Do It Yourself NAS

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.

Howto Forge has a great howto for installing and configuring FreeNAS 0.68.

This tutorial shows how you can set up a network-attached storage server with FreeNAS. FreeNAS is based on the FreeBSD operating system and supports CIFS (samba), FTP, NFS, RSYNC, SSH, local user authentication, and software RAID (0, 1, 5). It comes with a powerful web interface and uses very little space on the hard drive - about 32MB.

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.

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.