Headless NAS and Utility Server

[megosdog]

Hi everyone!! I have a question. I'm embarking on this quest now so that I'm not having to do this at the last minute later on. Anyhow, my quest is to replace my single disk Qnap Nas with a home brew dual disk nas/Utility Server. Part of the reason is 1) I want the redundancy of mirrored RAID, 2), I want to upgrade from one spinning disk to two SSD drives for added speed, 3) I want a stand alone cron/utility server for automated downloads, backups, etc, and 4) my entire PC and network setup will be getting a major overhaul in about a year to move from 100baseT to gig ether. So, rather than having a separate server that only does lightweight cron jobs, I may as well put the two of them together into one unit.

Plus, with the new system, I'll be able to take advantage of the new gig network once it's available. So far I've been looking at the Raspberry Pi boards as a possible MB for the system as that's all I'd need. However, there comes a problem with that. I can only plug the drives into USB on that, and I'd prefer the drives to be slaved directly to the MB. So, my next question is, what would you suggest I get as a MB (or preferably a whole system, case and all) that's small, cheap, low power and dependable that could be used for a NAS/Utility server with Raid 1 mirroring? The drives don't have to be hot swapable or bay style. If I have to swap drives, the system is coming offline anyways, so no need for quick swap.

As I'm not a hardware guy (I generally put things together and never have to touch them again for at least 3-5 years, so I rarely deal with hardware, and thus I'm not up to speed on the newest stuff, and I like it that way, lol), so any and all hardware help is welcome. Maybe be like, "Go here, get this, put it with this, $profit!" or something like that. Now, software wise, I'm golden, as I already have that part figured out. Especially since I'm into that all day every day with a vengeance, but hardware, eh, not so much. Again, I like hardware that's plug, play and walk away. So, when it comes to the hardware, treat me as a semi-noob on this. ^_^;; Thanks everyone!

[Don B. Cilly]

An Odroid H2 is just over $100.
You can connect a lot of drives to it, and it will run Kubuntu without noticing it, so any server-mode OS even easier.
See here for a laugh:



Actually, there are single-board computers with SATA ports for $20 or less. If they support port-multipliers, they may be all you need.

[oshunluvr]

Needing only two ports really widens the field. Assuming you want a small enclosure, there are dozens of suitable Mini-ITX boards out there. My latest is a Gigabyte i5 board.

A couple points to consider:

Network devices: more than one ethernet port can be good for longevity, i.e. if one dies the other one is available. Also dual ports are useful for port aggregation (think of it like RAID for networks). Of limited use for the home, but still fun to play with. My current mobo has a built-in wireless also, but I'm not using it at the moment.

SATA connections: Starting with only two drives is fine and dandy, but what if you want to expand or add space or make a drive copy or whatever? I would recommend at least 4 ports. My current server has 6 ports, but I'm using 4 at the moment. I use a small dedicated SSD boot drive and three spinning data drives: 1 10TB for daily use and 2x6TB for backups.

SSD vs HD: Reliability is no longer a factor but SSDs are still much more expensive per MG than platter drives. SSDs are also lower power, lower heat, and silent. On the other hand, you won't see any benefit to SSD speed from a server. The network will continue to be the bottleneck long after you're using gigabit networks. Your budget and tolerance will determine the best selection. I'm sure there's a Murphy's law that goes something like "You need for space will exceed your drive capacity by 10% annually" or something like that. I only used the SSD as my boot drive for my server because my case has 4 hot swap HDD bays and I didn't want to use one for the boot device. A small, cheap SSD fits in nicely without using a bay.

If you want it, my old server m-itx mobo is in a box somewhere with CPU and RAM intact. I upgraded for processor power reasons, but I'd be more than happy you mail it to you for free if you cover postage. It's just going into the junk pile anyway. I won't be home until after the new year, but if you're interested in it, send me a PM and I'll send you the model number and specs, etc.

[megosdog]

Been doing some digging around using various suggestions, and it looks like a mini-ITX system would give me what I want. Now I just need to find a case with 3-4 drive bays to allow for best possible cooling and I should be good to go. Now all I need to do then is make sure I put it together without creating magic smoke. lol.

[mr_raider]

I did this 2 years ago. I went with a mATX board off amazon on clearance, and a Rosewill matx case from newegg. Picked up an old AMD APU (the pre Ryzen stuff). Used an old Intel SSD for OS, and 2x4tb drives for storage. OS was Ubuntu server command line only. I used btrfs with mirroring function for the storage drives.

I administer the system via ssh from another PC or use webmin.

Been looking for NAS style interface that install on top of ubuntu to manage shares, but for now just use regular linux utilities.

[oshunluvr]

The "problem" with most NAS cases is you get what you pay for. In other words, they aren't cheap. I have a "Chenbro ES34069 Mini-ITX Home Server Chassis" whcih was over $250. My only complaints; The fans in it aren't as quiet as I'd like. It has an external power supply which on the plus side means it's smaller and runs cooler but on the minus means when the power supply dies, so does the case. It's 8-9 years old so it's been reliable and worth it in the long run. It's on it's second server build.

The hard part is finding a server case that isn't huge.