Building your own NAS

[Blacktoxic]

Anyone else like me planning on building their own NAS or has built one previously?

Basically have two desktops at home, one my gaming rig which I just brought back from the UK and one my parents use for light computer work. Now that they got themselves an ipad, they barely use that pc except for the occasional printing of stuff, I am planning to to clean and turn that system into a NAS hooked up directly to my router for backup and streaming, streaming and torrenting purposes.

Anyone else built/converted a system to a NAS before?

 

[Thehim]

A fellow forumer did his DIY style with $450 exclusive of HDDs.
diy-nas.blogspot.sg
Good info too.

 

[Phrajile]

Nice info there. So it seems the main block to doing so in Singapore would be the availability of NAS enclosures - unlike PCs that have an abundance of chassis.

I wonder if SLS decides to stock up on more of these NAS chassis, will we see a more vibrant NAS-building community?

 

[xkiller213]

actually converting a system to become a NAS is not difficult, you just have to install more HDD for storage... many NAS are just regular PCs running dedicated file serving OSes (eg. Synology DSM, FreeNAS, etc)...

you could make do with a regular OS like Windows 7/8 (only Windows 8 has software RAID5) and just share the files via HomeGroup or something similar... This way, your parents could still use it to do their occasional PC-related stuff, and you can also use it as a file server...

of course, this is ignoring the fact that this system would use much more power than the regular NAS especially if your processor is not as efficient...

 

[Thehim]

Nice info there. So it seems the main block to doing so in Singapore would be the availability of NAS enclosures - unlike PCs that have an abundance of chassis.

I wonder if SLS decides to stock up on more of these NAS chassis, will we see a more vibrant NAS-building community?

Yes, the killer to DIY NAS systems in Singapore can largely attributed to casings, not much casings are as ideal as compared to off the shelf NAS.

actually converting a system to become a NAS is not difficult, you just have to install more HDD for storage... many NAS are just regular PCs running dedicated file serving OSes (eg. Synology DSM, FreeNAS, etc)...

you could make do with a regular OS like Windows 7/8 (only Windows 8 has software RAID5) and just share the files via HomeGroup or something similar... This way, your parents could still use it to do their occasional PC-related stuff, and you can also use it as a file server...

of course, this is ignoring the fact that this system would use much more power than the regular NAS especially if your processor is not as efficient...

Agree to this, I'm using a Ubuntu system, with 5 HDD inside, only me using though.