I was using a DNS-323 and liked everything about it, except for its lack of expansion (2 drive bays) and its a bit underpowered (gigabit, but its cpu limits it to 12-14MB/s under ideal conditions). If you want to go beyond the DNS-323, there seems to be a huge gap in terms of price so rolling my own made sense. (With the community support and at that price point / form factor, I consider the DNS-323 near impossible to beat if you want to tweak).

To get decent speeds and at least 4 or 5 bays, looking at something like qnap or synology would be several hundred dollars. I did support for Iomega so I know better than to buy an underpowered piece of garbage from them (3x the price of the DNS-323, same performance, less community support)

Reused parts: 3x 1TB hd, 1x power supply, 1x 2.5 to 3.5 HD converter.

I plan on expanding when I find a good deal on the right hard drives (apparently "green" drives have serious issues with being in a RAID5).

Antec 300: ($10 off + $15 rebate)
$35 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811129042

Motherboard: (gigabit ethernet, 6 sata ports, passive cooling)
$50 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813138179

RAM: (4gb for this price, don't need it but Ill take it!)
$24 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820139659

CPU: (45w tdp, hits about 55% utilization at gigabit speeds)
$29 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835186134

Heatsink: (yes, its more expensive than the processor... just want decent cooling)
$29 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103944

5450: (~7 watts idle, passive heatsink)
$30 - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004Z9XRX4

CF: 8gb boot drive (much cheaper than buying an SSD, don't need the space for this anyway)
$18 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820208340

CF to Sata Adapter
$16 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812186099

Total cost: $231.00

Not bad, considering its every bit as capable (imo) as a $1000.00 NAS on everything but size and potentially a little bit higher power consumption. As an added bonus, the three fans on it move more air but are generally more quiet than the tiny fans found on some NAS units and the HDs are not all crammed into a near unventilated space. Its barely audible in a room with no electronics on.

Installed Ubuntu Server 11.04 from USB, MediaTomb, TransmissionBT, and Samba at this point (along with the obvious like ssh / samba / htop etc.) The mobo was a bit awkward with respect to booting from USB and recognizing the CF card as a HD, but I got it sorted (just not intuitive).

Processor utilization hits about 55% when maxing the write / read speed of a single drive (newbie mistake, forgot to get a few more sata cables, those come in tomorrow as I didn't want BB to rape my wallet). I don't really expect to do any transcoding, so the low tdp processor was exactly what I wanted in terms of heat / power use. Hitting ~100MB/s read and 90MB/s write which is maxing the drive over gigabit is nice I expect reads to stay the same and writes to go down a bit once I'm using the RAID.

As it has much more RAM than the DNS-323 (which has 64MB) I could allocate more to the cache for Transmission, and it doesn't slow everything to a crawl when a few torrents are running (on the DNS-323 the NAS would work fine but Transmission would be very sluggish).

I might add a sata card with hotswap capability + a couple external drive bays in the 5.25 at some point in the future, but that's probably not "important". I'm sure I'll find a few more things to install on it as well.

I wouldn't use a sempron.


You're relying on software based raid. That cpu will have to handle the raid and the network at the same time and I honestly don't think you're going to be happy with the results.


I would spend a little more on a decent CPU or add a real raid controller that handles the raid off cpu.

 

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It does fine with both. The write with RAID5 is a touch "slow" (~50MB/s), but I'm getting 90MB/s read. I could put a much faster processor in it but low tdp was a goal. I could have used an i3, but costs would have gone up. Its far faster than any consumer class NAS that you can get without spending much more money, afaik.

At some point I may toss a hardware raid controller in it, but getting a decent *hardware* controller (one that doesnt just offload to the cpu) would add another $100 to the cost of the project.

Also, if I eventually do get a raid card, the processor speed will matter even less at that point.

In short, it does exactly what I expect it to do, and I couldn't be happier.

Here was a chart that was pretty interesting: http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/nas/nas-charts/view

Write comparisons:

$950 - (34MB/s) Buffalo TeraStation Pro Quad
$939 - (25MB/s) Iomega StorCenter px6-300d
$499 - (47MB/s) QNAP TS-419P+

Read comparisons:

$625 - (93MB/s) Synology Disk Station (DS411+)
$650 - (90MB/s) Thecus Zero-Crash with Dual Power NAS (N4200PRO)
$499 - (86MB/s) QNAP TS-419P+

It was a bit of a jigsaw puzzle. I wanted replacing my current NAS to be as inexpensive as possible, while dramatically improving performance, without increasing heat or power requirements by much. I think I got that done. Even the QNAP being the closest at $500 only has room for 4 drives (where I have room for 5, ignoring the 5.25 inch bays).

EDIT:

PS. if you want to ship me one of these, I'll put it to use immediately:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816115029

I use a Dell PERC 5/i. It's old, but pretty cheap on eBay usually. And I can hook up 12 SATA drives to it. Though have never used more than 8 because if physical limitations of the case.
http://www.overclock.net/raid-controllers-software/359025-perc-5-i-raid-card-tips.html

I use one of the synology boxes...I vaguely remember setting it up a couple years ago...and haven't touched the box since. It is, without a doubt, the most reliable piece of hardware I've ever owned. It almost never occurs to me that it exists...it is extremely fast and has never malfunctioned once. Best $200 I ever spent...and I bet I'm still using it 5 years from now.

 

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use a Perc 6/i at work in all our storage boxes.

 

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