XigmaNAS

Lian-Li Case PC-Q08A Mini Tower 1/0/6 FAN Aluminum USB3.0 Silver Mini-ITX
4x Western Digital HDD WD10JFCX 2TB SATA III 64MB 2.5inch IntelliPower WD Red
2x Crucial Memory CT51264BA1339J 4GB DDR3 1333
Intel CPU BX80646G3220 Pentium G3220 Haswell 3.00GHz 2Core/2Thread LGA1150 3MB
In-Win Power Supply IP-P300BN1-0 H 300W SFX for Black Series
Asus Motherboard H87I-PLUS LGA1150 H87 Mini-ITX

Would make sense if you give more information how u want to use your NAS.
But in General if you want a realy cheap NAS, check for the HP N54L !

Regards
apollo

It's going to be used in a small (20 person) office. About 2 TB total backup needs currently from 4 different servers, including a Hyper-V host with 2 server VM's using probably Macrium. A second box might be sent off-site and an Rsync sent via VPN.

The box above would cost me a bit over $500 before shipping.

first of all you will most likely want to use zfs.
so you will need a board that supports ecc memory.
for mini itx there is this asrock board.
http://www.asrockrack.com/general/produ ... =E3C226D2I
or as apollo pointed out the n54l.

also please read this. it applies to nas4free as well
http://forums.freenas.org/index.php?thr ... ine.12484/

N54L is the easy & cheapest option: http://www.pccomponentes.com/hp_prolian ... 250gb.html

Well.... it's not *just* about cheap, heh. Features do still count. I've been looking at the ECC thing, and it bothers me, heh. I understand ZFS uses ram as it's write cache, and non-ECC memory won't catch some of the errors ECC will. But what does that translate to IRL? Lot's of people seem to be running ZFS on standard ram, and I've not noticed a huge outcry regarding unreliability.

Using ECC pushes up a non ProLiant box to closer to $1,000. Ugh. The Proliant memory limits (didn't I read somewhere the rule of thumb is 1GB ram for each TB of storage?) and the USB2 only make it a little less desirable. I liked the ASRock, but that's the foundation I used and came up with $1,100 (8gb ECC ram, 4x 3B Red drives, E3-1220 cpu).

So that makes it even more interesting to find a way to compensate for non-ECC ram. Does having a disk act as a cache help mitigate non-ECC ram? Maybe also a log disk?

please read this regarding ecc
http://forums.freenas.org/index.php?thr ... zfs.15449/

nas4free does not support usb3, so usb2 only makes no difference.
you do not need an e3 xeon cpu on the asrock. you can use your selected G3220.

So much for getting to use ZFS on a cheap setup. Sorry, that ProLiant just isn't that interesting. I'm not interested in hacking it to squeeze more use out of it, and 8gb max ram plus only 4 sata ports, using a 150watt (!?) psu.... I have larger plans than this will provide. Once it's been in production for a while and the team is comfortable with it, it will end up holding some VM's, act as off-site storage for a second office location, and might even be used as a document/media library for Sharepoint. Being able to spend $500 to build a beefy platform with all kinds of options had people interested. Spending $1,100+ for the same kind of beefy ECC platform makes people wonder why we don't just get a rackmount Synology or something. Hell, MSFT's 'Storage Spaces' has REFS, which is a little brother to ZFS, and is built right into the OS. I've been running a 2-disk mirror on my Win8 box for a couple months and it's great.

SOrry, I'm just feeling a little bummed. I've been playing around with N4F for several days now on regular hardware and I like it. Being able to stick my finger in the eye of the big SAN guys would have been cool. I guess there's no such thing as a free (or cheap) lunch!

the n54l can use 16gb. it has been well documented. and it has 6 sata ports.
and i have tried windows storages spaces and it was horrible.

c71clark wrote: I guess there's no such thing as a free (or cheap) lunch!

There has never been one (except N4F, this is for free