My Sub-$1000 DIY 16TB NAS (8 x 2TB)
#31
diafygi Wrote:Billbarty brought up an excellent point. Since this will be used for movies and accessed by a single HTPC, it seems pretty inefficient to spin up all the drives for one file.

Question: can I use different hard drives in a RAID array? If I were to buy two Samsung 2TB drives, would I be able to use all four in the same RAID 5 array?

Don't want to be the party spoiler but the combination of MB & PCI controller is going to give you serious headaches with any RAID system, especially unRAID.

That is because the MB has only a PCI slot and your controller has 6 SATA on a very limited PCI bus which can only deliver a theoretic 133MB/s for all drives combined.

During routine tasks like parity checks were all drives are involved it is going to take days to go through 2TB drives at a rate of 10-15MB/s.
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#32
So I built the frame today for the NAS. The pieces came together pretty nicely, but it was quite a bit of cutting and drilling. I accidentally put the wrong spacing for the hard drives on one aluminum rail, so I had to re-drill the holes Blush

Also, I might need to find some sort of pads for the bottom of the threaded rods. They look like they will scratch up my closet floor.

See pictures of the constructed frame with two hard drives here.

For the enclosure:
I found a damaged 12' piece of galvanized corrugated roofing that I was able to purchase for $5. Maybe I can pound out the corrugation and use it as an enclosure.

I've been thinking about hard drive heat. I'd like to try and create an enclosure that doesn't need any more fans. I'm thinking that if I just put fairly large vent at the to and keep the bottom open, the hot air rising will naturally create enough air flow for the enclosure. Any advise on ventilation?
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#33
I built a case out of some junk steel roofing panel and have been running the NAS for a week with three 2TB SATA hard drives (plus one 40GB IDE drive for the operating system). I consider this project pretty much complete and will expand the storage as needed. I have space for a total of 8 SATA drives.

I updated the main post with hardware/software specs and pictures of the case.
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#34
That is definitely the most ghetto case I have ever seen. Id ask about airflow, but I guess the whole thing is just one big heatsink...
Server - Debain Squeeze Server + 6TB RAID5 + Sabnzbd + CP & SB
HTPC - Zotac MAG + 60GB Vertex 2 SSD + OpenELEC Frodo 12.1 + Aeon Nox
HTPC 2 - AppleTV 2
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#35
CASHMON3Y Wrote:That is definitely the most ghetto case I have ever seen.

Rofl For only $5.00, too! Actually, the PSU fan vents on the inside provide some nice airflow to the hard drives and facilitate pushing hot air out the top.
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#36
Your case made my day! LaughLaughLaughLaughLaugh


Image
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#37
Shocked I'd put at least one case fan in there!
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#38
spencers Wrote:Shocked I'd put at least one case fan in there!

I've been running it for two weeks, and the temperature hasn't been a problem at all. The CPU fan and the PSU fan seem to provide plenty of air circulation. Also, I am only spinning up one drive at a time, so there is hardly any heat coming from them.

I've been testing the power consumption for the past week with a Kill-A-Watt, and it idles around 56W and peaks at 60W when it's reading from a drive. I'd like to eventually see if I can put it into standby during idle periods to get the 56W down to less than 20W.
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#39
Blofeld Wrote:I second the unRAID suggestion. For what you need it for, it seems ideally suited. It's cheap, reliable, scales extremely well - and you've got redundancy. I'm lovin' mine, that's for sure.

I LOVE my unRAID server. It's running on an old MSI K8N Neo4 with 8 S-ATA ports with 8 2tb drives (various models). This gives 14tb of parity protected data, as one of the disks is used for the parity (the sum) of the other HDs. This OS runs from a bootable USB drive (I put mine INSIDE the case for safety) and you can try the free version up to 3 drives to test compability and see how you like it. Before switching to unRaid I was using WHS (windows home server), but the only form of data protection it offers is duplication.

Good luck

http://www.lime-technology.com
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My Sub-$1000 DIY 16TB NAS (8 x 2TB)0