Any recommendations for a ~$100 motherboard for a home NAS storage/server? Would like it reliable, low-power, fanless, something a dummy can set up, manage, and have some kind of RAID software/hardware support, ..and of course compatibility with FreeNAS. Any suggestions welcome.
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migrated from stackoverflow.com Oct 9 '09 at 22:50
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You can buy an Intel SS4200-E prebuilt for $149 and be done with it. But... many low-power NAS lack in two fundamental respects:
The problem with lack of ECC and scrubbing is that you will throw some files there, don't look at them for a year and when you try to read it back - it is corrupted and there is no way to reconstruct it. I'm using my NAS (a real Linux server) to store my raw photos, and even at the 35-40 MB/s afforded by the gigabit network it still feels slow. |
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The FreeNAS wiki suggests these hardware devices:
You generally want to avoid a regular PC motherboard, as the power consumption and footprint will be much higher than that of an appliance. |
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A really good article from zdnet: Build the $340 NAS for half the price but double the speed He recommends a G33 motherboard with ICH9R RAID controller Power consumption is about 42 watts at idle, and 9 additional watts for each drive. Performance apparently compares favorably with that of professional NAS devices (about twice the performance), while costing much less. |
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Any old thing will work, I have a Old Gateway E-1400 with a 100GB HD, 256 of ram and a 700mhz processor running it, and it runs with no problem. If anything, more ram would help. I also have used a dell opti-plex small form factor (the gateway is also a small form factor) picked up both used for under $50 each, and added bigger hard drives. I would defiantly suggest a small form factor or other low power business class machine. |
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