Building a NAS - need hardware advice

Hi! I will be building a Network Attached Storage machine at home -
basically a box with a whole bunch of hard drives for Terabytes of
storage goodness. I've already chosen the case (Cooler Master's CM
Stacker) that will allow me to add up to 12 HDDs. I'm having trouble
with picking the innards though as I don't know what the requirements
of a NAS machine are. BTW, in the future I might use this box for a
TiVo-like functionality (recording shows and such) - this might have an
effect on the final components.

The motherboard will be pretty vanilla, with integrated everything (I
just need video and network, no need for audio), plus USB booting for
Damn Small Linux (want to keep OS separate from actual storage).

- What kind of power supply do I need? Is 400W enough or should I go
for 500W or even 600W? Why?
- Do I need a fast CPU?
- How much RAM do I really need?
- What is the usual way to add additional IDE drives beyond the four
allowed by the motherboard? I think I've seen PCI controller cards -
how many drives can I add with each card? Can I fill up all the PCI
slots with these cards or is there a limit?
- Anything I've missed?

Thanks a bunch!
-Roman

On 8 Dec 2005 23:24:44 -0800, rshekhtm.RemoveThis@gmail.com wrote:

>Hi! I will be building a Network Attached Storage machine at home -
>basically a box with a whole bunch of hard drives for Terabytes of
>storage goodness. I've already chosen the case (Cooler Master's CM
>Stacker) that will allow me to add up to 12 HDDs. I'm having trouble
>with picking the innards though as I don't know what the requirements
>of a NAS machine are. BTW, in the future I might use this box for a
>TiVo-like functionality (recording shows and such) - this might have an
>effect on the final components.
>
>The motherboard will be pretty vanilla, with integrated everything (I
>just need video and network, no need for audio), plus USB booting for
>Damn Small Linux (want to keep OS separate from actual storage).
>
>- What kind of power supply do I need? Is 400W enough or should I go
>for 500W or even 600W? Why?
>- Do I need a fast CPU?
>- How much RAM do I really need?
>- What is the usual way to add additional IDE drives beyond the four
>allowed by the motherboard? I think I've seen PCI controller cards -
>how many drives can I add with each card? Can I fill up all the PCI
>slots with these cards or is there a limit?
>- Anything I've missed?
>
>Thanks a bunch!
>-Roman

You're going to need a RAID controller. 3ware makes some decent 12
port SATA controllers. One piece of advice... WD SATA Hard Disks are
garbage. Out of about 200 I have I've already had to replace about
50 in the last year. I've been phasing them out in favor of Hitachi
disks and have not had any of those fail yet. Make sure you get a
motherboard with at least 1 64-bit PCI-X or PCI Express slot for your
RAID controller. Basically you will keep your OS on a disk attached
to the integrated IDE controller (You can boot off USB but it might be
more trouble than it's worth). All of your other disks will be
attached to your RAID controller and create an array (a RAID 5 would
probably work best in your case). This array will appear to the OS as
one huge disk that you can use however you like. As long as its
formatted with a standard file system (i.e. ext3, Reiser, XFS, etc.. )
you should be able to mount it under any standard linux distro. You
might also want to look into using LVM if you decide to use more than
one RAID controller card but I'm not going to go into that now. For
starting out I would recommend just using one 12 port controller since
managing multiple volume groups can get a bit complicated.

Hope that helps a bit.