Several months ago, I was returning from partying with my wife on the town. She had been in the process of downloading something off the net and had her 500Gb external drive sitting on the nightstand hooked up to her laptop sitting on the bed. I accidentally stepped on the cable which jerked the running drive off the table and onto the tile floor with a solid whack. The 80% full drive broke on impact, breaking the main platter bearing and causing the stack of platters inside to vibrate and rattle around freely inside the chassis.My wife was quite upset at this not only due to the loss of all her movies and music, but mostly to the loss of irreplaceable data such as pictures and documents. I then realized that the external drive setup was just too fragile and vulnerable to data corruption especially since the single drive offered no redundancy. We really needed a way to backup our data to guard against data loss in the future. An alternate online backup method for our data wasn’t a real alternative to us mostly due to the recurring costs, and limited bandwidth of our cable modem connection.
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.
Some reading this may be wondering what RAID is, and why did I want to use it. Well, I’ll explain it…. Actually I’ll be lazy and cut and paste from the net: read this link. I basically wanted something faster than a single disk and something versatile; able to recover from a disk failure.





The Plan: My first step was planning the system out. How much storage space did we need? How fast did it need to be? Could we expand the storage capabilities in the future should we need to? I determined we needed a terabyte (1,000Gb) of storage space since we had used approximately 600Gb of storage space that was still growing both in her external HD for her laptop, and the 300Gb drive in my desktop. Should that Tb be used up, I would need a way to add another later on. I looked at a few ready made solutions online such as the Buffalo Terastation, and the Infrant ReadyNAS units, and found them to be prohibitively expensive, especially since a total 2Tb of hard disk space dictated I use 500Gb drives as both units only had space for four drives total. I also would actually see only 1.5Tb of usable space due to the parity information of RAID 5 using up a quarter of a four disk array. Finding all this information; I really needed to look at building a tower with room for five drives (4 RAID disks + 1 for the OS) and expandable to include four more disks for another RAID array. That means building a unit much bigger that the ready made units, but I figured I’d just hide the unit away somewhere where it wouldn’t bee seen.