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Thinking of a Hack NAS

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1st HackMac for my media needs

Hello all you hackintosh people.

I have been thinking of buying myself a NAS for sometime, i just dont like the web interfaces you get with them. So as a true apple fan boy, i was thinking of building a hackintosh NAS. Something similar to the CustoMac Mini listed in the january buying guide. I have 4x 1TB drives id like to use, maybe willing to drop one for an OS drive (ssd)

Just looking for advice really...could i run Lion Server too? or just the main OS? This would be my first hackintosh so i am a total noob.

Thinking of this gear:

CPU: here
Motherboard: here
RAM: here
HDD: I already have 4 WD 1TB drives.
Case: here or here - although not sure if this one would work.

Could someone help me with case & PSU options? Ideally id be looking to have at least 3 3.5" slots and one maybe for OS
 
Certainly you could run OS X Server on the machine. Install Mountain Lion as usual, and then go to the App Store and buy the Server component. I run this on one of my machines.

The i3-3225, 8 GB RAM, and GA-H77N-WIFI board makes a nice simple and solid build. Mind you, some people did report issues with the LAN ports locking up under heavy load. I'm not sure if that was fixed in a driver update, but in any case I haven't seen it with my testing on my "thornbill" HTPC.

The H77N-WIFI board only has four SATA ports, but you can add more if you want. For a NAS box you don't need a discrete GPU and if you want WiFi you can use the mini-PCIe slot, so you have a full PCIe slot available. You could put in a full-blown hardware RAID card, or you could put in just a plain ordinary PCIEx1 SATA card with two extra SATA3 ports (I went overboard and put three of these in my lammergeier build).
If you didn't want WiFi you can even get another two SATA ports on a mini-PCIe card.

So if you wanted you could set up the machine with an internal SSD, and three HDDs in a hot-swap bay. In my lammergeier build I use a 3x3.5" hot-swap bay, and there are other builds on this site showing the use of 2.5" bays.
Or you could add two more ports and have an internal SSD plus an internal 2nd disk for things like a clone partition, and a 4-drive hot-swap bay (you can get 4x3.5" drives into the space usually taken up by two optical drives for example).
Or many more combinations...
 
could set up the machine with an internal SSD, and three HDDs in a hot-swap bay.

This is what id be looking to do, get a nice small SSD such as this one for the OS then use 3x 3.5 drives I can always put larger drives in over time, but 3TB should be fine for my needs at the moment.

Is there any cases you can suggest which would allow me to do this? As I believe this is what I am struggling with as i have the cpu, mb, ram all sorted.

Any help would be appreciated :D
 
Thanks for that...just what im looking for. found it on over clockers foe £99. so my whole hackmac is coming in at £375. Which isnt too far off a price of a decent NAS and i get to have a decent OS to play around with.
 
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