NAS

[Samdy Gray]

Hi Sam...did you recieve the 1.000 pence i sent you?

Yes I did, thanks.

[leefer]

Thanks to you also and for being patient.

[Peter Venkman]

I'm trying to keep power usage low though (to save on the leccy bill) and those Core2Duo chips are very power hungry.

Processor power isn't really so important on the NAS, hell I've seen one guy on AVForums who built himself a NAS with an old Pentium 3 (533mhz) and 256mb RAM and could still stream .mkv files flawlessly!

My network is only 10/100 ethernet rather than Gigabit, so the max transfer rate will be 12.5mb/s which an old chip will cope with easily.

If its power saving then you cant go wrong with an Atom, dirt cheap to buy brand new (£45ish) and very very low power, about 10w on full power I think.

[Simon Pieman]

I've got a spare celeron chip knocking about Sam. I'll check on the socket type but it's quite old.

[leefer]

Ta for your help Sie........dead easy but wanted to be sure........can see Crispys videos in all there glory now!.

Thanks.

[Samdy Gray]

I've got a spare celeron chip knocking about Sam. I'll check on the socket type but it's quite old.

Cheers Si, I'm going to have a gander about later to see if I can find a second hand mini ITX board with chip on eBay, but yours might come in handy if I can't find anything.

[Simon Pieman]

Just looked it's socket 478 I believe, might not be so useful after all!

[Samdy Gray]

To the techies (Si Pie/jje): What's the best/cheapest 1TB SATA HDD at the moment?

eBuyer have a Samsung EcoGreen for £49 at the moment which is supposedly low power. The same drive was £35 on Aria the other day but they've run out of stock now

I'm thinking of just sticking a single 1TB drive in for now and then add another in at a later date and run RAID0 or RAID1.

[Simon Pieman]

I'll have to have a look, for a normal pc I would recommend a Samsung Spinpoint F1, but you won't need it for speed so pointless.

Don't bother with RAID 0 - it's only used for speed and if one drive fails the whole lot does. Usually only seen in high performance pcs and honestly the speed difference is not noticeable. I've swapped to RAID 1.

RAID 1 is for mirroring - so if one drive fails you still have a working array. This is best for data backup but you won't get any additional storage space by adding the extra drive in RAID 1.

[jayohaitchenn]

RAID0 = no RAID.

[Samdy Gray]

Ah, I misunderstood RAID0 then.

The idea was to use mirroring, so I'll be needing RAID1.

I can always add more drives at a later date when I need the extra storage and change over to RAID5.

[Peter Venkman]

I use Raid 0 with 2x1TB Samsung spinpoint F3 and the difference on some large files is amazing but on on smaller file sits not noticeable at all.

on HD tach with a single 1tb F3 Spinpoint the average read speed for me is 90mb/s with a pair in Raid 0 (1.8tb total) the read speed is 150mb/s.

Also bear in mind I am running a core i7 at 4.1ghz and using Raid 0 will utilize the CPU a lot more than a non raid set up so the cpu is always working more with Raid 0 - therefore if power usage is a concern then non raid will use a fair bit (25% or more) less power because the chip is not being worked all the time that disks are accessed.

The Eco green is a nice drive but it spins at 5400rpm rather than the 7200rpm of the F3 so its not as fast in real terms.

[jayohaitchenn]

Ah, I misunderstood RAID0 then.

The idea was to use mirroring, so I'll be needing RAID1.

I can always add more drives at a later date when I need the extra storage and change over to RAID5.

Also bear in mind that both drives will be wiped if you add a second and try to RAID1 it later. You need to back that data up before you create the RAID array.

[Samdy Gray]

Anyone know much about PCI-e SATA cards?

I've sourced a lower power Via mobo & CPU bundle off eBay for £15, but it only has two SATA ports. That's enough for now, but if I want to add more drives in the future I'll need one of those SATA cards. Do they still give full SATA speeds?

[Peter Venkman]

Never used one myself as I am choosey about motherboards, I insist the ones I buy have at least 4 sata.

But yes they do support full 3gbps but they are not hugely cheap, expect to pay around £25-30 for a decent one.