As per my other post abut NAS Drives – yesterday I took it upon myself to build a NAS box from parts I already had and thus save myself spending any money. The goal if you recall was to have a system that was able to be upgraded in space later such as adding 1TB or larger Harddrives as needs arose. This journey took a while to get everything ready and was the end result worth the effort involved?
The Acer Aspire E700 Desktop
The machine was a Intel Core 2 Duo 1.83Ghz which had 5GIG RAM (2x512MB and 2x2GIG), NVidia GeForce 7600GT but also had an inbuilt graphics card along with 6 SATA COnnectors internal and a total of 10 USB Ports. A Point to mention was the internal 1Gbit LAN Card was not working. This presently had two SATA Drives fitted, 1x250GIG and 1x80GIG. I added a Intel Pro/1000 T Server NIC I had spare for the networking.
Prepaing the 1TB Harddrive
In my Dell desktop, I had fitted an extra 1TB Harddrive – this stored all my applications, Tunes, Backgrounds, games and so forth. The first (and long) task was to move everything across to my 750GIG Drives that came with the Dell. A Point to note here was that my Tunes directory needed sorting out anyhow and once I deleted them from iTunes, all playlist + number of plays and so forth would be lost 
Preparing the NAS Box
I booted from the FreeNAS CD I had made and went through the menu to install onto a Flash drive (USB) – this was to make sure then when the machine was re-started, it would retain it’s settings. I did a few tests to see how it worked but at this stage no drives were formatted on the Acer. I stripped out the Graphics card, 4GIG Ram (leaving 1GIG) and re-routed the wiring best I could. I did a few tests to see how much noise was present and seemed happy to go forward onto the next stage.
Networking
As my old router broke which had 1Gbit Networking and my present 5 port Gigabit Switch only has 4 ports working – I had two choices here. I could either plug in the NAS Box into the router and limit it to 100mbit or take on of my other machines off the Gigabit network and run it from there. In the end I thought it was just easier to place the computer near the router and run it from 100mbit port.
Preparing the drives
IN the Acer machine we now had 80gig, 250gig and 1TB Harddrive – all of which could be formatted by the NAS Box. IN the USB ports we had 500gig and 1TB iomega drives which currently have files already on (NTFS). Setting up the drives was easy enough, a long drawn out process though:
- Adding the Drive to the Disks Management
- Formatting the Said Disks
- Setting up a mount point
- Adding a Share per drive
All I ended off with was the same number of shares that I had drives. No matter how hard I tried though, I could not get to add the 1TB iomega drive and I said to myself that I would plug it into a Laptop and make sure it had no errors and such.
Copying the Files across the network
I choose the 250gig drive as my ‘Applications’ Drive – I started to copy across the various directories and was shocked how slow it was going across. I could understand why – 100mbit network compared to 1Gbit is of course going to be a lot slower. I stopped the process as it was getting late and would re-evaluate this NAS Box the next day.
I wish to also make a point about noise, while most people have no issues with leaving a computer (or many) sitting there humming away – I need the device to be silent and also the power it needs is also important – I do not need 250Watts been drawn 24/7 just in case I need a file one day across the network. After powering down all the computers and equipment – the fact it was also very warm that night – I could hear the fan grinding away along with the 2 External Harddrives been hot enough to cook eegs on. I powered the whole lot down – time to re-evaluate my needs.
What do I really need?
The machine that is most of the time is my Dell Core i7, my other machines come on now and then as needed. The few things that need sharing would be:
- Backdrops – This is currently 5gigs
- Tunes – be nice to have them on all machines.
- Applications – On the odd time I need to get them across to other machines.
I had a look though at what machines I use and a loss of 5gigs would be a drop in the ocean for backdrops given how much space each of these machines have. iTunes can already share out the music and the rest was easy enough to copy across the network from machine to machine as needed. The Bottom line is while I would love the idea of a large storage pool with fast copy speeds, I would need to spend some money to achieve this goal and the current crop of Harddrives I own are not worth of making into a NAS box.
End result
While it was a good exercise in making a NAS Box, I am in the process of copying all the files back to my Dell (which is taking a long time) from the NAS Box. I will place the 1TB Drive back into the Dell and move the files back into there respective places. I shall re-built the Acer E700 back into a Desktop machine – maybe using the 250Drive in another machine.
