mini-ITX NAS Box for under 100Eur - is it possible?

PDD

Hi Folks,

I recently bought a discounted Thecus N299 only to find that it was crippled by an upper limit of 500Gb, use a HDD bigger than that in them and it wont work. So it got me thinking could I get all the same functionality but with expandability by building my own on a budget.

I want to a NAS box that has RAID-1, prefferably power efficient and relatively low noise. I have a case and 2x 1TB HDD so it just leaves the power supply, mobo, chip and ram to be bought. I was thinking along the lines of using a mini-ITX board but can't find anywhere in Ireland that does them for a reasonable price, does anyone else?

Regards,

Dave

Wcool

hi PDD,

First, are you sure about the limit? This forum about N299 seems to report some drives that work:

Compatible drives

The bigger problem with the N299, is that it does not have spindown of the hard disks and the slow processor condemns it to a maximum speed of around 6.5Mb per second.

A min-itx board is possible. Best is to search on Ebay but not the Irish one. That will severly limit your options.

This is what I found on the German Ebay:

Via C7 mini itx board new, passive cooling

That board is 76 euro including shipping, but no doubt you should be able find even cheaper 2nd hand versions with a bit of patience (and maybe including RAM + PSU)

That board is silent, more than powerful enough (you could make it into a small home server with NAS function) and if you don't want to use FreeNAS or Linux, you could even run Windows on it.

Another option is Intel Celeron passive cooling

This will use more energy though but maybe compare what interfaces are on the computer.

You still need to buy the RAM + power supply (like a laptop PSU).
So it's a bit of work (isn't that all the fun??) but should be possible around 100 euro.

Wcool

Just to give you an example of a 2nd hand mini-itx board on Gumtree:

Itx Pc For Sale Epia-M10000 1ghz 512MB 40GB Htpc

Now this would be including PSU and RAM, it might still be there.