In the market for a home NAS

PogMoThoin

I'm making a few changes to my setup and have decided to invest in or build a NAS box of some sort, I'll be moving my SATA's with media to it. It's main purpose will be to stream media throughout the house over gigabit. It main requirement is that it needs to be low power and all it will be running is Windows server with Sabnzbd, Couchpotato and Sickbeard. At the moment I'm using the young fellas gaming pc as home media server, I'd like to reduce my bills by not leaving this on 24/7.

I've looked at the HP Proliant series, anyone know of any good deals going?

My budget is about €3-400, as I've said I have the drives (a1TB, a 2TB and 2x3TB) but I'd like space for 3-4 more. Also note, I have a VAT number.

ED E

See the deals forum, supposedly the proliant cashback is being extended further.

PogMoThoin

ED E wrote: »

See the deals forum, supposedly the proliant cashback is being extended further.

Yeah, checking that out now. Only 4 bays though, I was hoping for at least 6 so I might have to build. I may settle for that though, it's a good deal.

vibe666

I have a HP ML110 G6 and with a little shoehorning (and some extra fans) I've managed to get nine 3.5" drives into it, 8x 2tb disks for the NAS and the 250gb one that came with it.

it's also good for up to 16gb of RAM (i have 8gb in mine) and the socket 1156 mobo can take anything from the dual core Pentium G6950 that came with it to an x3480 quad core CPU.

the only thing to watch out for is if you're swapping out the fans as they are wired the HP way (i.e. non-standard) so regular fans need the pins swapping around on the plug, but it's a 2 minute job once you know you have to do it.

i'm running ESXi5 on mine (booting of the internal USB socket) with a freeNAS VM running on it from the 250gb disk connected directly to the eight 2tb disks for the NAS, plus a few other test VM's and it's been running really well, although i could do with some more RAM so i can give a bit more to freenas to speed it up a little, but other than that i'm very happy with it.

also worth noting that the ML110's sometimes pop up on the HP cashback site as well as the microserver, so they can also be great value.

EDIT: seems like the G6 is old news now and the G7 is a lot more pricy than i got my G6 for, which is more than a little disappointing.

i'll keep digging and see what i can come up with.

PogMoThoin

Pulled the pin on this just now as the cashback offer ends 30 sept
http://www.hpshop.ie/products.asp?partno=658553-421

PogMoThoin

It arrived today, I'm amazed at the build quality, a real beauty of a case, nice and neat. I'm also surprised at the size, it's lots smaller than it looks in the images and videos. PityI don't really have the time to get it setup ATM.