NAS - build or buy?

[ysu]

It's pretty much what's in the original article, few things upgraded, eg the mobo is one category up (A88 chipset) because the a55's were all out.

It's a tad dearer at $728.74 with 2x3TB drives. Here's the full list:

AB53929 Silverstone Black Precision PS09 Micro-ATX Case 1 1 $52.00 $52.00
AA49222 Silverstone Strider Essential Series ST50F-ES 500W Power Supply 1 1 $59.00 $59.00
AB53530 AMD A4-4000 Dual-Core Socket FM2 3.2GHz CPU Processor 1 0 $45.00 $45.00
AB53179 ASUS A88XM-A FM2+ Motherboard 1 1 $105.00 $105.00
AA62924 Kingston DT SE9 16GB USB Flash Drive (DTSE9H/16GB) 1 1 $11.32 $11.32
AB53711 Kingston 8GB (1x 8GB) DDR3 1600MHz DIMM Memory 1.35v KVR16LN11/8 1 1 $100.64 $100.64
AA22678 Western Digital WD30EFRX WD 3TB Red 3.5” IntelliPower SATA3 NAS Hard Drive 2 2 $164.99 $329.98



I'm not sure if I'll go freeNAS or unRaid, but leaning towards unRaid, I'm reading good things about it, and I can just put in another 3TB drive or two and extend the capacity....

Edit: it's all from mWave, I wanted to get it all in one place.

[KNAPPO]

I saw a little red light pop up on my NAS 2 weeks ago but everything has been streaming fine. I was a little worried so I turned it off till I had the time to look into it, turned out to be a critical system error...

Went into the software to check out the drives and HDD #3 had the warning 'Data Volume' is in degraded mode. The drive was still showing up as good so I did a clean and format of it and all is good. The system is now recompiling itself which will take a while. Really glad I set it up in Raid 5 now, looks like I didn't loose a thing.

[ysu]

Update;
I had to upgrade the CPU as well, now the box is here, I've put it together.
Very pleased with the components, Silverstone, asus, these companies do deliver. They fit together nicely, no hiccups. It's all relatively small & pretty light, too.

I still could not quite decide what to install, went with unraid for now, the install is mostly done, but I still haven't had time to set it properly up, nor to discover what can I actually do with it

[wild]

Finally decided to throw some more drives and a RAID card at my 3 year old Microserver. I already had 2x3TB drives in it, so I've bought another 3 to use in RAID 5. Had to install the 3 new drives and set up the array, copy the data off the 2 existing drives, and then expand the array. Now comes the nervous 34 hour wait as I pray it doesn't shit itself and take all my data with it. That said, I've backed up the important non-replaceable data, and the rest is just TV shows and anime.