Greetings all. It has been years since I dove into a NAS build so looking for some advice. So it has been at least 8 years since I last had a NAS. Since then I was running a full on Ubuntu server for home use. I got tired of the energy use of that beast (dell poweredge 2650, dual XEON, 16GB Ram, dual power supply etc) when in effect I was only using it for file storage. It ran 24/7 365 at 360 watts which really adds up. At the moment I just have an external drive plugged into my router. It works but it is not what I will call a long term solution.
Let's face it some of the off the shelf stuff is neat and ready to go but at a heavy price tag to performance cost. Soooo what to do. I do have some older boxes I can use and my first choice is the following:
Dell T3500 Workstation
CPU: XEON Dual Core W3505 2.53GHz
RAM: 4 x 2GB DDR3 ECC SDRAM 1333MHz 8GB total
My Drives:
WD Black 2TB (I was using in my server... maybe 2 years old.)
What I am after to start with is a 2TB Raid 1 mirror. Mostly photos and Music but we have 5 pc's plus mobile phones that I would like to backup critical data maybe via some type of one way sync.
Why this machine? As best I can tell from my kill-a-watt meter it pulls about 75 watts at Idle under windows 7. Not awesomely low but waay better than 360watts. The history of the machine is that it was purchased in 2012 as a redundant development machine in the event we had a failure. Essentially a spare tire. It was never put into full service other than keeping it up to date. I estimate that it was really only powered on for less than 10 hours. Essentially it's what I will call new old stock.
Why not just build a new one? I don't think I really save anything since the energy use would be near the same. Cost of a "cheap WD unit will be about $440. The energy savings between that unit @ 30 watts vs 75 watts which is 45 watts However the ROI on that $440 @ 45 watts of savings is like 8+ years which would exceed the life of the drives etc.
I also have a spare Rosewill 80plus green PSU that I removed from one of my other PC's. Not sure if it would make a difference in energy use though.
Let's face it some of the off the shelf stuff is neat and ready to go but at a heavy price tag to performance cost. Soooo what to do. I do have some older boxes I can use and my first choice is the following:
Dell T3500 Workstation
CPU: XEON Dual Core W3505 2.53GHz
RAM: 4 x 2GB DDR3 ECC SDRAM 1333MHz 8GB total
My Drives:
WD Black 2TB (I was using in my server... maybe 2 years old.)
What I am after to start with is a 2TB Raid 1 mirror. Mostly photos and Music but we have 5 pc's plus mobile phones that I would like to backup critical data maybe via some type of one way sync.
Why this machine? As best I can tell from my kill-a-watt meter it pulls about 75 watts at Idle under windows 7. Not awesomely low but waay better than 360watts. The history of the machine is that it was purchased in 2012 as a redundant development machine in the event we had a failure. Essentially a spare tire. It was never put into full service other than keeping it up to date. I estimate that it was really only powered on for less than 10 hours. Essentially it's what I will call new old stock.
Why not just build a new one? I don't think I really save anything since the energy use would be near the same. Cost of a "cheap WD unit will be about $440. The energy savings between that unit @ 30 watts vs 75 watts which is 45 watts However the ROI on that $440 @ 45 watts of savings is like 8+ years which would exceed the life of the drives etc.
I also have a spare Rosewill 80plus green PSU that I removed from one of my other PC's. Not sure if it would make a difference in energy use though.
Last edited:
