HP ProLiant MicroServer

[Samdy Gray]

The Pi's won't be powerful enough to run a full blown NAS solution, but one of the old PCs probably will.

Processor speed isn't all too essential, it's more about the amount of RAM and the number of drives the motherboard can take.

[Nomoreheroes]

Pumbaa - There's one Ebay with 2 x 160GB hard drives for £100

[slinky]

Just reading through this got me thinking. I have 2 or 3 old pcs in the loft plus an old laptop hard drive and a couple of Raspberry Pis. Does that mean I have enough components to make the equivalent of one of these Synology boxes?

Built myself an unraid server a few months back from a few bits and pieces I had lying around to store content for HTPC in the front room.  Works brilliantly and was completely free.  Have since upgraded the hard drives and bought a licence which has given me 12TB of storage with room to increase in the future.

[Nomoreheroes]

Thinking about this a bit more now. What does the Synology one do that this doesn't?

http://www.ebuyer.com/248760-d-link-dns-320-sharecenter-pulse-2-bay-no-disks-nas-enclosure-dns-320

There's over £100 difference between the two, but what does that £100 buy you?

[jonny72]

The Synology features are documented here;

http://www.synology.com/dsm/index.php?lang=uk

[Nomoreheroes]

I think, as with Pumbaa, I'm not the most tech savvy in the world and was looking for someone to help cut through some of the tech-speak and jargon.

All I want to do is back up photos and music. Plus I thought it would be good for the family to be able to share documents across platforms - Also thought about creating a database or two to store on it. Was going to then link it into my modem/router and poss create a VPN for me and selected others to access - But that might be a pipe dream.

Never done owt like this before. Don't wanna spend oodles of cash if I can get away with £50 and a couple of old hard drives from no longer used pcs.

[jonny72]

You get a lot more features and functionality with a Synology box over a basic NAS device. But you need to look at those extra features to see if they're something you want and whether they are worth the extra money. Have a look through the tabs on the page I posted the link to, including the packages.

Sharing documents is easy - it has a cloud file server (ie Dropbox style functionality).
Databases - it runs mySQL.
VPN - not sure you need it as there are other ways to access the files remotely.

[Nomoreheroes]

Taking the plunge with a Synology DS213+ and 2 x 1TB Seagate Barracudas.

Was going to buy from WAE+ (who were the cheapest) but found lots of bad reviews. Guess it will have to be Amazon for an extra £25.

[jonny72]

I'd go with the highest capacity drives you can, especially if you are going to mirror the drives.

1Tb won't last long.

And why the DS213+? You realise that is part of their business range? Will be overkill for home use - you're paying for performance that you don't really need.

[Nomoreheroes]

I'd go with the highest capacity drives you can, especially if you are going to mirror the drives.

1Tb won't last long.

And why the DS213+? You realise that is part of their business range? Will be overkill for home use - you're paying for performance that you don't really need.

Everything I have in the study is black - 212J would stand out like a sore thumb. Looked at 213, which was expensive. Once I'd made the decision, I then went with the quicker processor.

[Samdy Gray]

Processor speed means nothing on a NAS. You'll be limited by your network speed and to some extents the read/write speed of the drives.

[jonbd]

Depends what you're doing with it. I have a 212j and I get full speed transfers out of it as long as i'm not doing anything else. If I run sabnzbd or sickbeard etc on there, the transfer speed drops to 20ish MB as the CPU can't keep up with the transfer requests, even if those programs are sat doing nothing. I've upgraded to a microserver and it's much better for that now. I still wanted a couple of synology features though so i'm running their software in a VM so get the best of both worlds.

[jonny72]

HP Micro Server down to £110 at eBuyer after the £100 cashback....

http://www.ebuyer.com/430446-proliant-microserver-turion-2-2-2gb-250gb-nhpl-sata-lff-in-704941-421