fulltower / nas & genl purpose

[gongli]

Hi

I'm looking to build a full tower using the fractal XL r2 or similar full tower case (i never want to see a hd again except in this case). Basically i want a NAS but also general purpose email/browsing/multimedia. no gaming etc, so i can save a little on video cards. basically im looking for expandability, ability to serve filesystems on my network, ability to do crashplan (my offsite backup), probably a linux box, raid. stream a movie sometimes. id like to have 4t x2 for the nas component, along with maybe some kind of a ssd for the os.

also ive never built a machine, so im looking for super straightforward stuff, and budget around us$500-1000. if onchip video is good enough id save on that, and if linux is good enough id use that (i use linux alot). id lean towards an intel cpu and motherboard just to minimize any possible issues -- again its my first build and im looking to have it be as straightforward as possible.

thanks for any help!

[quest_for_silence]

You may start from here: the article is a bit old nowadays, but the underlying principles are sound.

[washu]

You don't need much CPU power for this. Even a lowly Celeron like a G18X0 will be plenty fast for your stated use case. Linux supports Intel onboard video well so stick with that.

Get a MB with all 6 ports available from the chipset as standard SATA ports. You may want to look for a MB with additional drive controllers, but those are cheap to add later if you need to expand. Since you are using Linux, do not get "RAID" cards, only get straight SATA controllers / HBAs. An onboard Intel NIC is a nice to have over a Realtek, but don't spend more just to get that.

Don't skimp on RAM. Crashplan uses more RAM the more files you have. It's also java so it's already inefficient. 8 GB should be a good starting point unless you are going to use ZFS, then get 16 GB.

ability to serve filesystems on my network

Do you want to serve files or filesystems? Those are two very different things. File serving is the usual case and from your description is what you should do. Standard SAMBA setup should do fine.