Turn old PC into NAS - Advice Needed
#1
Hi all,

I currently have my desktop pc in the living room with 3TB of space, which is now far to little.

I am looking into getting an small footprint ION box to stick behind my tv, and a NAS with around 8TB to compliment this.

I was going to buy something like the Acer EasyStore (which a friend has and I like) and stick 4x2tb drives in it.

I dont need a raid setup as I share my media with two freinds, so we all act as a backup for each other.

My new thoughts are to replace the case and a few key components in the desktop and stick it under the stairs and use it as a server, thus i can use the 3 1tb drives I have and add a couple of 2tb.

For now I just want to have XP on it (as it is what i know - minimal linux experiance) and will only be running sickbeard/couchpotato/SAB/VNC with all the drives shared up.

The pc has a striker II extreme m/b which has 6 sata ports which should suffice for now, and I have a dual core p4 on it atm.

In terms of power consumption and noise, how small of a power supply would I get away with and how little fan-ege would suffice, considering it will be doing very little and will only be accssed via VNC occaisionally (and very, very rarely have a screen attached)

The psu i have at the moment is some stupid 750w (or something) with leds etc that a freind gave me.

Sorry if this seems like a ramble, because, well it is. I will put up more information on the current components when i get home and look at them (if needed)

thanks
Reply
#2
I am not sure what the question is?

Your system is over-spec'ed for a file server, but I wouldn't buy lower grade (lower power use) items just to make it more suitable because that seems a waste of money. Otherwise you may as well start from scratch and build a low power server.

Windows XP would work, I built a very basic 'headless' file sharing PC with XP for my house at university. My 3 house mates and I could all access the shared drive areas. I set up remote desktop to manage it and controlled the torrent client via some .bat files and task scheduler.

But as sickbeard, couchpotato and most torrent/nzb clients have a web interface now, you don't really need the remote desktop. Although it helps for setting up and unplanned tasks.
Reply
#3
Windows Home Server - It will easily run on your XP hardware, backs up all your PC's Pictures, documents the lot, pools all your drive into one storage pool, keeps an eye on their health, does everything you need in the background too from encoding video to torrents etc... and you can access anything on your server anywhere in the world with a web browser....
Reply
#4
Thanks for the info.

I want to keep it as low-power/quiet as possible. Whats the smallest power supply i could realisticly use? How easy would it be to run it fanless (or as near as).

Sorry if i dont make to much sense, large gaps in my knowledge often get filled with nonsense
Reply
#5
BacklitVillain Wrote:I want to keep it as low-power/quiet as possible. Whats the smallest power supply i could realisticly use? How easy would it be to run it fanless (or as near as).

You didn't specify the exact components but if you are using the infamous & power hungry Pentium D, making the system mote efficient would almost certainly mean a new computer (new main boar and cpu).

Changing the power supply will not necessarily make your computer use less energy and a fanles power supply is not really justified inside a NAS which is most likely o be noisy will all those drives inside.

The way that I see it, you should either use it as it is now, and keep cost to minimum, or build yourself a cheap and efficient NAS from scratch.
XBMC Live: i3 530 / GT210 / 2GB / SSD + 2 x Zotac HD01 / 2GB / SSD
unRAID Pro: 6 x 1TB + 2 x 1.5TB + 2 x 2TB + 2 x 500G over GbE
HP Micro Server: SABnzbd+, Sickbeard, Couchpotato, uTorrent, Media Companion, MySQL, MKV Toolnix
Reply

Logout Mark Read Team Forum Stats Members Help
Turn old PC into NAS - Advice Needed0