Building Your Own NAS: Silverstone DS380 Chassis Tested, Reviewed

TechSpot combines some popular NAS components, a Silverstone DS380 case, Asrock C2750D4I motherboard, and FreeNAS.

Assembling your own NAS would net more performance as well because you’d be using a Celeron or Pentium over the Atom or other SoCs, while power shouldn’t be a concern with Haswell using less than 30 watts at idle. As the cherry on top, open source software such as FreeNAS and enclosures like Silverstone’s DS380 should make it less daunting to get started with your homebrewed eight-bay NAS server.

via TechSpot.

Building an Ultra-Low-Power File Server with the Trim-Slice

Linux Journal builds a low power NAS with an Arm-based server and USB hard drives.

As an experiment, and finally to get rid of that large, inefficient and ugly tower case, I decided to use the new Trim-Slice as the base for an ultra-low-power, ultra-small replacement file server. The Trim-Slice is built on the NVIDIA Tegra 2 platform, and the specific model I purchased features a 1GHz dual-core ARM Cortex A9 processor, 1GB of RAM and a 32GB SATA SSD.

via Linux Journal.

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

FreeNAS 8.0 now available

According to iXsystems developer James T. Nixon III, FreeNAS 8.0 includes major architectural optimisations and is more modular than previous versions. It features a redesigned GUI, built using Python and the Django web framework, that is aimed at making the OS easier to use. ZFS and UFS2 file systems are both supported – ZFS is used as the primary file system.

via The H Open Source

Has Microsoft just ruined Windows Home Server?

Ars Technica covers the implications of Microsoft removing the Drive Extender feature from Windows Home Server.

Indeed, Drive Extender was fundamental to the home server concept. A home server as originally envisaged by the Windows Home Server team should have, in essence, infinite storage, and storage that should be transparently extensible.

Systm Episode 60: Build Your Own NAS

An older post, but still good, Systm walks through installing FreeNAS:

If you’re just itching for an excuse to reuse that retired desktop PC or laptop sitting in your closet there here’s your chance. Today we’ll be looking at the basics of installing FreeNAS, an open-source DIY NAS. So instead of spending money on off the shelf options why not save yourself some cash and make use of the stuff you already have and get a super customizable network storage device to boot.

via Revision3 > Systm > Episode 60: Build Your Own NAS.