February 2, 201115 yr I noticed the following systems on Geeks.com: http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=WSYS147-NOHDD-R&cat=SYS http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=SAMBA845V-24-4-R&cat=SYS These seem like they may be a good start to building an inexpensive unRAID. Performance probably wouldn't be top of the line, but it should be acceptable. You may need a RAM upgrade or SATA controller card, but you could probably build a 3-drive unRAID system with these for under $100 + costs of your HDD's (maybe as little as $75 + HDD's with the second). Maybe a good option for someone on a budget who doesn't have parts already lying around.
February 2, 201115 yr On the first system, I find it interesting there is one 100mb rj-45 and one 1000mb rj-45. One for WAN, one for LAN? But how much was saved during manufacturing to achieve that? I'd be concerned about the quality of the power supply, but a 3 drive system would be fine, most likely. With the Plus license, I would consider swapping it for something better. Also, the interfaces are PCi and PCI-X, not PCI-Ex. Something to keep in mind. I would like one of these to run pfsense.
February 2, 201115 yr Author They don't seem to support SATA drives Thats why I said you need to by a Sata controller card. You can get some decent PCI sata controllers for $10-$15 (and PCI-X controllers too). It's unclear if the SFF PC has SATA or not. The original design of that box only had IDE, and used SDRAM. But the newer version (which is what they have) at least uses DDR ram. I don't know if it got any SATA ports in that upgrade or not. Again, not optimal performance, but a good alternative to someone wanting to buy a two bay NAS to run a media player or something. I'm looking at one as a possible means of data redundancy. If I can make an inexpensive array that has lower performance but equal capacity, I could turn it on once a month, perform a complete backup of my primary unRAID, and then turn it off. If it were small enough, I could keep it off site too and just bring it onsite a couple of day a month, giving me good data protection. As for power supplies, I have 8 drives (5 green, 3 7200 rpm) in my unRAID currently, on a 430W PSU. According to my APC, my peak power at startup is 185 watts, and that includes an LCD monitor. Nothing but the monitor and the unRAID is hooked to the APC. At idle, with all drives spun up and no data transfer, it runs 137 watts (with monitor). So either APC grossly miscalculates power consumption or my drives really aren't pulling that much power. Even when writing to two of the 7200 rpm drives (so really all three 7200 rpm drives because of parity), the APC reads in the 150's. I think the only problem with a PSU running multiple drives is if your 5 or 12V rail is rated low, but a large rating on higher voltages. Then your power consumption might be low, but you are still exceeding the PSU's rating at a particular voltage. But my 430W PSU is rated for 30A at 12V, so I would still feel pretty safe sticking another 5-8 green drives in it with no problems. So that PSU could be more than adequate ( i would think definitely so for a 3 drive system). It just depends.
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