Building My Own NAS

Z

zeppelin04

Member
So I am looking into building my own nas storage device and have gotten a fair amount of information from google. From what I understand I would just be building a cheap computer and installing freenas on it. I would probably aim for a micro atx but may just go with a midtower do to price and available components.

Does anyone know how much ram I would need as well as a processor for streaming media? I imagine it isn't much and I could get by fairly cheap but I want to make sure I am not coming up short. Also I am thinking of doing a raid setup to back it up. Probably just 4 drives where two mirror each other. Raid 1 I think it was.

Any input on this process would be appreciated.
 
I am not sure on what you would need hardware wise, I am in this process as well. I heard you do not need much for a cpu and RAM depends on what system you are using to manage the NAS.

If I am not mistaken RAID 1 on 4 drives would just create 4 copies of the same drive. If you want to use RAID 1 use 2 drives or use a higher level of RAID. RAID 5 would be good with 4 drives.

300px-RAID_5.svg.png


each disk has pairity info about the other disks information so if a disk fails it can be rebiult.
 
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I will have yo look into raids again. That raid 5 looks good though.

They do seek to be low power systems but I am not sure how low. That is my issue. Don't want to make it too weak or waste money And overpower it.
 
Looks like a good place to start is 1gb of RAM for every 1tb in your NAS. Even if you are lower than 8tb, people are recommending 8gb of RAM to start with. there is hardly a CPU requirement for Freenas. It really depends on how many users you have accessing your NAS. If you can grab any used cheap dual core it will most likely work just fine.

I am looking into using Freenas 9 with a ZFS filesystem. but I am a ways off of building mine.
 
Looks good to me.

Your PC should see it as a network drive. Any processing of media files, like watching a movie, will be on your local machine. The hardware in the NAS is really only responsible for holding the data and getting it to clients that access it.
 
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