aiming for ultra cheap low power build reusing as much as possible

[jamief]

I'm in need of some sort of NAS and I get the feeling that unRaid is going to fit my needs the best.    The goal is to store not critically important media mostly in some sort of network accessible location mostly to feed to my PC or my HTPC.  This is just storage for the most part and I don't need transcoding.  being that this will be a 24/7 machine I'd like it to be as low power as possible and I'd like the entire build to be as low cost as possible.

 

I have spare parts, and I'm not against changing the two current machines or stealing from them. 

 

My PC is an athlon 900e on a asus M4A87TDEVO  with a total of 8gb of ram. video card is a GT-220 which was low power for it's day but is 40-50 watts 24/7 on it's own.  It has a 240GB SSD with my OS and important docs, a 5 year old 1tb wd black which has backups of the important documents(they're also kept offsite), a 3 year old 2TB green which is half full of media.

 

it's running linux mint

 

the HTPC is an  i3 3330T on a Gigabyte H77N-WIFI mITX with  8 gb of ram  and 2 x3TB WD greens.  one is OS and media it's half full, the other is almost full of media.  it's running win 7

 

I also have 2x1TB external HD's that are collecting dust and I'll strip the cases and put the HD's into service.

on a shelf I have 2x4gb sticks of corsair vengeance cl9-9-9-2

 

The other thing is I regularly get access to "old" machines being scrapped from work.  I can and will be grabbing any of the larger working HD's from them and I'd like to add them to the array regularly swapping out smaller and dying HD's.    Most will be in the 1TB range but up to 3TB is possible if the "current" gen equipment.

 

So the fact that unRAID seems fine with mixed and matched HD's is a big plus for me.   

 

In a perfect world I'd love to upgrade my workstation for gaming. I was thinking i5 which means new MB, new ram, new video card, new CPU.  It's out of the budget and not important right now as the machine works fine.   

I wouldn't mind pulling the HD's from the media PC and putting in an SSD.  It wouldn't need a very large one. 

 

So my rough plan was to get a new SSD or smaller working used HD for the media PC.  take it's 3tb's for the NAS.  take the 2 external 1TB's for the NAS, and take the  1 and 2 TB  from the desktop for the NAS.   

Then being that I was thinking ultra low power I was looking at an ASROCK QC5000-ITX/PH http://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/QC5000-ITXPH/    It's $80 after rebate at the moment. The CPU on it is an Kabini A4-5000  I'll scrounge a power supply and case from one of those surplus machines.  I need to verify but I think my 8gb of ram will work in that MB.    The MB comes with 4 sata ports so I was thinking of one of those 8 port sata boards like the M1015 which would add another $100 or so to the price.   

unRAID pro can handle up to 12 drives for an extra $90 I think I saw.

 

So that's under $400 if I have to buy a new SSD for the HTPC.

 

I'd use one of the 3TB drives as the parity drive and then have 8tb left over if I'm understanding how all of this works.

 

My questions are  will that MB/CPU work?  Remember I'm not transcoding.  Maybe I'll set up torrenting on it at some point.

 

Also does anyone see any issues with this plan? 

 

I'm aware I'm using a lot of junk but the data isn't critical if I was to somehow lose it.  I fully expect to lose drives regularly but I'll have a pile here to replace them with almost instantly so I'm hoping with the parity drive it won't be a big deal.  Also performance isn't a huge deal as it's likely just needing to feed 1 machine over a gigabit network at a time. I don't want it to take 2 minutes for XBMC to start a show of course but hopefully it's nowhere near that slow.

 

Thanks

 

 

[Fireball3]

I would update the gaming PC.

At my place I got this second hand equipment lately:

GA-Z97X-UD3H ~90€

Xeon E3 1230v3 ~165€

16GB DDR3 1600 ~50€

For 100€ I will also be able to get a decent graphics card.

Keep your SSD and two of your many HDD's (maybe in a RAID1) to secure your data.

This will be a pretty nice gaming platform!

 

Then use your current board, CPU and RAM for your unRAID rig.

I have the M4A78TD-V EVO working nicely in 3 unRAID machines.

I'm confident that your board (notice it's different to mine) will also work.

Just throw the unRAID free at it to be sure it does.

[jamief]

I've definitely considered that option.  The major issue is  that machine currently draws about 105 watts at idle.  Half of that is the video card I think.  I'm not sure if it will boot with no video card installed at all.  Overall for what it is/does  it sucks a lot of power to be up 24/7

[trurl]

I'm aware I'm using a lot of junk but the data isn't critical if I was to somehow lose it.  I fully expect to lose drives regularly but I'll have a pile here to replace them with almost instantly so I'm hoping with the parity drive it won't be a big deal.

Just thought I would comment on this bit in case there was a misconception.

 

The data for one drive can be calculated from parity plus ALL the other drives. So to rebuild a drive, parity and ALL other drives must be working, and working well enough to allow ALL their bits to be read.

 

[Fireball3]

I've definitely considered that option.  The major issue is  that machine currently draws about 105 watts at idle.  Half of that is the video card I think.  I'm not sure if it will boot with no video card installed at all.  Overall for what it is/does  it sucks a lot of power to be up 24/7

 

No, it won't boot without a video card.

I have no time to check at the moment but I'm sure your current board has PCI slots.

Why don't you capture a low cost graphics adapter - 2D only?

 

[tdallen]

I threw a cheap $12 PCI video card into my server and pulled out the power hungry PCIex video card - works great, though you do loose a little bit of memory to the aperture.

[JonathanM]

No, it won't boot without a video card.

Depending on the specific board and BIOS settings, some motherboards will boot with no video card. Wouldn't hurt to check.

[jamief]

replacing the gaming PC with something new makes a fair amount of sense as it's needed anyways assuming I can get the current board to boot without a video card.  The manual is long gone so the easiest test is to power down pull the card and find out I guess. 

[JonathanM]

replacing the gaming PC with something new makes a fair amount of sense as it's needed anyways assuming I can get the current board to boot without a video card.  The manual is long gone so the easiest test is to power down pull the card and find out I guess.

Before you power it down to pull the card go into the BIOS and check for anything that references halting on errors or something similar.

[jamief]

I turned off halt on errors, pulled the card and tested.  It screams on startup for a bit then boots  so this is a possible solution.  Without the card it draws 52 watts at idle.  With the card it draws 77 at idle so the card isn't ultra bad.    Shutdown I see it was drawing 7 watts.  machine efficiency has come a long way in the last few years I guess.

 

This MB has 6 sata slots on it.  all are sata 3 I believe.    so that would get me well on my way without needing an expansion card to start with.

 

A new gaming rig would be about $300 for an i5 4690 and a budget z97 mb.  the onboard video on the i5 beats what I currently have and can be expanded later.  that just leaves snagging HD's from the HTPC and replacing it with an SSD... Oh and coming up with the $300 for the gaming machine.