My 120$ ultrapowersaving 6-disk Asus E35m1-l build ...

Ok, i finally finished it. My true NAS build. Previously i had "beefy" Dell FX160 with 2 core 4 threads Atom 330, 3GB ram and 500GB 2,5 drive which run pure debian on 2gb flash disk.

Now i have:
Mobo:Asus E35m1-l, 6xSATA III, PCI-E x16
CPU: (embeded) AMD e-350 2 cores 2 threads 1,6GHz, 15W TDP
Ram: Kinstrone 4GB DDR3 (max 16GB)
PSU: (TFX) Delta 250W bronze
Chasis: Compaq CQ1120UK
disk chamber: Chieftec CMR-625 5,25" chamber for 6x 2,5" drives

The only new item is disk chamber (about 40$). The rest parts are used, bought from allegro (Polish ebay). PSU is from other case (8cm taller and deeper Viglen Genie SFF computer). Asus mobo didnt have backplate (shame!). Compaq case was the cheapest and smallest case with full 5,25 chamber i could get. Many others come with slim chamber which offcourse didnt have place for 6 disks. Unfortunately case didnt have window for TFX PSU - originally compaq mainboard was powered directly from some external psu. I was thinking about buying Pico PSU from alliexpress for about 15$. But i would also need some external PSU which would be another cost. So i just cut the window for my Delta TFX PSU. TFX'es are cheaper and very easy to get. Yeah, i know the cut is not stright. Its because of case rivet which wasnt flatten enough. I also had to grind down a little bit plastic front near 5,25 chamber because i wont be able to open two last disk shelves.

Im using now 3 disks 160GB for OMV and 2x500GB in mirror raid for data and still have 3 free shelves for futue expansion. Tere is also place for another disk under 5,25 bay so i will put there my 160GB when i will want to fill all shelves on my chieftec chamber with data disks. As i mentioned before mobo has PCI-E x16 slot. But as you can see there is very little room for expansion card. I dont need any PCI-E device right now (maybe some 4 port Intel NIC?) so it doesnt bother me much

I use torrents, samba, nfs and syncthing as cloud unlimited-space replacement for my Dropbox, GDrive and Mega accounts. Well im still using Mega for some very recent stuff. OMV shutdown plugin turns the machine off when there is no connections to it. My current router and cable modem are controlled by some cheap digital time switch. When i replace router with Mikrotik (which i need to buy anyway) it will also WOL my NAS at the start.

I also ordered 8cm of luminescent sticky tape to replace this ugly yellow paper scrap Space under my desk is really dark place xD

So yeah, so far im really happy with this setup, its little power consumption and overall cost.

PS. Sorry for any language mistakes, im from Poland.

Zitat von tkaiser

You share 500GB?

Yeah. They are best best deal now as you can buy them almost new for very low price. Computer stores sell them as used because most people when buy laptops replace them with SSDs.

Zitat von tkaiser

How much W in idle and how much when clients access the storage?

Well i dont have watt meter yet. Its just my assumption that all this setup eats less power than common 3,5" with separate CPU. Maybe its premature assumption? I will check it soon.

Well, they are not used anyway. They are new, but replaced with SSDs. So i dont think they were subject to physical damage more than other computers brought by the couriers to stores. And i will throw some SMART here later.

Hmm, im thinking that you are confusing RAID1 (mirroring) with RAID0(striping). Im not using the latter, and i will never do. Maybe RAID10 but never RAID0.

ZFS and BTRFS are great! I would love to use one of them. But they are RAM hungry hogs and i have only 4GB now. FN11 requires 8GB at least. I did have FN11 for a short time to check some samba sharing but it was clearly slower than OMV. Maybe when i will have some spare cash i will buy more RAM and put some ZFS or BTRFS but not now.

Im not an expert but ive read some ZFS topics, seen Level1Techs and Lawrence Systems YT channels and i have an account on FreeNAS forum. Those guys (FN forum) say something like this (short brief): "ZFS relies on RAM and on data written in it. If proper ammount of it is used ZFS arrays are quite hard to kill. Many people use very little ram, far below mimimal requirements and they are fine, even for many years. Until something fails. When something gets wrong we see many of them coming here crying "i lost my data! ZFS corrupted them, i trusted ZFS and FreeNAS and they failed me aaaaargh! Thats why we publish minimal requirements on site. Stick with it if you care about your data"
Offcourse its very short version, i would need to find topics and put link to them here. But overall i really wouldnt want to go below minimal FreeNAS (and NAS4Free) requirement which is 8GB ram.

As for RAID1 i will read it now.

PS. As for speed.

Zitat von tkaiser

if it's about sharing a slow 2.5" HDD

All used 2,5" are 7200rpm drives, not 5400rpm which is quite common for this size.

It took long time but i didnt forgot to put some energy consumption measurements. It can be usefull for those who consider buying mobo with this CPU.

Iddle ~22W
Load ~35W

Load = few torrents downloading + samba copying + nextcloud browsing

I already made another NAS with G2020T and some serious case and cpu cooling mods. I will move all current setup to it. I wonder will there be big difference in Watts. At first i was considering Biostar A68N-5600 but finally i decided to take full (but power eficient) cpu. Its all about IDDLE work anyway right?