SuperMicro P3TDLE, Dual 1.26GHz Tualatin processors, 2GB DDR SDRAM, 1 ea WD1600AAJB (op/sys), 3ware 9500S-8 cobtroller, 8 ea WD1000FYPS RAID-5 array w/ hot spare (3ea 2TB partitions), Intel PWLA8492MT dual Gbit ethernet, Matrox video card

Used this article and the one on building a media server to roll my own deal. Picked up a cheap mobo with a Pentium 4, some memory and a cheap case at Best Buy, might have $200 in all of it.

The (4) 300gb drives, came from a local computer parts dealer going out of business for $40 a pop. Found the LSi card on ebay for $60.

Loaded Ubuntu 7.10, installed Samba for file sharing and a FTP server for backup. Also installed a media server piece, so the box gets used for that function and provides the NAS function for normal file storage. Everything works great, hasn't been off-line since installing it, had fun building it and learned some Linux along the way. The fact that I can always update it in the future in any manner that I want is a plus over buying a ready-made NAS unit for a lot more money.

I recently (This week) bought an external drive array that can hold up to 12 drives (NORCO DS-1220), for a pretty dirt cheap price ($500 with newegg's scary "Open Box" policy). I think filled it with 750GB hard drives (WD7500AAKS). It connects using four eSATA cables to an includes PCIx eSATA controller. Running twelve drives in two different RAID5 Arrays, I have 7.5 TB of much needed space. This is being hosted in an old ProLiant ML370 G2 server (Duel PIII 1.26 Ghz Processors, 6x36Gb UltraSCSI hard drives on a raid 50, three gigs of ram, and Quad Gigabit LAN's).

This came at a total cost of a little over $2,000 for the possibility of up to 9TB of storage, and the possibility of upgrading to 12 TB using larger hard drives. From my pricing, NAS's jump after the 2TB range, an average 5TB NAS cost upwards of $2,600.

As for why build my own, I like the ability to really control the device, if I want to, I can attach it to a windows server, giving me full NTFS support (Most NAS's use LDAP, with AD integration, not nearly the same thing). Upgradeability with a home built NAS having a lot more room to expand. I could easily turn my new array into a 12 TB NAS. I also have the flexibility of my own RAID setup, be it software, or hardware.

My desktop box is also my NAS server. I run Ubuntu desktop on a nvidia 6150, x2 3800 with 1GB or ram (single 500GB drive & DVD burner). The box idles at 48W, and I leave it on all the time. My wife's PC periodically takes backup images of valuable folders. I imaged the ubuntu filesystem and burnt a DVD.

I run a SSL webserver and SSH server for remote access. I was even able to download a service for dynamic DNS.

I like this setup much more than my linkstation box.

I build a backend data store for my ESX server. It's cheap, and consists of the following:

AMD XP 3000
1.5GB RAM
3x 320 SATA
$50 SATA Card
Openfiler w/ software RAID.

Let me tell you... it is slow as all heck. I burst fine, 30MBps, but after the first 200MB, it drops to 1-2MBps. I still can't figure it out.

I have read it multiple times. May be it is time to update the article. Having seen how fast a Windows Home Server can perform. May be we can use some up to date component just to test the Maximum throughput we can get from Gigabit Ethernet?

Personally i have always think the current NAS are simply too slow. WHS simply prove NAS can be fast. But it is too limited in its use and its has its fair amount of trouble right now.

The reason for building your own NAS has always been compelling. They are faster ( Hardware wise, ) Upgradeable in terms of Hardware and software, not to mention it is cheaper.

The main problem has always been getting a decent case. Just enough to fix an ITX MB with 4 HDD and a small power efficient PSU. I was hoping with the release of WHS we would see both of these come true.

With the Recent release of Intel Atom, the wish for fast and X86 compatible NAS may finally come true.

Performance:

The SNB DIY RAID 5 and all the consumer NAS boxes perform much slower than what can be achieved these days, as illustrated by this sample performance chart:

http://i89.photobucket.com/albums/k203/Madwand0/IOZone-DIY-vs-Thecus-vs-WHS.png

That shows the performance of a simple DIY build I made using 3-drive on-board RAID 5, on-board nVIDIA NIC (without jumbo frames) under Windows XP Home (OS on separate drive), which I measured using the same methodology as used by SNB. This build was based on a now-dated Asus A8N-VM CSM with an X2 3800 configured to use a single core and 512 MiB RAM.

The chart includes a couple of the higher-performing devices as benched by SNB to make my point.

Control:

Once you get into a NAS design, you quickly find that you have a ton of choices, and there's no single best choice for any of them. That is, it's really up to you how you design your NAS box. People get hung up on "server" terminology, box cosmetics, power consumption or other factors, but the reality is that anything goes -- from single-drive off-the-shelf boxes to the simple XP Home / on-board RAID & NIC that I used for the above example to ZFS and much more complex configurations. Automatic sleep modes can also do wonders for power consumption these days.

Anything goes as well for pricing. Whether it's $500, $1000 or higher depends on the individual concerned. It's better to build the device as per your needs and wishes than to a price point, as this will be a long-term central device of some importance to the household.

I had always planned to purchase a NAS appliance in my quest to simplify administration on my home network, but with Ubuntu LTS, (no need to upgrade the OS every 18 months), and equipment I had laying around, (a P3 1.4 S CPU and 512M RAM), I was able to get a decent NAS running quickly with not much cost. I purchased two SATA drives and a RAID-1 PCI card with the thought of putting those in a NAS when I found one I liked. However, it worked well for my needs and I use the Linux machine for other things like an IMAP and VPN server.

