Best power/price/capability ratio for a NAS box

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irangejuice

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#59965 15-Apr-2010 16:22

I'm planning to build a NAS box and am struggling to decide if I should go for:

A.

mini ITX motherboard with Celeron processor
4x SATA II
Up to 4GB DDR2
Gigabit Ethernet
Foxconn Case with 150W PSU

AMD Athlon II X2 245 Processor
Asus M2N68-AM Motherboard
4 x SATA 3Gb/s RAID 0,RAID 1, RAID10,RAID 5
Dual channel DDR2 1066/800/667
Gigabit
Random case with 300W PSU

As this will be running 24/7 I'd really like to get the ITX for the smaller power consumption.
However, I'm just worried that having about 3 users at home it might not be very sufficient.

common scenarios would be:

User A Streaming to HDTV a 1080p movie
while
User B downloading ABC.rar 200mb
while
User C torrent CDE.rar 200mb

Inputs?

magu

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BitSignal

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#318917 15-Apr-2010 16:29

I've gone through the ITX route and wrote this: http://log.nunca.com.br/post/361963204/the-big-little-nas-pt-1.

Handles my Mac's Time Machine backups, multiple clients, automated Usenet downloading, etc.

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Ragnor

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#318978 15-Apr-2010 17:52

Gigabit Ethernet, hard drive speed, disk controller speed, os file system etc have a much greater effect on performance than cpu speed usually.

Even a dual core atom cpu can give you good throughput/performance.

irangejuice

18 posts

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#318980 15-Apr-2010 18:05

Nice read Magu. How did you end up setting up your Raid 5 with only 2 SATA ports on the Intel ITX? It's considerably cheaper than the Gigabyte model I was looking at but only supports 2 SATA HDDs.

(Sorry if I missed the part where you explained that in your blog)

magu

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BitSignal

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#318984 15-Apr-2010 18:14

There's a second part to that article which I haven't finished yet.

And I realize now I forgot to mention the RAID card I had to buy to have 4 ports. Thanks for the heads-up.

Basically, I had to find a low-profile card that would fit in the tight space. And the only way to find out how small the card needed to be was to assemble the whole thing then measure. The card I found on TradeMe was SATA1, so there's still room for improvement.

"Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads." - Doc Emmet Brown

irangejuice

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#318986 15-Apr-2010 18:24

Ahh excellent so it wasn't my eyes.

Looking forward to part 2.

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Snowflake

#319139 16-Apr-2010 00:14

is this going to do anything but NAS? why custom build when you can buy one ready to go?

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irangejuice

18 posts

Geek

#324497 29-Apr-2010 03:25

No, actually, I was after a NAS with a little download management on the side like say a Home Server.

I decided the best way to know for sure if NAS was really what I wanted to go with or a Home Server was to make one with donated parts.

So right now I've got a

Pentium 4 2.8
250W PSU
Intel something motherboard with 2 SATA ports and Fast Ethernet only.
PCI SATA card for additional HDD (future)
1TB Seagate SATA
0.5TB Seagate SATA

will be adding a 1GB PCI LAN card tomorrow.

With 100mbps I'm getting only 10~11MB/s but that's expected.

What throughput should I be expecting with a Gigabit connection? I know how much it is theoretically but can anyone shed light on their real world throughput on their setups?