Low power DIY NAS?

briany

Have a Synology NAS at the moment, which I'm happy enough with, but I've been thinking that if and when I did want to upgrade it, I might try the DIY route. Maybe that would offer a better price/performance return than something off the shelf.

So, a few basic questions:-

- Is it possible to build a NAS with a power consumption of under 20 watts at peak, and under 5 watts at idle/hibernation? (24-7 machine)

- Is it possible to build a NAS with the same form factor as typical commercial, i.e. a compact, quiet, box with status lights for the drives? Can you buy enclosures that are specifically made for building a DIY NAS?

- Are the open-sourced NAS OSes out there as fully-featured and supported as DSM for Synology?

Coyler

You could go Rasberry Pi/ARM chip but I'd recommend something like Apollo Lake chips. These are prebuilt or pre-soldered onto the mobo like this. You could easily pick up a nice mini-itx case that would suit your needs and taste. And finally, as for OS, it's entirely up to you. What's your use case? It's entirely possible to run DSM on x86, I think... but what's the fun in that?

ED E

1. Depends on drives. Each drive pulls a couple watts while spun up

2. Yes, but options are limited. DS380 is ok but needs cooling mods.

3. DSM is just a port of existing options, Debian could do the same things with a slightly less polished UI.

ED E

Coyler wrote: »

I'd recommend something like Apollo Lake chips.

AL are a bit on the glorified calculator side of things, Denverton has a little more horses to play with.