When I upgraded my HTPC server, I decided to put my money into one box and make it solid. I wanted to consolidate as much as possible to further ease administration as well as being able to put my money into one box instead of several. I now run everything on a single server and am able to build that machine to be fairly fault-tolerant with the cash freed up by selling my old equipment.

I started with the MB selection. I ended up with an Intel DG965WH because it had the on-board video, Gigabit Ethernet with Jumbo Frame support, etc. along with six SATA ports connected to the ICH8R chipset. I bought six of the WD 24/7 drives, a 4U rackmount case, and a couple 3-in-1 drive bays. Everything else was pulled from the old HTPC server including a E6600 CPU and 2G of RAM. So, my cost was pretty much covered by selling the rest of the old equipment.

I now run three RAID-1 arrays, one for the OS, one for TV recording, and one for other data, (media, files, backups, etc.) I chose three RAID-1 arrays over a RAID-5 or 6 setup because it allows me to add more space to a certain area by just purchasing two disks instead of all six. My research has also shown that the RAID-1 setup offers better performance than RAID-5, although I haven't noticed any bottlenecks, (there is no formal testing on my part there).

I reused my SATA card and hooked it up to a removable drive for off-site backups. I use GoodSync in a one-way configuration to write all data, (pictures, files, etc.) to the removable drive daily and once a week I swap it with another drive I store at another location. All my PCs use Acronis TrueImage Home to write daily snapshots to the server.

There have already been two incidents where the setup has really paid off. In one case, one of the OS drives died, (thankfully it was still under warranty). I was able to pull out the defective drive, send it back, get a replacement, put it in, and have the RAID rebuild all without any service interruption or me having to run any manual commands. In the other case, the HD died on my kid's computer, (that one was not under warranty). I was able to put a new drive in that I had in the basement, boot with the Acronis CD, load the last image, and everything was operational within 30 minutes. I also have the server hooked up to a battery backup unit, so it is able to survive a 30 minute power outage, shut down nicely, and come back up as soon as power is restored.

I can't see buying a NAS appliance now. The current setup is easy to maintain, is cost effective, and gives me a high degree of availability. I was also able to afford a second motherboard, have a spare E4500 CPU, and an unused PS around in case of a hardware failure. I can always strip some memory from other PCs on a temporary basis if that fails. I also don't have to buy as many batteries for the UPSs since I'm down from four to two.

I think a home-built server is economical, (at least for me since I have various parts laying around that wouldn't be worth selling), and much more flexible than an appliance. I used to have eight servers in the basement, (four primary and four backup with software disk replication), but am now down to two with no noticeable loss in performance. The only thing I really want is email notification when/if a drive fails instead of having to manually check every once in a while.

I'm about to build my own low-power NAS box because I want to put Slimserver and TwonkyVision on it.

Yes, you can install these on off-the-shelf NAS boxes but their not really built for this sort of thing and the performance suffers.

Really looking forward to the VIA NAS motherboard being available.

I used an MSS 300 GB for a couple of years but it simply did not offer enough storage and flexibility. When my MCE PC died a miserable death last December, I also lost most of my file storage (and by lost I mean functionality, not data). So, I had a few parts kicking around so I decided to roll my own NAS. I needed something with a small foot print that could also be flexible. Enter freenas.

Parts I re-cycled for the project:

- Beat up Antec Sonata II Case (All ducting and front door removed)
- Via EPIA 533MHz w/640MB RAM
- ATA to CF Adapter
- 512 MB CF Card
- PCI Sil3112 4 port SATA card

What I purchased:

- 4 Drive Tray-Less SATA Hot-Swap Enclosure
- 4 x 500 GB HDDs

Total cost, roughly $520.00 at the time of purchase.

Available storage, 1.4 TB in a RAID 5

Performance, not great, ~20-25 Mbps of throughput on average. Though this is plenty for desktop backup and media (music & video) access.

Reliability, Awesome. This NAS just keeps on ticking.

Flexability? Freenas out of the box is great at what it does but it is missing a few things if you are to use it as a terminal. I was able to add a few packages via pkg_add -r (though this is now broken due to my release being out of date) and what I couldn't add via pkg_add I built on a FreeBSD VM and transferred to the Freenas box.

All in all I am very happy with this device. I have a fully functional NAS, *nix environment I can use for testing etc... and a fully functional automated torrent downloader. All this and the footprint for OS, add-ons and custom scripts is 96MB!!

Oh - and let's not forget native AFP support too!!

Try to find an off-the-shelf NAS with ECC protected memory...

When the Shuttle KPC box arrives this week I'm gonna put FreeNAS on it and see what happens. I'm planning on testing various combinations of:
CPU (low-end Celeron or mid-range Dual-Core)
Memory (256M-2G single and dual-channel, depending on what I can scrounge up)
Single drives (PATA, SATA, a 74G Raptor I've got sitting on the shelf, maybe a laptop drive or two)
Dual drives (I've got some Seagate SATA pulls from NAS upgrades) in software Raid-1

So far, a junk PC with FreeNAS dropped on it is about 3/4 the speed of my Infrant ReadyNAS, and Netgear (IMHO) has really screwed the pooch with their ReadyNAS line, so I'm looking forward to seeing what I can build. For an off-the-shelf box with all the features, ReadyNAS is still the one, but their costs are astronomical and their tech support evaporated after the buyout, and I'm losing confidence that they'll manage to turn around faster than I can build custom NAS boxes.

Nas rocks on power consumption.
Difficult & more expensive to build own NAs in that option!