Decided to take some old hardware I had laying around and consolidate the variety of HD's I have in two different PC's and build a NAS.

 

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E6750

Mobo: Foxconn G31MV-K LGA 775 Micro ATX

RAM: Corsair XMS2 2GB DDR2 (2x 1GB)

Drives: 2x 128GB Crucial M4 SSD (Cache)

3TB WD Red WD30EFRX

2x 2TB WD Black WD2002FAEX

2TB WD Green WD20EARX

PSU: Corsair CMPSU-650TX 650w

Case: Rosewill CHALLENGER ATX Mid Tower Case

SATA Card: Syba SD-SATA-4P RAID Controller Card with SIL3114 Chipset

 

Hope to start out with these parts and over time upgrade the variety of HD's to all being WD Reds. I know the Controller card is a RAID card, but going to see if that works as I had it lying around along with most of the other parts. Only new parts are the case, the WD Red, and the CPU Cooler(Arctic Freezer 7 Pro).  Plan on using this as just a NAS for now.  Using it for storing media, dashcam footage, and gameplay recordings.  Will most likely add SABNZBD, sickbeard, and couchpotato in the future as my stream PC(twitch) currently handles that duty.

 

Need to buy a flash drive today and get it put together tonight. 

unRAID 5 runs great on older hardware, unRAID 6 can be a little more picky in my experience - but still generally runs well on older hardware.  Let us know how things go.

 

 

I know the Controller card is a RAID card, but going to see if that works as I had it lying around along with most of the other parts.

 

If it doesn't work you should be able to flash it with the IDE bios, google sil 3114 bios, there's base (IDE) and RAID bios.

 

Connect as few array disks as possible to this controller or it will be a major bottleneck during parity check/sync and disk rebuilds.

 

I was just thinking about it being a bottleneck. May have to upgrade to a PCIe sata card as my mobo does have an x16 slot.  My mobo only has 2 onboard SATA slots and I was going to use those for the SSD's and connect the 4 HD's to the card.  I had just looked up about the card bios just before posting this so I may put it into one of my other pc's to update the bios first as I think the RAID bios is on there now.

 

Is it possible to just use that card for now and upgrade it in a few days when a new one arrives and not have to redo everything?

Didn't get it put together last night. Going to wait until I get a PCIe sata controller card.  My other two PC's don't have PCI slots on their motherboards so no way to get the non-raid bios on the card I have.  I mean yes there's a way, but to much of a pain to do it that way for something I'm just going to replace.

If you haven't already bought a card, the trusty old Adaptec 1430SA is a great little 4-port card and is available very inexpensively on e-bay:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Adaptec-AAR-1430SA-4-Port-SATA-PCI-E-RAID-Controller-PCA-0025-01-B-0836-/331750505705?hash=item4d3ddefce9:g:Q7IAAOSwL7VWkU7x

 

... if you get the 1430SA you may need to update it to the 2507 BIOS to support > 2TB drives (i.e. your 3TB Red) => but that's very easy to do without the need for any other PC.

 

Browsing the forums today for recommendations I saw that card mentioned. I went with this one:

 

IO Crest 4 Port SATA III PCI-e 2.0 x1 Controller Card Marvell Non-Raid with Low Profile Bracket SI-PEX40064

 

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00AZ9T3OU?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s00

 

Also found out instead of 4GB of RAM I only have 2GB. 2x 1GB sticks.

2GB is fine for basic NAS duties but may become an issue if you want to start running Dockers.

Already pricing parts upgrades and I don't even have this one built yet. DDR2 RAM is a bit on the pricey side compared to the same size DDR3 RAM.

Browsing the forums today for recommendations I saw that card mentioned. I went with this one:

 

IO Crest 4 Port SATA III PCI-e 2.0 x1 Controller Card Marvell Non-Raid with Low Profile Bracket SI-PEX40064

 

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00AZ9T3OU?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s00

 

Also found out instead of 4GB of RAM I only have 2GB. 2x 1GB sticks.

 

That card will work, although it'll limit your parity check and rebuild performance because it's only a single lane card.    That, plus the fact that your board's v1 PCIe bus means you'll only have 250MB/s of bandwidth available to share among 4 drives, which will be a notable bottleneck on performance when you have multiple drives in use at the same time (i.e. during parity checks).

 

The 1430SA's 4-lane interface would have completely eliminated the bottleneck.

 

 

 

That's why it helps to do more extensive research. Ended up buying the 1430SA card and will just return the other.

Already pricing parts upgrades and I don't even have this one built yet. DDR2 RAM is a bit on the pricey side compared to the same size DDR3 RAM.

 

I've got some DDR2. PM me and we'll discuss.

I finally got the non-raid bios flashed to the card I have. Even with the major bottlenecking I'm going to at least get a start on things.  Found a spare laptop HD and stole the ODD from my gaming rig and installed windows just to flash the new bios.

My God is this Controller Card slow. Got to 80% on the post read of the 3TB and I was at 40 hours....then I accidentally flipped the switch on my surge protector trying to plug in a new router.  :'( I'll resume this when the Adaptec card arrives today.

Here it is all done.  Got the Adaptec card installed and the 4th HD.

 

 

 

 

Upgraded to 4GB of RAM and installed a fan controller.  Doesn't sound like it's trying to take flight anymore.

Few months ago I found my G3258 and decided to upgrade my second PC and take the old parts from that and upgrade the NAS.

 

Mobo: ASRock H97M Anniversary Micro ATX

CPU: Intel G3258

RAM: G.SKILL Ripjaws X 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3

 

This mobo has enough SATA ports that I didn't have to use the Adaptec card anymore.  Been running good for the past few months.

 

 

Nice upgrade => more than doubled your CPU "horsepower" [PassMark 3964 vs 1724] and all on-board SATA ports was a very nice change.  Even saved a bit of power [TDP 53w vs 65w for the E6750]