Creating NAS was going on my head for a long time, and I finally created one after reading yet another Synlogy unit review
I already had an array of three 2TB hard drives configured in RAID5 which I have been using since 2012. I think that main reason was the noise - as I have only Noctua fans spinning consantly in my PC @ low RPM, and rest of components are semi-passively cooled, three 7200.14 Barracudas were the only noise source.
As currently I am more involved in cars than PC's, I wanted to spend as little money as I can. I have started with my spare PC which consisted of:
Core 2 Quad Q9550 @ 3,8GHz 1,32V
Asus P5Q-E
4x2GB DDR2
2x SSD 128GB
WD Blue 1TB
Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 Ti
Corsair CX750M
Windows 10
Not very energy efficent machine - Fermi and old, overclocked CPU I was using it for casual gaming in my home when I was living in another district, but I finally moved in again and it was just waiting for better days. I didn't measured power consumption, as first thing I have done was to change GPU to Radeon HD5450, remove HDD and make CPU run at stock. I ended up with 70W, and it was without any HDDs!
Next thing that came to my mind was motherboard. I have found that another mobo I have (Gigabyte GA-P35-DS4) uses few watts less during idle, so I swapped it immediately. I also modified BIOS to update veeery old Intel RST (8.9.x I think) to little more recent, which accepts bigger HDDs (11.6) and mobo was ready to go. Another bonus was that it can set lover CPU voltage than previous Asus (0,7V instead of 0,85V).
Back in time, I had an hobby of collecting old CPUs. I have more than 100, and 30+ of them are LGA775. I selected few and started experimenting. I have pretty nice Core 2 Duo E8400 which was capable to do 4,8GHz on air, but quickly it became clear, that it doesn't undervolt very nicely. Finally I found Pentium E5500 which can do 1,4GHz on 0,75V, and that's what I am using right now. Final setup is as follows:
Pentium E5500 @ 1,4GHz 0,75V
Gigabyte GA-P35-DS4
2GB DDR2
Toshiba OEM SSD 128GB
3x Seagate ST2000DM001 RAID5
Corsair CX750M
OMV 3.0.74
That setup gives me:
41W during idle with HDDs shut down
55W when HDDs are spinning
58W under CPU stress (!)
63W while generating DLNA library which stresses HDDs and CPU
I think that most impressive is CPU power ussage, as idle to load delta is only 3W which suggests TDP ~5W. Pretty nice for old 45nm Core 2 Duo. And it is still powerful enogugh to saturate whole 1Gb link:
I am using this machine mainly as data storage accessed thorugh SMB, but it also serves as print server, DLNA server and I am planning to get familiar with Plex. I've been using it for few days, and haven't got any issues - it is stable, and behaves predictably.
I had only one strange issue. After two days, and number of restarts, my RAID array disappeared from web GUI, and obviously data became unavailable. It happened after setting hdparm.conf to put drives to sleep after 5 seconds of inactivity. As stupid as it sounds, I just wanted to check if it works, but I ended with danger of data loss and quickly attached GPU to troubleshoot the problem. To my relief, array was green under Intel RST bios, and couple minutes after that I was able to access my data under Ubuntu livecd - BIG relief
After some tinkering it became apparent, that RAID array is not assembled and I found an command to assemble it, after which everything was working correctly, but I had to it every reboot. It took me few hours to find out that mdadm was looking for arrays only on existing partitions, but my stripe was residing under "container". Simply changing one line in mdadm.conf fixed that, but I have no idea why it worked before and stopped working. It is also my first time I am using RAID under Linux environment, so everything was new for me. But all in all, data was intact and that's what matters most
In the future I will buy newer hardware, but I am happy with power consumption results I have now. I have bought 250W Gold rated power supply and I am waiting for delivery. It should be much more efficient under such conditions: when running on it's own, CX750M consumes 18W off wall and if I calculated it properly, new PSU should cut power consumption by about 15W which is awesome
Last but not least, here are photos of my build (hdds are getting cooling from small fan on front of the case):
Thanks for reading!