I'm not building this myself, but I selected the components for a friend. The requirements were that it had to be aesthetically pleasing and small. The idea is for it to sit on a shelf. Its going to run either UnRaid or FreeNAS. Here's what we came up with. BTW go easy on me, I'm on mobile.
PSU: Just the cheapest Gold rated Mini-ITX power supply. It will only need to power two drives and the 17W processor.
Case: Really the case doesn't matter. This was just the best looking case we found for the size.
RAM: Cheep ECC RAM that fits the requirement's for the motherboard. Looks to be from an old PowerEdge R610
Motherboard/CPU: It was a clear choice to go with an embedded motherboard. We picked this model because of the dual gigabit Ethernet, CPU, and PCI slot. Here are some other moddles we were looking at.
HDD: I know some of you will have problems using a refurbished hard drive. I have a friend that works for this company and he explained to me their refinishing process. I completely trust it... maybe.
Things to upgrade
SSD for cache: You don't need a big one. I recommend up to 30GB. It's not like your going to be copying GTA back and forth.
RAM: The ram is super cheep. Why not just get 8GB for an extra $20.
UPS or Raid card: Its bad news if a hard drive looses power while it's writing. A old UPS or Raid card would solve this (I'm talking about a raid card with a battery on it).
Anyways here, AM1 Based NAS, Motherboard has 4 SATA ports, with some extra RAM for headroom, that hard drive you have there is going to die quickly buy something new and rated for NAS use, also all the sata ports at 6gbs per second, rather than 2 3gb ports there, not that that matters much with hard drives
while ECC memory is preferred the cheapest solution I've found out side of ghetto ASUS AM1 ECC builds is an i3+board+8gbs of RAM starting at $300
case natively supports up to 3 3.5" drives
and ya, you want a UPS at some point
also please tell him the PC you throw in a closet to store your data doesn't have to look good.
well... their hardware is designed solely on RAID and HDD support. For proper PC nas you'd need raid card - as you wouldn't want to bet on those built in ones...
that depends, but its not. (cheaper ones would be yes.)
they have few additional features normal mobo built-in controllers won't have. Like automatic failover, the long running ops can be done without downtime, and loss of accessibility etc. some include BCV; or event/transact logging
overall depends on algorithms it uses, and thus some might be much more expensive than others.
The built-in raid controllers are usually cheap crap, that will overtime break your data if you have a faulty drive and will never let you know until all your data is dead.
Well ya, but I'm going to assume that this is a media NAS, not something for important regular back ups, lots of people just run NAS' with old hardware, or buy low power/cost AM1 stuff for machines that only need a single 1080p stream
Crap! I was must of been on that ARK page for 30 min yesterday. I'll swap it out for this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=20-226-778 This is only ment to be a 1-2 drive system so the motherboard is fine. I talked to him about the case when we picked it out and he said it is going to be in his living room. I don't care and he wouldn't care normally, but he insisted on it. Anyways thanks for catching that.