[Project] NAS Appliance

[Lloyd_mcse]

Ok found ESET Nod32 Antivirus Business Edition is £91 for 5 users, so I have a trial for that atm.
I really want to get a full Suite like the AVG Internet Security Business Edition as I would and could use it on all the other PCs.

I have found that

• Spywareblaster
• Spybot Search & Destroy

work fine on Server 2008, so atleast there is some free protection, other than a correctly setup Firewall

[Lloyd_mcse]

total cost so far..

CPU/Motherboard/RAM £89
PSU £30
Case £30
2TB WD Green £100

Total £249

I need to add a decent SATA controller as there is only 2x sata ports on the motherboard. SATA controller £79 - cheap Adaptec 4 port PCI-E. Once I have that I will move the OS to a SATA drive and try to use Ubuntu 10.4 as the os.
Still a considerable saving on the Synology products

[Lloyd_mcse]

I have changed the hard drives to 2x 18GB 15,000RPM U320 SCSI drives as the Maxtors started sounding a bit strange.
I am also slightly upgrading the motherboard to a Asus P5QPL-AM Intel G41 at £40, it has 4 SATA ports instead of just 2, still; a controller card would be nice.
While I was at it I wanted to get a half decent case for it so got a Coolermaster Elite 330

So far it's been a solid little file server and adding the 15,000rpm drives have certainly speeded things up

[Lloyd_mcse]

I just built another one of these

Components
Intel Pentium E6500 Dual Core
Asus P5QPL-AM G41
2GB Ram DDR2-6400
Intel X4500 Graphics - On-board
Coolermaster Elite 330
Corsair CX430 430watt PSU
Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard

Storage (So Far)
1x Samsung F1 500GB
1x Samsung F1 750GB
1x Western Digital Green 1TB
1x Western Digital Green 2TB

This is actually replacing the current setup so I moved the hard drives into this case.
I'm going to use the celeron setup as another server as a teamspeak server or something for ets

EDIT: I will add some pics tomorrow

[Lloyd_mcse]

here are some pics

[Lloyd_mcse]

New Storage added

1x 500GB (100GB OS and 400GB DATA) - Next to be upgraded
1x 1 TB Western Digital Green
2x 2 TB Western Digital Green

Should keep me going for a while, I'll have to get a SATA/SATA RAID card to add an more hard drives though.
I'll probably get a 1.5TB drive to replace the 500GB.

[Lloyd_mcse]

To add a bit more to this thread....
I have ..

File Server
Intel Pentium E6500 Dual Core 2.9GHz
Asus P5QPL-AM G41
Intel X4500 Graphics - On-board
2GB Ram DDR2-6400
Coolermaster Elite 330
Corsair CX430 430watt PSU
Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard
Storage (So Far)
1x Samsung F1 750GB (250GB Win 2008 & 500GB Data)
1x Western Digital Green 1TB
2x Western Digital Green 2TB

As my file server, then I have..

Ubuntu Test Server
Intel Celeron E3200 2.4GHz
Asus P5KPL G31 MATX
Intel G31 Graphics - On-board
4GB DDR2-6400
Corsair CX430 430watt PSU
Coolermaster Elite 330
Ubuntu 10.04.02 LTS x64
Storage (So Far)
1x Samsung 320GB SATA II

as a Ubuntu 10.04.02 LTS test server which is also running Plesk 10.2. It currently just hosts a test site (a mirror or the LES site).
I'm going to add a Xeon LGA 775 (or just a better CPU) to it soon, but as it's just a test server atm there's no hurry.
What slows it down is thebusiness broadband 7.4Mb/1MB (740KB/s down, 100KB/s up) . I can't wait till we get fibre SDSL is just too expensive.

Ubuntu is great though, highly recommend it if you want to get into Linux or if you're a advanced user. It's very robust and secure

Both systems run 24/7 and I'm yet to have a problem

[Lloyd_mcse]

Just added some more storage to the file server. As it was going to run the OS (Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 Standard) I wasn't going to use a Western Digital Green drive, they are fine for storage but not designed to be an OS drive.
That left me three options, a blue, black or an RE model. To my mind the RE and black are overkill for what I need, so I went for a WD Blue 1TB SATA 6GB/s 7200rpm 32MB. Very good drives, and for about £40 they're good value too.
I have partitioned it so the OS has 100GB and the rest is a data storage partition.
Opening word docs over the network is much faster now (compared to the old SATA2 drive). I'm still only using the southbridge SATA2 ports but it's fine for now

File Server - Latest Spec
Intel Pentium E6500 Dual Core 2.9GHz (SpeedStep is on 1.6GHz)
Asus P5QPL-AM G41
Intel X4500 Graphics - On-board
4GB DDR2-6400 RAM
Coolermaster Elite 330
Corsair CX430 430watt PSU
Zalman CNPS9700 NVIDIA Edition
Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard with SP1

Storage (So Far)
1x Western Digital Blue 1TB (100GB OS, 900GB Data)
1x Western Digital Green 1TB
2x Western Digital Green 2TB