Diy nas

[G77]

Has anyone tried to make their own NAS before? If so, any pointers?

My aim is to throw some 160gb hd's ( I beleive 4 is doable per unit) into an old case with a bit of a motherboard, onboard nic, and 256mb ram. Hopefully i'll be able to get just sort of 640gb of storage per machine and im doing 2 machines.

Not decided if im going to boot the machines from usb flash drive or hdd but if i remember rightly both the machines have a floppy drive which i've read is used to store configs for the NAS software.

At this stage i think im going to use the FreeNAS software as this project isnt about creating some storage, its about finding a use for those 160gb drives which have come out of doorstop v+ boxes (there all doorstops now! not even freeview pvr's!) FreeNAS has a web gui too.

[G77]

decided not to go along with the live cd effort and installed Freenas onto a 160gb hd offov a sa8300

it asks you if you want to create a data partition on that drive too so you then have 500mb for the os, 20 odd mb for storing the config.xml and the rest is for your data.

i ended up with 134gb useable from the 160 disk.

tomorrow i will throw in the other three 160gb drives and use the inbuilt software raid to combine the three as one virtual drive.

i can write to the drive at 2.5mbit a sec over wireless. not sure if the wireless is the bottle neck here so will try wired in the morning

[cable man]

This looks like a bit of fun,

Are you going 2 put spare hard drive in just 2 back it all up, So it copy of all the data and instantly take over if the first hard drive should fail...

[G77]

nah, nothing like that. just bung the hdd's in so i can use them as mapped networked drives.......

didnt go with the raid stuff, it lessened the capacity over all so stuck to 4x individual drives....... this is the end result......

forget the private and public, thats the other nas which i bought

[G77]

the freenas drives are empty, i have reserved 8% for automatic defragmentgation, heh

[G77]

heres a screen of the web gui...

[kayoshi]

Don't know if this helps you G77 but i'm in the process of building a NAS box, gone for the following components;

CFI A7879 Mini-ITX NAS/Server Case - 4 Hot Swap Bays
Intel D510MO Fanless Dual Core Atom Mini-ITX Board
1GB 240 Pin DDR2 PC2-5300 667MHz
3ware 9550SXU-4LP 4 port SATA II RAID Controller
4 x 1TB Samsung HD103SJ Spinpoint F3 1TB Hard Drive SATAII 7200rpm 32MB Cache

The box will give me 4TB total capacity (albeit only 2.7TB-ish will be usable as the disks will be configured in a RAID-5 array).

I've got a bit of experience with Openfiler so will prob dump that on after it's built, that or FreeNAS.

[G77]

im not going that daft. i just wanted to put the hdd's i had to good use.

theres no way im going to use anywhere near the capacity i have now and thats including 16gb of cable hacking files. heh

nice specs thou

[cable man]

G77 How did you get on with this as i have got 8 wd 320g HDD and going 2 try 2 make 1 ????

[G77]

it went great. 4 drives per tower.

didnt bother with the software raid, just use it as 4 seperate network drives.

you can use vista win 7 to browse the network for them or type

\\freenas

at the run command, you can them map them as network drives