Need a NAS and I have no clue what I am doing....

[JTS_Nassau]

I have just built a new office computer and HTPC and now I think the data is going to build up so fast I need a NAS. I will mostly store videos and pictures to share with my HTPC (XBMC).

NewEgg has the following combo deal on sale for $78.98

MSI A55M-P33 FM1 AMD A55 (Hudson D2) Micro ATX AMD Motherboard with UEFI BIOS

bundled with:

1x AMD A4-3400 Llano 2.7GHz Socket FM1 65W Dual-Core ...

I have the ram and a couple of sata hard drives that I would like to use to start.

I would like to back this data up.

What do you think?

Thanks in advance...

 

[bollar]

By "no clue," do you literally mean you have no clue, or do you have systems experience you believe can be transferred to setting up and administering a NAS? If you truly have no clue, I suggest you get an appliance NAS like those offered by iXsystems or another provider. If you're unsure, I suggest you read the docs and try to assess if you're up for the challenge.

Otherwise, I don't know enough about the hardware you propose to evaluate it.

 

[JTS_Nassau]

I can built it and think I can setup\administer the software.
What I have no clue about is the hardware. I want to speed as little as possible, I have already gone over budget with the other builds.
I want to be able to use the sata drives I have replace\add new drive when I have the funds.

 

[praecorloth]

There are going to be a lot of things to consider here. Let's start with backups. Were you thinking that the NAS itself would effectively be your backup, or that you wanted to have a backup system in place that would store the data on something other than the NAS?

 

[JTS_Nassau]

There are going to be a lot of things to consider here. Let's start with backups. Were you thinking that the NAS itself would effectively be your backup, or that you wanted to have a backup system in place that would store the data on something other than the NAS?

I was thinking a raid set up so if one drive died I wouldn't lose my data.

 

[cyberjock]

So check this out: https://www.google.com/search?q=rai...fficial&client=firefox-a&source=hp&channel=np


RAID is NOT a backup solution. RAID only provides high uptime. If your file system gets corrupted, files get deleted, etc. you have no backup.

 

[JTS_Nassau]

I understand.... I am more concerned with drive failure.

 

[fizzgig656]

If your hitting you budget already, have you considered using an older PC that you've upgraded from? dunno your situation as om guessing were all doing this from different angles?

please ignore me if you've done this type of thing before, but i work in IT building and repairing kit etc but with MS products. building the kit it easy(within reason) its taken me quiet a bit of time "tweaking" and asking sheds loads of questions on here just to get where i am and ive spent most of the last week or two at work not doing work? oops dont tell the boss. are you concerned about power usage? how may drives you thinking? etc?

 

[cyberjock]

I understand.... I am more concerned with drive failure.

I would seriously, and I mean seriously, consider using a product you are more familiar with if you do not plan to do backups. If you don't know what you are doing and you make a mistake, your data could be lost for good. In a business environment this could backfire. This forum has lots of threads of people that have not had backups and lost huge amounts of data and still don't know what exactly they did wrong(Edit:Got an email back from the thread earlier.. http://forums.freenas.org/showthread.php?10143-All-my-media-suddenly-disappeared!&p=45034#post45034). I was in one of those threads earlier today :(

This is why my sig says what it does about backups.