Do It Yourself NAS

SmallNetBuilder has a list of NAS devices benchmarked by different criteria. A homebuilt Ubuntu NAS device make an appearance in several benchmarks.

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

X-bit labs benchmarks eleven 160 GB hard drives.

SmallNetBuilder takes a look at the Norco DS-500, a five drive eSATA attached drive enclosure.

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.

Tom’s Hardware benchmarks a couple of 7200 drives in RAID 0 and compares them against the 10,000 RPM Western Digital Raptor. For fun they put the Raptor in a RAID 0 array too.

DailyTech reports on the SATA update. Included with the new connectors are updates to NCQ which benefit desktop and laptop systems.

The latest SATA revision 2.6 adds new physical and performance features to the previous SATA revision 2.5, also referred to as SATA 3.0Gbps, specification.

The New York Times takes a look at the hard drive market.

Strong demand for external hard drives was one of the highlights in consumer electronics last year. Americans spent $600 million on external hard drives in 2006, an increase of 53 percent over 2005, according to NPD, a market research firm. Put another way, consumers bought 739.7 million gigabytes of hard-drive storage space last year, more than 11 times as much as they did in 2003.

Tom’s Hardware takes a look at hard drive performance, focusing mainly on 7200 RPM drives.

This article will give you an overview of all parameters that are relevant to hard drive performance. These are the drive form factor, platter diameter and platter count, recording technology and data density, rotation speed and access time, interface and buffer memory.

Toms Hardware reviews the Sytrin SHF1 Hard Drive Cooler.

Tom’s Hardware has a review of some storage accessories, including a dock which turns a standard 5.25″ drive bay into a hot-swap housing for four 2.5″ laptop drives.

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.