DIY: Home UBUNTU NAS Server

A detailed blog post which covers hardware and software choices.

For the hardware, I ended up with a fanless MiniITX motherboard Intel D510MO, which has a Atom processor, Gigabit ethernet (all my home network is Gigabit, so it does make a difference). I am also using a 2GB 800Mhz Kingston RAM memory, and both two SATA connectors. The MOBO has up to seven 2.0 USB and one mini PCI Express, in case I want to add more SATA drives in the future.

via DanielAndrade.net

Understanding RAID

bit-tech.net has a good overview of different RAID levels. Pros and Cons of each level are explained in a clear manner.

In the last few years RAID has become really quite popular. Once purely in the domain of high-end enterprise servers, today, any self respecting enthusiast motherboard had better have onboard RAID if it wants to be taken seriously. The abundance of onboard RAID controllers mean that it’s not unusual to see small arrays in today’s home computers. The reasons for this can be for increased speed, increased reliability or simply for bragging rights. After all, two or more disks are better than one, right?

Understanding Hard Drive Performance

Tom’s Hardware takes a look at hard drive performance, focusing mainly on 7200 RPM drives.

This article will give you an overview of all parameters that are relevant to hard drive performance. These are the drive form factor, platter diameter and platter count, recording technology and data density, rotation speed and access time, interface and buffer memory.

DIY RAID 5 NAS Server Worklog

This blog contains full instructions, including links and  pictures of all hardware needed, to build a 1+ TB NAS. Windows XP is used as the software, while a Highpoint RocketRAID hardware RAID card takes care of the drives.

I did some research into building a network attached storage (NAS) server, and bought the appropriate hardware online. I’ll cover the steps I took to build a homebrew NAS server capable of offering 1Tb of redundant RAID 5 storage.

Network-Attached Storage With FreeNAS

Howto Forge has a great howto for installing and configuring FreeNAS 0.68.

This tutorial shows how you can set up a network-attached storage server with FreeNAS. FreeNAS is based on the FreeBSD operating system and supports CIFS (samba), FTP, NFS, RSYNC, SSH, local user authentication, and software RAID (0, 1, 5). It comes with a powerful web interface and uses very little space on the hard drive – about 32MB.

Build a Cheap and Fast RAID 5 NAS

SmallNetBuilder’s guide to building your own NAS device. In it they use a standard PC with an LSI Logic MegaRAID hardware-based RAID card. Included are step-by-step screenshots on setting up the RAID device using the MegaRAID’s bios, and benchmark of the machine while running Ubuntu Linux and FreeNAS.

Ars System Guide: Home Media Server

Ars Technica has a system builder buyers guide for low and high end home NAS systems. Both hardware and software raid makes an appearance.

With multiple PCs becoming commonplace in the home, the need to push data through every room in the house via Ethernet or WiFi combined with the proliferation of digital-only content mean the storage demands of home users are rising quickly.