Recommendations for a NAS newbie?

[Tomson124]

Hey everyone,

 

I was researching different ANs solutions for quite some time now, but as prebuilt things aren't really my thing, and they tend to be overpriced often, too, I want to build one myself. Have a lot of experience with "normal" consumer grade hardware and "gaming" PCs. 

But reagarding server stuff I am a bit lost.

My goal is to built something I can place in my small attic above the hallway right next to the router. Shouldn't consume to much power, but noise is not exactly an issue up there. It would be used for storage and as a backup to my main computer (mostly photographs and video clips), and maybe some smaller tasks in VMs.

Budget is around 500€.

My main idea was a AMD build with an Athlon 200GE (or 3000G) about 8GB RAM and 3x2TB would be more than enough for some time.

Any suggestions? Also found a deal on ebay for a Supermicro X10SLL-F + 8GB ECC RAM + Intel Xeon 1230V3 for 159€ which I am considering, too, but I think the power usage of the Xeon might be a little high even in idle due to it being still 22nm?

Thanks in advance.

[testdasi]

As a simple NAS, the Xeon 1230 V3 should be more than sufficient. Power consumption on the NAS will be mainly driven by your HDD and not the CPU. Intel SpeedStep is pretty good at reducing power consumption to an acceptable level. You are unlikely to break even 10-20W diff in power consumption in any reasonable amount of time with more expensive hardware.

 

Also note to add 20-30 Euros to cover a cheapo GPU since I don't think the 1230 V3 has integrated.

[Tomson124]

2 hours ago, testdasi said:

Also note to add 20-30 Euros to cover a cheapo GPU since I don't think the 1230 V3 has integrated.

I did some research for the CPU and often it was stated, that it would consume about 20W in idle. Which seems a little high, but when I consider how much power it has in comparison to e.g. the AMD Athlon.

I don't need a GPU as far as I understand it, as the mainboard has a IPMI.

 

But would be 8GB of RAM sufficient for the setup I am intending as I could get the same set with 16GB for 30€ more.

 

Just saw the board only has SATA2 which doesn't matter for the HDDs but for a cache SSD maybe I shoul look for an add-in-card.

Nevermind, it has 2 SATA3 and 4 SATA2 ports.

Edited January 9, 2020 by Tomson124
Misread SATA port info

[testdasi]

While you can run Unraid headless, you might still need GPU to set things up e.g. BIOS. I don't think IPMI supports that and I don't think AsSpeed VGA chip works either due to lacking drivers.

 

8GB is enough for pure NAS. Even 4GB is enough. 16GB is better if you want to do stuff like dockers (trust me, once you set the NAS up, you will be very itchy to do more with it.

[Tomson124]

Okay thanks for the input. You maybe know by any chance how the Xeon E3-1280v2 compares to the 1230v3? I found another offer for a old workstation with that CPU and 32GB RAM, a Nvidia K2000 and even case and PSU, altough I would maybe change the PSU (if it is even possible, probabaly non-standard pin layout). For about the same price as the other offer, altough the other one is a real server board by supermicro and the workstation is "only" a HP OEM board.