Dell Workstation as NAS Killer

Technology Buy Curious
1

Hey guys,

after deciding to build a NAS Killer on my own instead of buying a Synology DS918+ I am trying to find the best fitting solution for my case of application. For me the most important facts are energy efficiency and usage of RAID5 with 5 or more HDDs. Right now I have to decide if I want to reuse some of the old hardware I could get for free or to buy some stuff on ebay. Because i built my last PC about 10 years ago, I would like to ask you, if you would recomend to build a NAS based on the following workstations:

  • DELL Precision T1500: i5-650 3.2GHz, 73W, 2 x 2GB 1066MHz RAM
  • DELL Precision T3400: E8200 2.66GHz, 65W, 2 x 1GB 800MHz RAM
  • DELL Precision T3400: E7400 2.8GhHz, 65W, 2 x 1GB 800MHz RAM

Unfortunatly I am not that familiar with the motherboards used in these workstations, but I guess using RAID with multiple disks with these boards could be a problem?

Thanks!
Best regards,
michatj

2

I wouldn’t recommend any of those. Those are all too old…

Have you looked at the NK 4.0? There’s tons of prebuilt recommendations there.

3

Thanks for the information. I already checked out all the available build guides but I can’t really decide which one will suite best for my application. I want to use the NAS for file storage of macOS and windows machines and for streaming 4K videos to my smart TVs. The file transfer speed should also be enough for video editing on the NAS, if this use case is possible.

4

As long as you’re Direct Playing 4K any recommended NAS server is going to work for you. It’s when you try to transcode 4K you’re going to run into issues. NAS Killer 4 is where you should be looking for recommendations. It doesn’t sound like you need more than that.

1 Like
5

Agreed, NAS Killer 4.0 is the way to go.