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Cheap Nas/Home Server box
Dragoon0309
Member
Hey guys, I'm considering buying or building a nas or home server to store my extra data. RAID is a must as I want redundancy, any ideas?
I'm probably looking to spend a couple hundred not counting hard drives, but cheaper the better.
Comments
If you're looking for data availability then try a raspberry pi with USB drives, or a RAID1 SATA-to-USB 2 bay dock.
The HP N40L is a great little machine. or 54L or any of the Gen 8
Pi isn't too good unless you have a VERY large SD card
Edit: NVM, just re-read what you said.
N40L/N54L is a lovely machine for home server
Lots of info on it here: http://n40l.wikia.com/wiki/HP_MicroServer_N40L_Wiki
try to look at thecus, synology, qnap or buffalo product, their entry level nas, usually around 200-300,
if you more like Diy approach, you could try raspberryPi + ext usb hdd + owncloud
The N40L is around the same price, majority of the time it has a larger CPU that doesn't use ARM..
[EDIT] Same price here in Australia, not sure about US.
Alternatives to pi. Consider beagleboard xm. It has 4 usb ports. Or cubietruck which has native sata.
I use beagleboard xm with usb drives in raid 0. I care about availability over redundancy though.
I used thecus & synology product here, since its easy to find and cheap enough for my needs and I used raspi at home
http://www.ebay.com/itm/SuperMicro-1U-Server-X6DVA-EG-2x-Xeon-3-0GHZ-SL8P6-12GB-6x-2GB-No-HDD-/400596992746?pt=COMP_EN_Servers&hash=item5d457102ea
What cpu does that actually have?
A very old one. Stepping SL8P6 is a netburst architecture Xeon which came out around 2005/2006.
http://ark.intel.com/products/27094/64-bit-Intel-Xeon-Processor-3_00E-GHz-2M-Cache-800-MHz-FSB
It's probably okay to meet the OP purpose as a home storage server.
Get one of the cheap AMD all in ones with a fair chunk of SATA connectors.
a cheap second hand router that can run a custom firmware like ddwrt or openwrt and has two usb port (if you want to do a raid to project your data) could do the trick, too... (a second hand raspberry pi is cheap too and you'd be able to run different OS on it while you'd be rather limited on a router...)
An i3 could be pretty power efficient too (could go down to around 15/20w idle with a nice power unit and a 2.5 hdd) - a pi or a router would consume way less though.
Thanks for all the advice so far guys. It really helps. It looks to me like a PI or cheap computer build would be the best bet. I'm not too worried about power usage, but don't want to run a extremely loud second hand server from the early 2000's either. I had a shuttlebox at one point that was just way to loud.
an atom based pc with slow fan or maybe fanless heatsink will suit you best. Atom are also cheap. Otherwise, dedicated 2 bay nas box are also cheap.
I just bought a "WD My Net N900 Central HD" comes with a 1tb drive.. was on sale for $70.
The wd2go android app works really good. Let's me browse the network and streams movies/music straight to my tablet.
Pretty simple machine, no RAID or anything fancy but was really easy to setup. Quite impressed with it especially for the price.
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833146006
@Dragoon0309
Best price for what your looking for is $10.99 and free shipping:
Has 800 mhz arm cpu and 128 mb ram - can use sd card or usb flash drive for storage.
Can run archlinux and i think openwrt
http://www.amazon.com/Pogoplug-Backup-and-Sharing-Device/dp/B005GM1Q1O/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1397101960&sr=8-1&keywords=Pogoplug+Backup+and+Sharing+Device
I bought one and got it a few days ago - have not tested it yet due to no sd or flash drives - but i do hear its good - and for only $10.99 its a steal