Inexpensive NAS?

D

daedal

Gawd
Joined
May 10, 2005
Messages
686
So we're moving into a house that will be fully LAN-wired and naturally, my first thought was that I need a NAS to have music and movies available all over.

I have two options:

OPTION 1
Buy a NAS enclosure. From what I could find, they're fairly expensive (200$ and over) but are usually bundled with an HDD.

OPTION 2
Use one of my old machines (think 500-700mhz) as a NAS, but I'm afraid that when they die (which shouldn't take too long if I leave them running 27/4 to make media accessible at all times), they'd bring the hard drives down with them. I'd also need to buy a large hard drive since they all pack very small drives.

Any thoughts? What are you using as a NAS?
 
Whats in your walls? Cat5 or Cat6?

Option 2 will be your most cost effective, yet beneficial method. Do some digging around here on FreeNAS and check out http://freenas.org

As far as Option 1 goes, only thing I would want to buy pre-built is this: http://www.drobo.com/ despite its issues/bullshit need to make it a NAS.
 
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Building your own is the best option I would say, most bought NAS are expensive and haven't got much room for expansion.

I have build my NAS on FreeNAS, works very well and I don't need to keep it powered up 24/7 either, I power it up via a magic packet sender and power it off via an HTML command.

I think most application don't need a NAS to be powered 24/7 unless you're using it for capturing video from CCTV.

More experienced members will hopefully guide you the right way, good luck with your decision.
 
Option 2 would be the better choice IMO since all you really need to do is replace the PSU with a good quality one. That's usually the first part in old PCs like that fails or causes failure. Then slap in a SATA controller card and an Intel Gigabit NIC and you'll have a pretty solid NAS. What's even better is that you can always take the PSU, controller, and Intel NIC to a new system should you need more performance.

I've used a system as old as a Pentium III 866Mhz as a NAS and it worked just fine until I needed some encoding work done. Linux and WHS worked just well on those old systems.
 
Awesome! Thanks for the links to OpenNAS! That looks like exactly what I needed, especially if it supports wake and sleep remotely.
 
but I'm afraid that when they die (which shouldn't take too long if I leave them running 27/4 to make media accessible at all times), they'd bring the hard drives down with them.
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Why are you afraid of this? The only thing that could happen is a power supply failure that kills the HDDs. The motherboard and stuff shouldn't be able to affect the harddrives.
 
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