Nas or not to Nas?

godskitchen

Hello one and all, i built a PC for a friend of mine in may of this year, the case he wanted was not in stock at the time so I gave him an old one I had knocking around.

Anyway the case is now back in stock, its the Origen s21t
http://www.origenae.com/en/htpc_s21t.htm

Really nice case, expensive but lovely.

Anyway, it holds up to 10 HDDs, which he needs, well I say need, thats not true but he will fill it.

What I was wondering is, what advantage would a NAS setup have over having all 10 HDDs in the one case, apart from heat, which I think I can solve with some well places fans. He wont have any need to stream the media across a network he says, but I think this is short sighted......

Any advice would be very welcome........

Cheers

Shiny

The motherboard in the computer should be able to spin down any
hardrives that are not in use if you put the drives into the pc.

As you say yourself he wont need to stream media so I assume that
there is only 1 pc in the house. Hence he would save money any power
to keep everything together in the one place.

To start with put everything into the new case and in a years time if he
wants an NAS then, it would be easy to migrate the hardrives over to it.

godskitchen

Thanks Shiny, I do have one more question, he has a 500w power suply at present, he will have 10 HDD's on this thing before the end of the year, all of them at least 500Gb, what power suply would I need to advise him to look at?

The system right now is a E6600, 2Gb ram, 512Mb 8800GTS.

Or is it a case of he wont need anymore power as he wont ever really be using more than one HDD at a time?

Also when you say spin down........am I right in thinking this wont turn the drive off, just put less power to it?

Cheers again

Shiny

Well each of the hardrives would take 12Watts each under heaviest load possible
but this would rarely happen.

I reckon its going to be pretty close with that power supply.

If it is a good one it will be able to handle the surge of power during startup.
But if I was you I would consider a 750 watt supply to ensure the system wouldn't
crash under max load.

colm_c

10x 500GB = 5TB (at least)

Thats a lot of space for anyone's home computer - is he going to download then entire Internet!

What does he need so much space for?

Surely he would be much better having some kind of hotswap drive(s) so he could just stick in the drive(s) he wants at any one time.

colm_c

Sorry, just seen the case. Home Theatre - that would explain the drives. Still 5TB is an awful lot of space even for that purpose.