Mohtalim

Question: If I'm going to upgrade my main PC, does it make sense to downgrade my current PC as a do-it-yourself NAS?


Background:

Well, my current NAS, an Infrant NV (essentially this without the LCD), is at 870 / 873gb capacity and I'd like some more space. Even though my NV supports X-RAID for expandability, I'm thinking of backing it all up before trying.

Since Infrant was bought by Netgear, their prices have sky-rocketed. An empty NV+ now runs ~$1000. For reference, I bought NV from Newegg for ~$600. Furthermore, they're not the quietest of boxes. In fact, that's why I keep my NV on the first floor.

Because of the prior, I've thought about building my own NAS when I replace my current quiet PC. To this end I've been reviewing RAID controllers. From my filtered newegg search query, two rise to the top of the heap:

• 3ware 9650SE-4LPML PCI Express Lanes: 4 SATA II Controller Card RAID Levels 0, 1, 5, 10, Single Disk, JBOD - Retail
  * pros: no fan, accessible phone support, good reviews
  * cons: 2nd highest sorted
• areca ARC-1210 PCI-Express x8 SATA II Controller Card RAID 0/1/1E/3/5 JBOD - Retail
  * pros: most newegg reviews, highest sorted
  * cons: fan + inaccessible phone support

Does anyone have experience with do-it-yourself NAS creation or can provide good advice? As a heads up, I'm already familiar with Tom's Hardware's Build a Cheap and Fast RAID 5 NAS article circa 2006-08-01.

Thinking about it some more, I don't need to build a new box. I could simply stick the RAID card in my current PC provided the noise is acceptable and I have enough drive bays. Hmm...

As a sanity check, I currently use an Asus P5K Deluxe (newegg) which has an extra PCI Express x16 slot (electrical x4/x1). Will that work with these cards? I'm not 100% sure.

Regarding hard drives, I'm definitely going for either of these two:

• Western Digital Caviar GP WD7500AACS 750GB 5400 to 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM
  * currently 129.99/750 =~ $0.17332 per "gigabyte"
• Western Digital Caviar GP WD10EACS 1TB 5400 to 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM
  * currently 209.99/1000 =~ $0.20999 per "gigabyte"

The ratings seem to be low due to slightly lower performance that most people won't notice, but these are for storage and video playback anyway.

Also, if anyone knows of good (read as "grommeted" at least) 5.25" to 3.5" drive bay adapters that'd be good to know.

The Antec Solo has 3x suspension 3.5" hard drive mounts and 4x 5.25" bays. I could use the tray mounts instead of suspension to get an additional bay, but I'd like more bay options if possible.

Edit1: Newegg's server accessory page has interesting items from the simple and cheap metal brackets to large enclosures with likely loud fans.

Edit2: These look very interesting:

• iStarUSA T-5-SA 1x5.25" Bay Trayless Anti-vibration SATA Mobile Rack - Retail
  * promising image
• SANS DIGITAL MS-TRAY MobileSilver Series Removable Tray - OEM

My only recent experience with RAID has been a loss of data due to a failed controller card. Choose a controller card wisely.

Okay, just to make sure, where does this


fit into this


The black PCI-E 16 looks too long and the PCI-E 1s look too short.

Edit: Got confirmation on IRC that it fits into the black slot, even though it's longer, it's designed that way.

Also from IRC, apparently my board already supports RAID5!

However, there has to be a catch, the cards I found aren't more than my motherboard for no reason, or are they?

Since that's a PCI Express x4 card, I'd guess it needs one of the PCI Express x16 slots, probably the black one if you want power to the card...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI_Express

Thanks!

Also looking more into my motherboard, I can't tell if it has a hardware XOR engine for RAID5 or if it offloads those calculations to my cpu. Apparently my board uses Intel's ICH9 chipset, but from browsing through the 814 page document I didn't get a definite answer. To be conservative, it probably offloads to the CPU.

So a new question is, use my motherboard's RAID5 or buy a RAID5 card...

Integrated RAID controllers offload a certain amount of work to the CPU. Discrete cards don't.

I bet there's a MTBF difference too, though I have no data.

My iPhone typing speed sucks, apparently.

For video, I don't think perf is too much of a concern assuming you don't process your own files. Network speed is your bottleneck, not disk.

I think I'll buy some drives and the "anti-vibration" enclosures and set a time-limit of a few hours to set up motherboard RAID5. If that goes awry, I'll buy the 3ware card.

I am afraid of potential issues with AHCI and the RAID drivers if I don't already have ACHI enabled and the drivers handy.

Random: Mohtalim also makes a good note-keeping tool!

VLSmooth wrote:Random: Mohtalim also makes a good note-keeping tool!

So does google docs or google notebook, but I guess those would be too heavy for an iPhone or the like...