HomeMade/DIY NAS solution [closed]

Question

Has anyone experience with building NAS (Network-attached storage) for home/small office using?

What component would you recommend?

Hardware

• CPU
• motherboard
• HDDs
• RAID controller
• etc.

Software

• OS
• FTP
• HTTP
• etc.

Answer 1

I've taken an old pc (P4 2.6 i believe), added 2 extra hard drives (about 600 GB total space), and installed FreeNAS.

I now have it setup sharing via webserver, ftp, smb (windows), and NFS.

Cost me almost nothing (I already had the old PC), and works great!

Answer 2

Tom's Hardware recently did an article:

10 TB RAID server for $1000

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/10tb-hdd-raid,2344.html

Answer 3

Here's what I did a few months ago:

HARDWARE
AMD Athlon X2 4850e (45W low-power CPU)
740G-based motherboard
iStarUSA 5-drive SATA RAID cage
A bunch of hard drives!

SOFTWARE
Debian Linux
mdadm (software RAID)
SMB
Apache
Mediatomb (UPnP AV server, serves media over network to my 360s and PS3s)

Answer 4

There's a good article on building a NAS on codeproject.

Answer 5

As for the OS, Windows Home Server makes the whole thing extremely user friendly, and provides good interfaces for backups and managing the NAS externally.

Answer 6

You can often get HP ML110s or ML115s off ebay quite cheaply. They have a mini-tower case about the size of a small PC and four bays for 3.5" disks. As a bonus you get a PCIex8 and PCIe x16 slot on the ML115 (at least). This gives you the option of adding a SAS or SATA RAID controller and an external disk array if you need to expand the system.

I bought a ML115 for £165 with a two core opteron and 1GB of RAM. Two larger drives in a mirror added about £100 for the pair. IIRC I used Fedora for the O/S and set up Samba, NFS, NIS, caching DNS (BIND), postfix, fetchmail and procmail for email and probably some other stuff I can't remember. Backup is somewhat simplistic and done to a DDS4 tape that I got with another server.

It's pretty much fire and forget.

Answer 7

Just to chime in on everyone suggestions: use a real hardware RAID controller. Don't bother with on-board solutions. I know they're cheaper, but in reality they're pseudo-RAID controllers and are more prone to breaking your RAID array more than anything else. You can use whatever CPU, RAM, motherboard whatever you want, but data is stored on disks and disks are prone to going kaput. A good RAID controller will save you. A bad one (on-board or software RAID) will more likely make your life miserable rather than saving it from disaster.

I never use software RAID anymore but I'm sure some people may recommend Linux software RAID. Personally, I haven't tried it so I can't claim anything, but if your data is worth anything to you, you might as well pay up for a solid RAID controller from 3Ware, Areca, LSI, Adaptec, etc.

So far I've used 3Ware 9650SE (SATA II) series RAID, LSI (for Dell Servers) and HP SmartArray controllers. I've never had an issue with any of them. I believe I had one disk go bad in the SmartArray series years ago but the controller kept humming along. We swapped out the bad disk for a good one and the array rebuilt the disk and all was well. No headaches.

Personally, if you're running a small NAS for a SOHO, I'd look into the consumer level devices as they may save you some time and possible construction headaches. Larger offices and higher IT requirements would require more serious equipment and not home-built type NAS.

There's a wide variety of vendors with different OSes and capabilities. They may be a better buy in the short or long run depending on your budget and your requirements. The other thing about consumer NAS devices these days too is the software is getting so much better that the number of options for each vendor and their product is growing rapidly. For example, higher grade consumer NASes (read: more expensive) now support iSCSI. In addition, the small size and custom parts use less electricity than most desktop counterpart NASes.

If you're thinking of looking into consumer NASes, I'd suggest: Netgear ReadyNAS (expensive but solid), QNAP (Linux and affordable), Thecus (performance and affordable), or Drobo (expensive but easy to use).

Answer 8

My soon to be home nas specs.

Hardware:

• CPU: Something amd
• motherboard: Unknown
• HDDs: 2x80GB ]-[ The more the better! SERIOUSLY!!
• RAID controller: None
• RAM: 1x256mb

Software:

• OS: FreeNAS ]-[ this is the best option thst i have found yet
• Protocols:
  
  • CIFS (samba)
  • FTP
  • NFS
  • TFTP
  • AFP
  • RSYNC
  • Unison
  • iSCSI (initiator and target)
  • UPnP

P.S. The minimum FreeNAS Specs are:

• A PC with a minimum of 192MB of RAM, a bootable CD-Rom Drive plus either:
  
  • A Floppy Disk (for configuration storage) and one or more Hard Drives (as storage)
  • A Bootable USB or CF drive (64MB minimum for Embedded platform, 128MB for Full platform) and one or more Hard Drives (as storage)
  • A Bootable Hard Drive and one or more Hard Drives (as storage)
  • A Bootable Hard Drive (which will be partitioned for FreeNAS and Data)
• Or a virtual PC emulator such as VMware/QEMU, configured as above.

Warning -

• 192MB of RAM is the minimum required for starting the Full platform.
• 256MB of RAM is the minimum required for upgrading the Embedded platform of versions > 0.7.
• Using advanced features like software RAID 5 and enabling lots of functions may need more RAM (512MB or more).

See here for a list of hardware that is known to work

Answer 9

I saw the Tom's Hardware article. They used 12 hard drives -- totally unrealistic for 90% of the home builders. Can you imagine the noise they would make? I'm about to try Freenas using a AMD 64bit Phenom x3 & 4 drives.

Answer 10

its been said, but its the best thing out there, Freenas, get a old comp, even P1 will work, and put a 1TB drive in there, network access and internet access if you like, as well as FTP, domain integration

Answer 11

For the software, get Freenas or OpenFiler. Personally, I use FreeNas for a 1.28TB RAID1 array on an old VIA 533MHz + 256Mb SDRAM. It runs off a CompactFlash card connected to an IDE port.

Answer 12

I would assume kick ass dedicated Ethernet controllers, but since no one has mentioned it, I guess it wouldn't make much difference? Even if you built a "scapper-NAS/PC" ?

Answer 13

I would buy an Intel D945GCLF2, Chenbro ES34069 and use OpenSolaris with ZFS as Operating System. That's my plan at least. There is an DIY article about it: DIY: Home NAS Box with OpenSolaris and ZFS.

Answer 14

I like my TonidoPlug. Plug computer (~5 watts), runs headless Ubuntu, you can use multiple USB-drives via a hub; but no RAID that i'm aware.