Hey everyone!
I am new here and I am getting ready to build my first NAS. I have been doing some research and I am quite overwhelmed. I want something that I can store all my media on (and stream to the rest of the house), download torrents, and do backups to.
Right now I am thinking of doing a FreeNAS setup with RAIDZ2. I am thinking of using 8 3TB WD Red drives. I know that is not the ideal number of drives but size and reliability is more important to me than speed. If I understand correctly that will give me about 18TB of storage (less after formatting).
What I need help with is whether my old computer can be salvaged to make the NAS or if I should just buy new, budget components. I built a gaming computer in 2006 and it has a AMD Athlon 64X2 4400+ Socket 939 processor in it. It has 4GB of DDR RAM and an Asus ASR32-MVP Deluxe Crossfire motherboard. It also has a 550W Antec power supply which I am pretty sure would be more than enough. What do you think about the other components though? Are they suitable?
Can I just add, say 2 PCI SATA cards with 4 SATA ports each, and then finish the build? Any recommendations for such cards?
I know that I would also need a drive for the boot drive, as well as a drive (maybe 2 for mirroring) for the ZIL data, and I was thinking of just getting the cheapest available SSDs for those.
Also, it has a Sapphire HD3870 video card in it (the second one died). I think that it won't add any performance to a NAS that doesn't do video transcoding or anything so I would just remove it. Unless there is some benefit I don't know about.
I really appreciate any advice you can offer!
I am new here and I am getting ready to build my first NAS. I have been doing some research and I am quite overwhelmed. I want something that I can store all my media on (and stream to the rest of the house), download torrents, and do backups to.
Right now I am thinking of doing a FreeNAS setup with RAIDZ2. I am thinking of using 8 3TB WD Red drives. I know that is not the ideal number of drives but size and reliability is more important to me than speed. If I understand correctly that will give me about 18TB of storage (less after formatting).
What I need help with is whether my old computer can be salvaged to make the NAS or if I should just buy new, budget components. I built a gaming computer in 2006 and it has a AMD Athlon 64X2 4400+ Socket 939 processor in it. It has 4GB of DDR RAM and an Asus ASR32-MVP Deluxe Crossfire motherboard. It also has a 550W Antec power supply which I am pretty sure would be more than enough. What do you think about the other components though? Are they suitable?
Can I just add, say 2 PCI SATA cards with 4 SATA ports each, and then finish the build? Any recommendations for such cards?
I know that I would also need a drive for the boot drive, as well as a drive (maybe 2 for mirroring) for the ZIL data, and I was thinking of just getting the cheapest available SSDs for those.
Also, it has a Sapphire HD3870 video card in it (the second one died). I think that it won't add any performance to a NAS that doesn't do video transcoding or anything so I would just remove it. Unless there is some benefit I don't know about.
I really appreciate any advice you can offer!