Do It Yourself NAS

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.

Backblaze is back with a new version of their Storage Pod. The major change is that they got rid of their port multiplier backplanes, and instead are going with drives directly attached to two expensive 40-port SATA cards.

The port multipliers have always been a negative aspect of their build to me, as I can see them causing problems, slowing down performance, and being difficult to integrate into a standard PC case. Their replacement is two $700 40-port SATA cards. The downside to these is price, and while I’d love to have one of these cards in my 20-drive file server, it’s out of my budget.

I guess I’ll keep waiting for an affordable, high-port count SATA card.

For the first time since the original Storage Pod, Backblaze is announcing a completely redesigned approach with the introduction of the first “direct wire” Storage Pod. This new Storage Pod performs four times faster, is simpler to assemble, and delivers our lowest cost per gigabyte of data storage yet. And, once again, it’s open source.

via Backblaze Blog 

New features include a faster processor and an optional SSD cache.

Read more about it at Ars Technica and Drobo.com.

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

A quick review with a few benchmarks.

Thecus is the first dual-bay NAS box manufacturer we’ve seen to ditch the usual ARM or Marvell processors found in mainstream models in favour of a fully fledged 1.8GHz Intel Atom D525 CPU.

via bit-tech.net

A professional rackmount version of a DIY NAS, with link aggregation and redundant power:

The N8900 is based on a dual-core Intel Core i3-2120 processor with 8 GB of DDR3 memory and Thecus Dual DOM flash memory.

via SmallNetBuilder

AnandTech dissects, thoroughly reviews, and benchmarks the Synology DS211+:

Synology has a sensible model number nomenclature in which the last two digits refer to the year through which the model is intended for sale. The first set of digits refer to the maximum number of bays supported. Some models have a + at the end, signifying higher performance. Today, we have the DS211+ for review. The DS refers to the product category, Disk Station. 2 indicates a 2 bay model, and the 11 indicates a 2011 model. It is supposed to have a higher performance compared to the DS211 which was released in November 2010.

The Drobo FS is one of the first entry-level NAS systems to include 5-bays, most products in this class only support 4-bays. This means that the maximum capacity of the Drobo FS is 10TB, compared to 8TB in four-bay NAS units.

via StorageReview.com.

Versia has a comprehensive guide to setting up Debian 5.0 on a VIA ARTiGO A2000 barebones storage server.

This post will explain how to set up a NAS server with Debian running essential services such as ssh, samba, nfs, cups, rdiff-backup and rtorrent with a web interface; and using two HDDs in RAID 1 mode with everything encrypted. It took me awhile to research all bits and pieces, hopefully it will save you time if you are going to do a similar set up.

SmallNetBuilder walks through building a 16 drive RAID5 NAS with FreeBSD 6.

WhatPC? brings a complete NAS building guide involving Mini-ITX motherboards, Promise hardware RAID, and NASLite commercial NAS operating system.

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.

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.

SmallNetBuilder has benchmarks of file access to Ubuntu Linux and Clarkconnect over Samba. Included are instructions for setting up the software on both systems, and a guide to the hardware used in the project.

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.