I want to make myself a NAS, and I have available parts from a Dell Optiplex 980, a few years old, but it doesn’t take top of the line stuff to run a bunch of hard drives.
However: The Dell case is the “desktop” form factor. There’s not enough room for all the hard drives. And the Dell motherboard only has 3 sata ports anyway. So I can’t use the motherboard.
Looking around online, the CPU socket on that board is LGA 1156. If I buy another board that supports that socket, could I use the CPU and memory from the Dell board? What other compatibility do I need to check?
you can purchase external drive enclosures that will hold multiple drives, and connect via a single usb, sata, etc. connection.
purchase a sata controller card (usually <$100) to add more sata ports.
If you’re set on switching to a different mobo, you should be fine with the same cpu and memory as long as the socket types match (memory uses a standard interface). The only real worry, for me, would be if the new board will fit in the case. Dell uses custom size cases iirc (power supplies, too, but the connections there are universal, so it shouldn’t be an issue).
I have to get a new case, too, since the dell case is small and won’t fit the number of drives I want to use. I don’t want to use external drives because I want it to look nice
I suppose I could look for a case that will fit the number of drives and the mobo, and then get a SATA card to connect them. That might be cheaper/easier than moving to a new mobo.
You may want to think about power consumption - most of the time the NAS isn’t doing much. A standard mobo/psu combo will consume a reasonable amount of power, let alone the disks as well.
Spend the money on a low power passively cooled mobo with sufficient SATA ports, and a laptop style psu. Add a tower case with a lots of disk bays. It will be more efficient, quieter, and more reliable without a fan.
I used a Zotac motherboard with an AMD E-350 dual-core for my server a few years back. I only run a 3Tb mirror, though. I think it supports 4 SATA drives. But I could not find anything similar on the Zotac site now.
Sure, but you’ll need to track down an older (obsolete) motherboard. You’ll likely need a heat sink / fan as well, since the Dell has a passive heat sink in a shroud, with airflow from the case.
Using the Dell motherboard in a different case is problematic. While the 980 should be old enough to not suffer from the 12V-only power supply fad, Dell does not offer ATX I/O shields for their boards, the mounting holes tend to be in odd locations, and the front panel controls and cabling are specific to that chassis.
Dell received those systems as “barebones” (case, motherboard, power supply) from the manufacturer (Foxconn) and then added CPU / heat sink / RAM / drives depending on what the customer ordered.
If you’re going to build a server, you may as well start with a server. There are many nice ones on eBay for very reasonable prices, both name-brand (Dell, etc.) and OEM (such as Supermicro).
I’d suggest checking out the Serve The Home forums. eBay finds are posted in the “Great Deals” forum, but as you are a newcomer to this sort of thing, I’d suggest asking what people think about any given system before ordering anything.
I set an Optiplex GX1 on fire once when I swapped out the power supply. It turns out that the PSU connectors were standard but the wiring of the PSU itself wasn’t (which I could see easily just by looking at the wires themselves). I melted part of the MB. Luckily the machine was a cheap surplus computer we bought for peanuts.
That taught me to never take anything for granted when dealing with a Dell desktop machine.
Reliability through redundancy. Which is the “R” in RAID.
After all, your single drive is only one disk drive failure away from destroying all your data. A properly-built RAID will be able to survive single-disk failure with no down time and no loss of data. A moderately deluxe RAID will even survive multiple simultaneous disk failures.
Hrmm. So maybe the only useful part I can scavenge from the Dell is the memory.
This is extremely shoestring (see below). I probably can’t afford anything actually marketed as a server, which is also likely to be overkill for most of my purposes. And I’m not exactly new at system building, just well out of practice.
Thanks for the Serve the Home link.
The NAS is to hold my media library, all ripped from DVDs/Blurays for viewing on devices throughout my house. I need more than 3TB because I have more media than that, and I’m going with multiple drives for data redundancy.
What prompted this is that one of my HDDs just died, taking with it about 200 movies that I’ll now have to re-rip. It is a pain in the ass to re-rip 200 physical disks. So I’m going RAID with at least one parity drive.
My plan is to run this box with FreeNAS. But the budget is small and it’s competing against just shoving some more drives into my old Windows box and setting up software raid. Not as resilient as ZFS, but no additional cost except the additional hard drives (which I’ll buy regardless).
Don’t bother with anything other than RAID 1 or RAID 10. Rebuild times on large HDDs in RAID 5 or 6 can be considerable. Just get yourself a pair of high-capacity HDDs and mirror them.
One resource I haven’t seen mentioned is PCPartPicker. Great site to mock up a build based on your needs (including price), and look at other NAS builds. Start a system build will let you choose parts and ensure compatibility. You can also view completed builds and search on NAS or similar to see what others have done. Might give you a few ideas at least.
And maybe not even that. A memory technology only lasts a few processor generations and then gets replaced with something newer. Your 980 probably has DDR3 memory. Current systems will either be DDR3 or DDR4. However, your existing memory might be too slow for a newer system (there’s generally a minimum speed supported by a given CPU / motherboard combo, and if your memory is slower than that it won’t be accepted).
One of the posts in Great Deals over at StH is a 1RU rackmount server where the seller has hundreds of them and is willing to sell for $85 in qty 1. Just add CPU, memory, and drives. As an example.
Take a look at my RAIDzilla 2.5 systems. Home-designed and built from various off-the-shelf components. Lots of discussions about backup strategy, and coolpictures (if I do say so myself).
RAID is not backup. Neither is a copy of the data in the same building (even on another floor). RAID will save you from some hardware failures (but not all). It doesn’t do anything for you if you delete the wrong files / directory by accident, or any one of a number of other events that are more likely than you might think.
Off-site media is one solution (a friend / relative’s house out-of-state). Tape (still stored someplace safe) is another. Then there’s the various online backup services, but you need a fast connection for them to be useful. Some are “all you can eat”, some are “pay by the GB”.
