Computing on Demand PC News & Reviews
The build was fun and easy. OpenMediaVault provides an easy administration and the hardware performs as expected. Given its price point, it is impossible to match the flexibility we now have vs buying a prebuilt NAS. Having the freedom to install Windows Server, WHS, or any of the open source NAS OSs makes this build completely worthwhile.
The benchmarks indicate that this unit may be beat in benchmarking by some other NAS, but had I spent a few extra bucks here or there it may have been a different story (We had a Zotac board with an i3 that we were testing, but that raised the costs by $100). Either way, we ended up with a 6 bay NAS that performed equally as well as the QNAP -TS-669 PRO for about half the cost. We also have the ability to easily add four more hard drives (2 SATA connections left on the HighPoint controller and two left free on the motherboard) if we ever find a case that can hold them.
This build took just a few hours to complete and a few days to fill. Time to build something bigger… something along the lines of a 40TB server.
Save some cash, use nas4free and find a motherboard with enough onboard slots and use ZFS. You wont have to buy an SSD (just a usb stick as it runs in RAM), nor will you have to buy a controller card that. If the controller card dies, it will be hard to replace or get your data back. Whereas with ZFS, you can just plug into any other motherboard and re-import.
I just happen to have 8x2Tb drives sitting around, poor mans build my a$$
The build is cheap… the drives aren’t. All the NAS reviews I do… I have much more than 8x2tb lying around. They can be had for 79 a piece now…
would like to know about the 40TB build as i’ve recently filled my 9.5TB QNAP 659Pro+ and want to go homebrew
The build was actually completed before this article/build as I my needs were immediate. However, baby steps… it will be published soon.
oh nice, look forward to reading it!