Build Most Economical NAS

[nibble123]

Hello ,
Apologies as I have not gone carefully through the sticky posts and asking the million $ question over here.
I need a most economical NAS for my personal data. I do not want NAS to be running 24x7 hours and have a budget of 250$-350$. Can any one please suggest the hardware for same.

Regards,
JR

 

[Maturola]

is your $350 budget including the actually storage? (HDDs)
What type of storage capacity you are looking for?

If your NAS is not running 24/7 I think it defeat the purpose of "NAS", your better serve with a USB External Hard Drive. (will fit your budget and it will only be "on" when you need it)

 

[nibble123]

However , I need a solution ( not online cloud ) in which my data is safe mainaly family media files ( ~10 TB) and not get lost after a hardware failure. Also , the access to data should be easy and quick.
Not sure , if NAS will solve this purpose. Please advice.

 

[nibble123]

Seems like i have posted the questions in wrong product , Please delete the post .Apologies for the same.

 

[Maturola]

I understand, your budget is just unrealistic for a data Redundancy (protection from hardware failure). The best you can do is as i said before use a high Quality External Hard Drive to backup your data.

A NAS in a budget with data redundancy would set you between $400 and $500 and this is diskless.

Check this post out:

http://blog.brianmoses.net/2014/01/diy-nas-2014-edition.html

 

[joeschmuck]

I don't know anywhere you can get 10TB of storage for $350. If someone sees that, toss me the URL.

 

[danb35]

@nibble123, joeschmuck has what's probably the most economical build that would meet the hardware recommendations for FreeNAS. To match it, you're looking at about $60 for the motherboard, $110 for the CPU, and $160 for RAM--you're at $330 already. Case and power supply are completely at your discretion, but would obviously add to your total. If you actually have 10 TB of data you need to store, and you want redundancy, the bare minimum you could get away with would be 4 x 4 TB hard drives ($180 ea., $720 total) in a RAIDZ1 configuration.

Another option that seems somewhat popular is a used HP Microserver N40L. You can get those on eBay with no drives for about $300, but you may still need to upgrade the RAM to a bare minimum of 8 GB (and 16 GB would be better given the capacity you're talking about).

Even if your stated budget excludes the drives, you're pushing the margins of what's feasible with FreeNAS. You might try looking into other software solutions like unRAID or NAS4Free, as they may be less demanding of your hardware.

Edit: If you're willing to consider used hardware, you have more options, though you're going to pay in terms of decreased performance and likely higher power usage. You may also find that parts are more expensive than for a current-production machine--older-spec RAM, for example, tends to get expensive. But with that said, it may be an option to consider.