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.

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…