The Case: So I looked around online to find an acceptable case. Most of the cases I found were your garden variety beige boxes with space for only 4 or five internal drives at most. Most of the cases had several 5-1/4” slots which I didn’t need. Finally I came across this case: link In the description it reads “External Bay: 5.25x9 or 3.5x9 or Internal Bay: 3.5x9” So that will allow me to mount 9 hard disks, comes with two 120mm fans, and doesn’t come with a garbage power supply that I’ll have to throw out anyway. Great!




The Guts: I already had an old computer gathering mold in my garage, so putting it to work would be great; saving me money and making room in my garage- a win –win situation! J The good thing about a simple NAS like this is that hardware requirements are pretty low. You just don’t need lots of CPU cycles and memory, so this provides a great use for old parts. If you’re a moderate computer geek like me you undoubtedly have parts laying around. Old parts I used were:
An Intel micro-ATX motherboard:
(3 PCI slots, one AGP slot) with a Pentium 4 2.4Ghz CPU



Two 512 sticks of DDR Samsung RAM:



A 3.5” floppy drive , CD-ROM drive, and associated IDE and floppy cables were also pulled from the old system.

The beige tower that all this hardware originally housed in had a cheap 300W generic power supply in it. I was going to be needing a little more power, since I will be having 5+ hard drives spinning up together at startup. I ended up buying a Silverstone ST50EF-Plus 500W power supply from Newegg: Link



Now down to the meat and potatoes of the NAS- the RAID array. I wanted to use hard drives that were relatively new on the market so if a drive fails, I can replace it with the same exact model. I also wanted to use disks with a serial ATA (SATA) interface due to the increased speed over the old IDE interface, and its smaller cables that assist airflow throughout the case. From reading all the information about RAID I could find, I found that usually a hardware RAID card will outperform the integrated software RAID solutions commonly found built into motherboards these days. But since I am using an old motherboard that does not have integrated RAID, I must go with a PCI RAID controller card anyways. Using the standard PCI bus will limit data transfer to/from the array to a maximum around 100-133MB/s; whereas if I was using a motherboard that featured PCI-X or PCI Express slots, I could see maximum transfer rates in the 180-200MB/s neighborhood for PCI-X, and faster for PCI Express. I don’t run a business or anything, so 100MB/s is fine for personal use.
I searched around and found a few four SATA port PCI RAID cards capable of RAID 5, but taking user comments and price into account I settled on the Highpoint RocketRAID 1740 PCI controller card:



I want to realize around 1TB of storage space from this NAS. Using RAID 5, this means 4 disks of 400Gb each. (4x400Gb=1.6Tb) One disk’s worth of data for RAID 5 parity will be eaten up, so (1.6Tb – 400Gb= 1.2Tb). Subtract the amount the OS will use for the format of the array, and the usable storage space should be around 1.1Tb. The four drives i'll be using are SATA II Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 400Gb 7200RPM 16Mb cache disks from Newegg.com


In the future if I need more storage space, I’ll buy another card, and four more drives to add to the tower. I’ll also probably go with 500 or 750Gb drives, as I’m sure the price will fall especially considering Hitachi just introduced their 1Tb hard drives.

Operating System: The OS is usually Microsoft Windows for me, as it is comfortable and familiar to me although I’m not especially wild about the stability concerns I have about Windows. I do want the OS to be stable since this box will be “headless”, meaning stuck in a corner with no keyboard, mouse or display attached. These thoughts got me looking in other directions for an OS.
Linux- This was the obvious first place to look for an alternate OS. However, not being used to it I found it frustrating, as I couldn’t figure out the root command line commands to install the drivers, or do anything for that matter. I prefer to have a point and click GUI at my disposal.
FreeNAS- I downloaded this image and played with it for awhile. It is based on the FreeBSD OS, and seems pretty stable. However, I still could not figure out how to install the RAID controller drivers, as it is all done through command line. All this testing alternate OS’es made me want familiarity, especially should something go wrong with the array, where I could spend hours trying to do something simple that I already know how to do in windows. I also figured since the NAS box will not be used in a business environment, If it crashes occasionally it is not the end of the world. Thinking this, I finally decided to use Windows Server 2003.

I made a full list of all the hardware I would need, purchased it online for the total cost of $776.00. I procured the OS, and stripped the old computer into components; lying the used hardware neatly in a stack in the corner of the room. Then I waited for the boxes to arrive in the mail. Assembly: I finally received all the parts in the mail. I’ll do a mini review of each component as I install it.