recycling my old PC part into an NAS

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iamsammajor

370 posts

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#239363 13-Jul-2018 16:10

hi all geek fellows,

have a retried motherboard and cpu siting at the draw and want to build it into a simple NAS for sharing movies within computers.

would 1G ddr2 be enough?

what about power supply? only planning 2 3.5 HDD

if i want to go fanless, worth buying retried atoms board and put it in?

anyone had done this before?? and what are your thought, DYI NAS any good?

just a Friday idea talk

have a nice weekend

Sam

JeremyNzl

359 posts

Ultimate Geek

#2055898 13-Jul-2018 16:36

Have you thought about taking it a step further and building an Unraid box

https://lime-technology.com/

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZDfnUn74N0WeAPvMqTOrtA

I love mine, I regret not building one sooner.

Cheers Jeremy

davidcole

6037 posts

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#2055899 13-Jul-2018 16:37

Ive done it with Linux, windows and appliance type apps (freenas).

Overall works well. Freenas is pretty simple to follow your nose, until you start want to use jails and add other applications on if (crash plan etc). But for just straight file based sharing it was perfect and pretty low specifications needed.

A bad in the purest sense of the word doesn’t do a lot.....until people start trying to load them up with media serving or backup software or virtualisation.

Previously known as psycik

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Gilco2

1556 posts

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#2055909 13-Jul-2018 17:25

JeremyNzl:

Have you thought about taking it a step further and building an Unraid box

https://lime-technology.com/

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZDfnUn74N0WeAPvMqTOrtA

I love mine, I regret not building one sooner.

Cheers Jeremy

I have an asustor nas and unraid server. I had seen here someone loved their unraid. I tried openmediavault and freenas and finally unraid. Again I really wish I had tried unraid first. It is the best I have tried and also love mine. No trouble with it at all. (touch wood).

Hammerer

2476 posts

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#2055910 13-Jul-2018 17:28

I've used new FreeNAS (plug-ins with more options) and old FreeNAS (now called NAS4Free) and other free products because I like to reuse old equipment. But some of that old equipment uses a lot of electricity when compared with the new gear. So it is worth considering the economics of 24x7 operation before committing.

NAS4Free can run embedded with 384MB but if using ZFS there is a 1GB minimum: https://www.nas4free.org/wiki/doku.php?id=documentation:setup_and_user_guide:hardware_requirements&do=export_pdf&rev=1350843869

The new FreeNAS requires much more than 1GB so it will be out of this league: http://www.freenas.org/hardware-requirements/

Another important question 32-bit versus 64-bit system. Most of the stuff I want to do are recommended to have 64-bit systems.

cruxis

482 posts

Ultimate Geek

#2055918 13-Jul-2018 18:06

I use https://xpenology.org/ which allows you to install Synology’s operating system DSM on your own hardware. Can have have all the features of a Synology NAS for a fraction of the price.

iamsammajor

370 posts

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#2055934 13-Jul-2018 18:48

davidcole: Ive done it with Linux, windows and appliance type apps (freenas).

Overall works well. Freenas is pretty simple to follow your nose, until you start want to use jails and add other applications on if (crash plan etc). But for just straight file based sharing it was perfect and pretty low specifications needed.

A bad in the purest sense of the word doesn’t do a lot.....until people start trying to load them up with media serving or backup software or virtualisation.

I was looking into unraid abit. But hardware requirement seems quite high, are they not?

Gurezaemon

~HONYAKKER!~
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#2055944 13-Jul-2018 19:15

iamsammajor:

hi all geek fellows,

have a retried motherboard and cpu siting at the draw and want to build it into a simple NAS for sharing movies within computers.

would 1G ddr2 be enough?

what about power supply? only planning 2 3.5 HDD

if i want to go fanless, worth buying retried atoms board and put it in?

anyone had done this before?? and what are your thought, DYI NAS any good?

I did this a couple of years ago with an old Atom board and 1 gig of DDR3 RAM. It had previously run Windows 7 as just a file server (very slowly) but I decided to experiment with OpenMediaVault as a NAS distribution.

A 250 W power supply has proved ample for this task when used with an old 2.5 inch 40 gig HD for boot, and two 3.5 gig HDs for data. It runs plenty fast enough to serve even HD movies without any delay whatsoever.

I tried FreeNAS first, but it was so slow on this hardware to be unusable, and basically FreeNAS it is overkill for your purposes.

I'm a fan of having low power equipment that is good enough to do one job, and the fanless ATOM board is perfect for this. I've used it with 512 megs RAM with no slowdown whatsoever.

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Trade NZ and US shares and funds with Sharesies (affiliate link).

richms

28191 posts

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#2055952 13-Jul-2018 19:40

If I have any more grief with windows storage spaces I will be building up another machine to be a NAS and moving drives over to it.

Been really recommended to me by several friends with extensive media collections for holding it.

Richard rich.ms

iamsammajor

370 posts

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#2055961 13-Jul-2018 20:03

Gurezaemon:
iamsammajor:

hi all geek fellows,

have a retried motherboard and cpu siting at the draw and want to build it into a simple NAS for sharing movies within computers.

would 1G ddr2 be enough?

what about power supply? only planning 2 3.5 HDD

if i want to go fanless, worth buying retried atoms board and put it in?

anyone had done this before?? and what are your thought, DYI NAS any good?

I did this a couple of years ago with an old Atom board and 1 gig of DDR3 RAM. It had previously run Windows 7 as just a file server (very slowly) but I decided to experiment with OpenMediaVault as a NAS distribution.

A 250 W power supply has proved ample for this task when used with an old 2.5 inch 40 gig HD for boot, and two 3.5 gig HDs for data. It runs plenty fast enough to serve even HD movies without any delay whatsoever.

I tried FreeNAS first, but it was so slow on this hardware to be unusable, and basically FreeNAS it is overkill for your purposes.

I'm a fan of having low power equipment that is good enough to do one job, and the fanless ATOM board is perfect for this. I've used it with 512 megs RAM with no slowdown whatsoever.

This really looks like something that I want, I really need to look at my gig’s power consumption rate. TM doesn’t have 2nd hand atom boards

davidcole

6037 posts

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#2055969 13-Jul-2018 20:24

richms:
If I have any more grief with windows storage spaces I will be building up another machine to be a NAS and moving drives over to it.

Been really recommended to me by several friends with extensive media collections for holding it.

Not keen on storage spaces, it’s a poor cousin to the drive pooling that was in whs. The replacement aftermarket products drive pool and drive bender have surpassed it if you want to stay windows based.