smoothwall firewall all virtualized on the same host as well.

Only time will tell if I need to bump the CPU up to an i5 and add extra RAM.

 

[roughiain]

Sorry for the long post, just thought I'd share a solution that's working for my needs. Maybe it might work for yours or someone else looking for something similar.

About 2.5 months ago I was looking for a NAS solution, but I didn't want to spend alot of money on it.
I was looking for a way to add more storage space and some form of data protection/ backup to my PC.

I have looked at various software like windows storage spaces, freenas, unraid, xpenology for example.
Since I only have 1 PC, that I need to use for work, games, plex server, radarr, sonarr and other stuff. I needed something very versatile.
As I was looking for different options, I came across a program, StableBit Drivepool.

Drivepool creates a virtual hard drive that combines all hard drives that you configure to be part of the pool. So you can have 1 BIG drive. It also offers various options on managing data on the physical drives themselves; Like setting space thresholds, spreading data across the multiple drives or not, data/ space balancing, duplication, etc. Without having to reformat or lose existing data on the drives.

They also have DriveScanner program that monitors hard drive health. It can integrate with Drivepool, so if it detects a faulty hard drive it will automatically start moving the data off that hard drive.

Another cool product of theirs is CloudDrive. If you have a supported cloud drive account/s you can configure them in CloudDrive and it will show up on your PC as a hard drive on windows explorer.

And no, I don't work for StableBit.
I just decided to try their software, liked it, bought it, now sharing my experience of it.

Anyways, I've got 6 drives in my PC now; 1x Samsung SSD for windows 10 pro, 1x 1TB WD Black drive for Plex program data, and frequently changing data, 4x 3TB WD Red drives for media storage, infrequently changing data.

Now that my SATA ports are all used, next would be to either upgrade to bigger drives or add SAS HBA card with pass through to connect more drives.

Oh, 1 more thing, depending on your needs and type of data you are storing. snapRAID does parity calculations on your drives/ data that has been configured. It does need 1 dedicated hard drive that should be the biggest. So if a hard drive fails, it can rebuild the data from the parity stored on the other drives. Only thing is that it doesn't work well with some of DrivePool's balancing features, so it is recommended to turn off those options.

I have been running this setup without a problem for about 1.5 months now. Even did windows 10 1903 update, no problems.

As for Plex streaming, I use nvidia shield tv. I did notice that some files would transcode on my PC when I use the normal Plex app, but if I use Kodi Plex addon, then it doesn't transcode.

Anyways, just thought I'd share. Hope you find a solution that works for you. Good luck.

Storage spaces on windows can do similar job and is free