If you own more than one computer, you may find that some items would just work better if they were held in one central location and each computer could access these files no matter which computer was on – such as your MP3 Collection for example. This can take the form of dedicating one computer as a server if you like and left on 24/7, you could build your own NAS box or buy one of the many off the shelf – all are good but have a downside normally. I plan on jotting down my thoughts to give each idea a good going over and seeing how it look at the end – join me on my journey into NAS.
Server based sharing
When I said server here, I mean a computer with FIle and Print Sharing enabled and various drives shared out, this can be Windows (any), Linux or Mac based OS. What happens here is we take a machine, put as many hard drives as you have around / can afford and basically use the share option. One the other computers you browse the network and map a network drive which connects on start up and you have access to these files all the time. The good side of this is any computer can be used but for me at least, the bad side is that depending on how quiet the computer is – this can be a noisy solution to the problem and also eating up electricity 24/7 (250+ Watts). It does mean though you can plug in USB Drives (or even eSATA if the machine supports this) and add this to the shares without having to wipe the drives first.
Build your own NAS (Proper hardware)
The first item you are going to need is a nice case that is small, quiet and can hold more than one drive – we could get Fractal Design Array R2 Mini-ITX NAS Case
This bad boy holds SIX Harddrives, you need an Mini ITX Board and maybe even a sata raid card. The cost of this case is about £149 and looks nice and should be a lot quieter than a normal desktop case. next on our list would be of course the Mini ITX Board – Intel D410PT With Integrated Intel Atom Processor D410 and the Intel NM10 Express Chipset M-ITX Motherboard
This motherboard comes with the ATOM CPU which means it does not need a FAN – very quiet indeed then and the price look at that site is about £56. You need to buy some memory, this takes DDR2 and has two slots, for a NAS Box, you do not need a lot – so a single 512MB Stick will do you fine – so we can add another £10 to the price. The last thing you need of course would be some hard drives – after all what use is a NAS without such a thing right? At this point it comes down to cost vs. capacity.
One example here is 1.5TB sata drive this comes in at the bargain price of £57 or you can branch out and buy a 2TB Drive for about £88 but this has a lower spin speed of 5400RPM for example. What it comes down to is this – if you bought three 1.5TB Drives, you will be spending £171 and have 4.5TB of space (formatting means you loose some of that of course) compared to two 2TB Drives setting you back £176 but only giving you 4TB of space. The upshot is the end game, 6×1.5TB is 9TB and 6x2TB of course is 12TB – quite a difference one you fill the drive bays up over time.
Counting up the cost so far then – we would have spent close to £400 on a system that has a potential capacity of 12TB, looks nice and is quiet.
What software to use?
The Software I would suggest would be FeeNAS – this is very flexible and included various add-ons such as BitTorrent Server and an iTunes Server.
The Pre-built *Cheap* Solution
One example here is an Edimax NS-2502 NAS Box, this comes with NO Drives but has all the features such as BitTorrent Server, iTunes server and so forth as well as GigaBit Network port, USB for connecting extra drives and so forth.
The price of this is £99, add to this 2x2TB Drive (£80 each) and we have a 4TB NAS Box for a price of about £260 – this is a lot cheaper then the solution above but you are limited of course to only two drives.
The last option is to buy a single drive NAS Box – in this case a Western Digital My Book 2TB NAS Box. This device is listed as £150, cheaper once again and it has a USB Port so you can stick your existing USB Drive in there and share that out, no metion of iTunes server and such.
Thoughts
How much you spend on a NAS depends on many things such as how much capacity you need, how much redundancy it offers (Such as RAID 0, 1,5), other services it comes with such as Torrent and iTunes for example and finally how quite plus power consumption of the offending device. At the moment my main source of files would be Backdrops (I have a lot), my Tunes and maybe my movies. If I moved to a more central storage arrangements, I could give up the 1TB Drive and the 750GIG drive and replace that with something a lot smaller – remember if all your data is now central, why do you need such a big OS Drive?
My Pick of the day would be the Edimax box – lots of features, cheap and good reviews…
