Do It Yourself NAS

Backblaze details how they build a 67 TB 4U storage server for less than $8,000. C0T0D0S0 then takes a look at some of the trade offs of the device against much more expensive systems.

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.

George Ou over at ZDNet.com has a blog post about adding a good chunk of storage to his computer. All that is needed to duplicate this is 3 free drive bays, 5 free SATA ports, and a power supply that can handle the extra 150 watts while the drives spin up.

Fast forward 15 years later, and I just bought 2.5 terabytes of hot-swappable SATA-300 storage for just under $730.

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

Debian Administration looks at setting up Software RAID5 with the new Debian installer.

rubbervir.us shows how to quickly turn an old computer into a file server running Samba.

Debian Admin has an article detailing NFS setup and tuning.

HowtoForge has detailed instructions for setting up a fileserver by focusing on the relevant parts of SME Server.

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.