Recently I built a home NAS file server to finally consolidate all of my data into one easily managed network location. I have worked with Network Attached Storage systems before, and I’ve even played with SAN solutions before, but this was my first time building one from scratch.
The goal of this project is to have a massive, always-on, redundant, and wicked fast network accessible storage drive where I can save all of the files from my massive media collection for permanent archive. This central location will be my grand file repository for basically everything. Ideally I should be able to loose my desktop and laptop drives without losing anything that I care about.
I’ve had plenty of time to define exactly what I needed in a file server, and requirements were actually pretty simple:
- Separate system and storage arrays
- RAID failure protection on both arrays
- At least 7 terabytes of usable storage
- At least 60 MB/s of real world network throughput
- Expandable base that I can add storage to when it become necessary
- Excellent hard drive cooling
- Reasonably low power requirements
- Less than $2,000 total
This is the story of my particular NAS build and some of the stuff I learned during the course of this project.
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