NAS Boxes

[raimon]

Hey chaps,

 

This is for home use.

I currently have a D-Link DNS-320L ShareCenter, great piece of kit, can support 2 internal drives, 1 external drive, builtin FTP Server, bittorrent and blah blah blah.

 

I want to know is there a nas box like the size of a mini switch which you can setup then plug about 6 external drives in, making it like a storage server having 6 drives or so, dependant on the number of usb sockets of the nas.

 

Cheers.

[3s-gtech]

Not that I know of - but you could build one based on something like a NUC with a USB 3.0 hub, or a mini-ITX PC. Would probably be pretty cheap if built using something like an AM1 mini-ITX board with a Sempron CPU and 4GB of RAM, booting from USB stick.

[raimon]

Not that I know of - but you could build one based on something like a NUC with a USB 3.0 hub, or a mini-ITX PC. Would probably be pretty cheap if built using something like an AM1 mini-ITX board with a Sempron CPU and 4GB of RAM, booting from USB stick.

 

Thanks i like the NUC with USB Hub idea, what OS would you install on it?

[Dos_Box]

There are planty of Chinese 'droid based media centers around which will do that. The problem you have with getting a small PC then attaching drives to is that it starts to get very big very quicky. I have a Zyxel 2 drive NAS that is DLNA complient and use an old laptop with the screen removed as the media centre.

What is it you want to do with it exactly? That would be the first question I'd ask.

[themightymrp]

You could always go with FreeNAS - a prebuilt Linux distro which should make things fairly simple

[3s-gtech]

Yup FreeNAS would make most sense.

[raimon]

So i just need to build my own NUC and install FreeNas on it?

[3s-gtech]

NUC or any small PC, with lots of USB ports or a decent USB 3.0 hub.

[raimon]

Thanks I also read with FREENAS a minimum of 8GB is required, and the OS is better installed on a USB Drive rather than HDD as the image will take up the entire disk, making other parts of the disk space unavailable for storage, so wise to install it on a 4GB USB Flash/SD Card.

[Arthur]

What about Synology's DS414slim NAS? It takes 2.5" drives so is really small.

 

[raimon]

What about Synology's DS414slim NAS? It takes 2.5" drives so is really small.

 

 

Thanks, i currently have a nas with 2 internal drives, and 1 ext hdd connected. Now i wish to expand the capacity and i want a hub like device so i can just plug external HDDs in. And there is no limit of how many i can connect to it.

 

It also must be cheap and cheerful. My nas cost me £55, and i just put in my existing HDD from my PC, job done. Now i just want to expand the central storage but still keep using the current nas without replacing the current HDD, no point wasting those good drives.

Edited June 12, 2014 by raimon