[Project] NAS Appliance

Network Attached Storage Appliance

Been thinking alot about my storage system lately, as my Synology NAS drive is way out of date, as it can't support over 500gb drives so maybe upgrade to one of their Synology 4 Bay units but that would end up costing about £600 to £800.

So after not thinking every detail through I thought why not use my little cheapo Celeron system ...

Intel Celeron E3200 2.4GHz
Asus P5KPL G31 MATX
2GB DDR2
Adaptec 2120S SCSI U320 64MB cache Controller (laying around)
2x Fujitsu 18GB 15,000rpm U320 SCSI RAID0 (Server 2008 OS)
2x 2TB Western Digital Green
Antec 350watt Basiq PSU
Coolermaster Elite 330

Installed Windows Server 2008 and just sharing a 500GB drive of films atm as a trial, before spending any more cash.
Need to add a better PSU and a better cpu would be nice. We'll see how things go.

I plan to stick it in a corner with a lan and pwr cable and run it 24/7 :up:

*Note i know this isn't the usual type of project, i just thought i'd share what i am doing will add some pics and info when i have more time

I knew I had forgotten something - Anti-virus
I had hoped to use a spare copy of Kaspersky, but of course it doesn't work with Server 2008.

After looking around for some free trials I found AVG Internet Security Business Edt £188 for 5 PCs, I only really need one or two atm And it doesn't seem to have the ability to serve AV updates to local PCs which is a bit rubbish, would be better for my gaming/company network (it still has a gaming profile though lol) to centralise updates, not that I use AVG on my other PCs.

I will continue looking while the trial runs down. I am hoping this Kaspersky will work, and centralise updates, we will see. If not Avira do a version that does everything i would like but its 400mb file on my poor celeron :w00t: maybe the xeon :up:

Does Microsoft Security Essentials run on 2008? I would have thought so seeing it's a MS product after all.

no that was my first thought to, but no it wasn't covered. I mean surely it's not much to ask for someone to offer basic security per server.

I wanna fit a Dual Port Gigabit server card and a decent Raid card, but there are only 1x PCI-E (16x) and 2x PCI, and as the SCSI RAID card is taking up one, i will have to see if it'll all fit :D

yer ive got the same problem as lloyd ;/ rofl

Well so far so good, I have instant access to the share even over wi-fi.
I transferred a 6GB video file at 6mb/s though I have seen up to 10MB/s.

I'm going to replace the wi-fi connection with a cat6 cable run, go from 6mb to about 50mb/s (max speed i have seen). My bedroom is right above my PC room so shouldn't be too much trouble, just need to order a couple of face plates for the wall mouted LAN point.

Which brings me to another point, back when nvidia brought out the 590 chipset their onboard gigabit supported teaming which makes sense when they provide 2 ports. But now when i looked at my marvell onboard they don't support teaming - seems like a major oversight when they include 2 ports on the motherboard !! :@

Here's the RAID card I was talking about - LSI 9260-4i PCI-Express x8 4-Port SAS/SATA 6Gb/s RAID Controller Kit

what is a raid card? a grpah card and if it not what does it do thats a lot of money

RAID, an acronym for Redundant Array of Independent Disks (Hard Drives)

A RAID Card like this has it's own CPU and RAM (same as the SCSI one I am already using, same price to) so it uses no CPU clock cycles to run the array.
It's very good if you have critical data as you have a greater choice of RAID implementation - 0, 1, 0+1, 5, 6 etc etc so you can rebuild the array easily if a hard drive fails :up:

Google RAID for a wiki definition

I take back what I said, it doesn't need a new CPU, for this service I think it's perfect :up:
Saw a peak of 256MB/s transferring from upstairs over gigabit :D

I do however need to get a RAID card, gonna get this i think to tide me over

Adaptec AAR-1420SA 4 Port SATA II PCI-X
X is different from PCI- Express, u get 64bit 133mhz cards and slots :up:

I was transferring a 10GB BD rip down to this server last night, it did most of it at 80MB/s which I am pleased with :up:

sounds all good mate;]

Here's some pictures so far.....

And some more.... It's a bit of a mess still ..... gonna get a small modular PSU and different case that can fit my SATA backplane but still small enough to leave in a corner :D

luky git................

I thought I would try Kaspersky Business AV and I have to say for the money there is no way i will be buying it, all you get is basic anti virus for £199 :S (1x file server & 5 pcs). Whereas AVG IS Business Edition you pay just £188 for 5 PCs (any number of workstations and servers) and you get complete protection.
I'm gonna have a look at Avira first before i take the plunge.

My little rant about network teaming was a bit premature, after a bit of digging I found an app at Marvell, i think it includes the driver too, but could be wrong.
See pic for a view of the extra tabs....

