Do It Yourself NAS

X-bit labs reviews the QNAP TS-219P Turbo NAS.

The Tech Report has benchmarks of the new USB 3.0 standard. They’re compared against USB 2.0 and eSATA.

StorageNerve has benchmarks for the 4-slot Drobo connected using USB 2.0 and Firewire 800.

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.

Learn FreeNAS posted news that FreeNAS is no longer dropping FreeBSD for Debian, but will add a Debian based version of FreeNAS called OpenMediaVault.

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.

The Tech Report reviews the Western Digital My Book World Edition II, a two drive, ready to use NAS.

Toms Hardware reviews the Drobo USB DAS device.

bit-tech.net has a good overview of different RAID levels. Pros and Cons of each level are explained in a clear manner.

In the last few years RAID has become really quite popular. Once purely in the domain of high-end enterprise servers, today, any self respecting enthusiast motherboard had better have onboard RAID if it wants to be taken seriously. The abundance of onboard RAID controllers mean that it’s not unusual to see small arrays in today’s home computers. The reasons for this can be for increased speed, increased reliability or simply for bragging rights. After all, two or more disks are better than one, right?

SmallNetBuilder checks out the rackmount Thecus 1U4500 which can hold four SATA drives.

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.

George Ou over at ZDNet has RAID benchmarks for various flavors of RAID, based mainly around the RAID10 and the Intel ICH8R RAID controller.

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

SmallNetBuilder reviews the  Linksys NSS4000 NAS.

SmallNetBuilder has a writeup of the different types of prebuilt NAS devices available.