DIY NAS

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I've learned two things in the past: you can never have enough money, and you can never have enough disk space. Okay, there's a third thing i've learned: those two above are mutually exclusive. My first NAS was a Conceptronic CH3SNAS with two 1TB drives as RAID1 and a Gbit NIC. The existing OS on there was pretty soon "extended" with FFP to work around some issues and also provide access to the system's shell.

Having shell access taught me some things about off-the-shelf consumer NAS and their manufacturers:

  • They're just using Linux, too
  • They're stripping all the good stuff to optimize their system
  • They're not good at optimizing

With these insights, the observation that the weak CPU of the CH3SNAS was not even remotely able to provide Gbit-bandwith (only ~20MByte/s) and the strong desire to have a more flexible storage solution, i decided to build my own NAS from off-the-shelf computer parts - and have never looked back.

What OS should i use?

My original idea was to basically just build a regular PC, just without any fancy graphics card, a cheap but reasonably powered CPU and loads of large drives, then put Debian Linux on there and just start from scratch configuring all the services like Samba and... well, actually i only needed Samba, but with decent performance.

No big deal and easily done, right? But then i discovered OpenMediaVault. Don't get, i'm more than capable of installing, configuring and maintaining my Linux systems, and happy to have something to tinker with, but OMV looked like it would be easy to use (compared to e.g. Openfiler) and by that i mean "keep me from tinkering too much with it, losing Terabytes of data in the process". And it was just a regular Debian Linux under the hood, so i'd still have all the freedom i want.

After 4 years of using it, i'm still convinced that going with OMV was the best decision, compared to the alternatives out there - and i tried a couple of them - so this would be my OS recommendation for everybody looking into building their own NAS, too.

Blockbox (2012)

  • Motherboard: Asus E35M1-I
  • CPU: onboard AMD E-350
  • RAM: 4x 2GB DDR3 1333MHz
  • SSD: OCZ Agility 3 60GB Samsung 840 128GB
  • HDD: 6x WD Green 2TB WD20EARX
  • Case: Lian-Li PC-Q08 black

The HDDs are configured in a RAID5 with ~9TB usage storage space and have been running 24/7 for the last 4 years. No failures at all. That can't be said of the OCZ SSD i was using for the OS, though.