Ok found ESET Nod32 Antivirus Business Edition is £91 for 5 users, so I have a trial for that atm.
I really want to get a full Suite like the AVG Internet Security Business Edition as I would and could use it on all the other PCs.

I have found that

• Spywareblaster
• Spybot Search & Destroy

work fine on Server 2008, so atleast there is some free protection, other than a correctly setup Firewall :up:

total cost so far..

CPU/Motherboard/RAM £89
PSU £30
Case £30
2TB WD Green £100

Total £249

I need to add a decent SATA controller as there is only 2x sata ports on the motherboard. SATA controller £79 - cheap Adaptec 4 port PCI-E. Once I have that I will move the OS to a SATA drive and try to use Ubuntu 10.4 as the os.
Still a considerable saving on the Synology products

I have changed the hard drives to 2x 18GB 15,000RPM U320 SCSI drives as the Maxtors started sounding a bit strange.
I am also slightly upgrading the motherboard to a Asus P5QPL-AM Intel G41 at £40, it has 4 SATA ports instead of just 2, still; a controller card would be nice.
While I was at it I wanted to get a half decent case for it so got a Coolermaster Elite 330

So far it's been a solid little file server and adding the 15,000rpm drives have certainly speeded things up :D

I just built another one of these

Components
Intel Pentium E6500 Dual Core
Asus P5QPL-AM G41
2GB Ram DDR2-6400
Intel X4500 Graphics - On-board
Coolermaster Elite 330
Corsair CX430 430watt PSU
Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard

Storage (So Far)
1x Samsung F1 500GB
1x Samsung F1 750GB
1x Western Digital Green 1TB
1x Western Digital Green 2TB

This is actually replacing the current setup so I moved the hard drives into this case.
I'm going to use the celeron setup as another server as a teamspeak server or something for ets :up:

EDIT: I will add some pics tomorrow

here are some pics

New Storage added

1x 500GB (100GB OS and 400GB DATA) - Next to be upgraded
1x 1 TB Western Digital Green
2x 2 TB Western Digital Green

Should keep me going for a while, I'll have to get a SATA/SATA RAID card to add an more hard drives though.
I'll probably get a 1.5TB drive to replace the 500GB.

To add a bit more to this thread....
I have ..

File Server
Intel Pentium E6500 Dual Core 2.9GHz
Asus P5QPL-AM G41
Intel X4500 Graphics - On-board
2GB Ram DDR2-6400
Coolermaster Elite 330
Corsair CX430 430watt PSU
Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard
Storage (So Far)
1x Samsung F1 750GB (250GB Win 2008 & 500GB Data)
1x Western Digital Green 1TB
2x Western Digital Green 2TB

As my file server, then I have..

Ubuntu Test Server
Intel Celeron E3200 2.4GHz
Asus P5KPL G31 MATX
Intel G31 Graphics - On-board
4GB DDR2-6400
Corsair CX430 430watt PSU
Coolermaster Elite 330
Ubuntu 10.04.02 LTS x64
Storage (So Far)
1x Samsung 320GB SATA II

as a Ubuntu 10.04.02 LTS test server which is also running Plesk 10.2. It currently just hosts a test site (a mirror or the LES site).
I'm going to add a Xeon LGA 775 (or just a better CPU) to it soon, but as it's just a test server atm there's no hurry.
What slows it down is thebusiness broadband 7.4Mb/1MB (740KB/s down, 100KB/s up) . I can't wait till we get fibre :up: SDSL is just too expensive.

Ubuntu is great though, highly recommend it if you want to get into Linux or if you're a advanced user. It's very robust and secure :up:

Both systems run 24/7 and I'm yet to have a problem :D

Just added some more storage to the file server. As it was going to run the OS (Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 Standard) I wasn't going to use a Western Digital Green drive, they are fine for storage but not designed to be an OS drive.
That left me three options, a blue, black or an RE model. To my mind the RE and black are overkill for what I need, so I went for a WD Blue 1TB SATA 6GB/s 7200rpm 32MB. Very good drives, and for about £40 they're good value too.
I have partitioned it so the OS has 100GB and the rest is a data storage partition.
Opening word docs over the network is much faster now (compared to the old SATA2 drive). I'm still only using the southbridge SATA2 ports but it's fine for now :)

File Server - Latest Spec
Intel Pentium E6500 Dual Core 2.9GHz (SpeedStep is on 1.6GHz)
Asus P5QPL-AM G41
Intel X4500 Graphics - On-board
4GB DDR2-6400 RAM
Coolermaster Elite 330
Corsair CX430 430watt PSU
Zalman CNPS9700 NVIDIA Edition
Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard with SP1

Storage (So Far)
1x Western Digital Blue 1TB (100GB OS, 900GB Data)
1x Western Digital Green 1TB
2x Western Digital Green 2TB