Building a NAS with 10+ year-old hardware

  • Hi,


    I've got some old hardware lying around gathering dust, and decided to build a NAS to give it some purpose. The idea is for it to be a simple content delivery platform for other devices in my home network, namely phones, chromecasts and a separate encoding machine, that should read it's input video/audio files from the NAS and write it's output to it. In total, there should be no more than 3, maybe 4 devices interacting with the NAS at any given time.


    All content intended for the media devices will already be encoded to compatible formats and all my devices are set to communicate via SMB, so there won't be any encoding or dedicated media server running on the NAS, just an SMB server.


    The hardware I have available is:


    Motherboard:
    Intel DG31PR
    or
    ECS G31T-M7


    CPU:
    Celeron 450 (1-core, 2.2GHz, 800MHz FSB, 512KB L2, 35W) - Avarage CPU Mark: 626
    or
    Core 2 Duo (2-core, 2.8GHz, 1066MHz FSB, 3MB L2, 65W) - Avarage CPU Mark: 1775


    RAM:
    1GB DDR2 667MHz (Markvision)
    or
    2GB DDR2 80MHz (Corsair)


    I've looked in this forum and elsewhere for information regarding to the performance requirements for my use case, but couldn't find anything particlarly useful for this specific hardware combination, so I decided to ask for help from people more experienced/knowledgeable than I am in the subject.


    What would be the most power-efficient combination of these parts that can deliver enough performance for my use case? Can I get away with using the Celeron? By the way, I'm willing to overclock/underclock the CPUs if it's beneficial to the use case.

  • Hi,


    I have a modest configuration, OMV4, Athlon II X2 250 3.0, 6GB RAM DDR3 and 4TB for data.
    Use FTP, SMB, CUPs, MySQL and NGINX for Nextcloud.
    In my network about 6 devices access the NAS, plus two devices with LibreELEC for multimedia.
    I have no problem with my NAS.
    Your configuration ECS G31T-M7 + Core 2 Duo seems good for what you intend, although I would try to go to the maximum RAM with that board, I think they are 4GB.

  • just an SMB server


    Then you look at the wrong stuff. For a Samba server CPU is irrelevant and amount of RAM is irrelevant as long as your network is the bottleneck and not your storage (only if storage is slower than network having huge amounts of RAM is of any use since only then the filesystem buffer allows network writes happening a little bit faster).


    You need good NICs so if you want to stay with onboard stuff ECS already lost since 'Atheros AR8112 10/100 LAN' -- that's Fast Ethernet and therefore too slow.


    Again: CPU horsepower and amount of RAM are 100% irrelevant for your use case, you need a good NIC with some offloading instead.


    See ODROID HC1 and HC2, that's the performance you want (and 99.9% OMV boxes based on x86 scrap won't match):


  • I have a modest configuration, OMV4, Athlon II X2 250 3.0, 6GB RAM DDR3 and 4TB for data.
    Use FTP, SMB, CUPs, MySQL and NGINX for Nextcloud.

    My C2D (an E7400 btw, just realised now I forgot to say this in my original post) should deliver about the same performance level as your Athlon, so it does give me peace of mind that despite the age, my hardware should be enough for the job.



    You need good NICs so if you want to stay with onboard stuff ECS already lost since 'Atheros AR8112 10/100 LAN' -- that's Fast Ethernet and therefore too slow.


    Again: CPU horsepower and amount of RAM are 100% irrelevant for your use case, you need a good NIC with some offloading instead.

    Intel board it is then. Thanks for the heads-up! And I guess I'll give the Celeron a try, since CPU power is irrelevant, the lower TDP becomes the next best thing.


    About the ODROID boards, I had given it some thought, but I just upgraded my rendering/encoding machine recently and I'm not willing to invest any money in hardware at the moment. The HC1 and HC2 are really good products though, and I might pick one up at some point in the future.


    Both replies did clarify a lot of stuff for me, thanks everyone for the help!

  • The HC1 and HC2 are really good products though


    In fact their CPU is too powerful for the job (and wastes a bit too much energy for the use case -- but I'm an energy efficiency fetishist from time to time and consider 2W more than needed awful ;) )


    Fun fact: I started measuring NAS performance with servers ~15 years ago. And it's really funny to see that such low cost designs like HC1/HC2 (or a couple of other ARM designs) today outperform literally everything that is older than 10 years in my lists.


    That said: there's no need to trust into anything. Once you have your setup running simply run a test. I would recommend Helios Lantest with 10 GbE settings against a Samba share. I still bet that 99.9% of x86 based OMV installations that make use of Gigabit Ethernet are slower than those ODROID thingies.

  • For the CPU, you may want to consider using the Core 2 Duo instead of the Celeron.


    The C2D is a newer generation than the Celeron, and more efficient overall with better low load power management. TDP isn't an issue here, as its a measure of maximum thermal dissipation at high CPU loads, which your NAS probably wont ever be at. At low loads, the C2D's better low power management is probably more useful

Jetzt mitmachen!

Sie haben noch kein Benutzerkonto auf unserer Seite? Registrieren Sie sich kostenlos und nehmen Sie an unserer Community teil!