Building an Atom powered NAS

High speed, low cost, low maintenance networked storage... what more do you want?

Most people have more than one computer in the house, some people may have one on every room. Either way, sharing files between them can be a bit annoying.
There are several choices for solving this problem:

-    Shared folders; cheap, easy (ish), and quick. Share your folders with all other computers on the network.

Problems? Insecure, limited by hard drive space (so fairly pointless for media) and sometimes a pain to get working… oh and so confusing when using multiple operating systems…

-    Home Server; Using Windows Home Server Edition you can have a drive available to the whole network, which shares files, printers and more. Or if you are a student (or rich), the free Server 2003 and Server 2008 from Microsoft Dreamspark give it a boost.

Problems? Again, operating systems compatibility, expensive, and hard for large amounts of storage.

You solution? A NAS! Or Network Attached Storage.

Not only does it just appear as another hard drive in My Computer, but it is as big as you want it and works with Windows, Macs and Linux alike!


So, the first question, big or small?
For any shared drive under 1 Terabyte, just buy an enclosure/premade one. Far cheaper, more reliable, far easier, and less power requirements…
My LanDisk: http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?ModuleNo=97390 has served me well for several years, and takes a cheap IDE drive. These days it is probably worth going for a SATA II enclosure with Gigabit, as they are far faster, and more future proof.


But, as I found out, what happens when you store backups of movies, raw pictures straight off your SLR, movie edits, audio edits, and 1GB Photoshop files and still want to share them?
Answer: you need a BIG, POWERFUL NAS!

So: how to build one (please note, this is a work in progress, even when I finish, it may still be edited with comments)
You will need:
+An Atom Processor
+An Atom Motherboard (usually available as a package)
+A case: large enough to hold all your hard drive and cool them
+Power supply
+Hard drives (quantity to be decided later)
+Some NAS software (see review later)
Optional extras:
+Hotswap HDD bays
+A RAID card


Step 1.
Choosing components
->Atom is the chip of choice: low power consumption, low cost, but capable of giving you your file as fast as needed.
Other choices include any old Pentium 3/low clocked Pentium 4’s or Celerons, and maybe even some Core Duo’s/Core 2 Duos. High clocked ones are not brilliant as higher power consumption, plus a lot more heat mean you just add heat or noise to your system.
I’m guessing Atom is great for upto 4TB, and greater and you’ll need a C2D: more because of motherboard capability, rather than processor capability.

->A case: depending on how big you want it, allow approximately two 3.5” HDD slots per Terabyte, although using hotswap bays, this changes to 5.25” slots
Micro-ATX is fine for small ones, though you may need a full ATX for larger storage room. Most Mini-ITX Atom motherboards should fit in these cases

->Hard drives: Recommendations are: Quiet drives and low power consumption are good. The largest possible drives: bad. Basically, the larger the hard drive capacity the more heads it has and so as a widely accepted rule; the less reliable it becomes… (as a standard rule, 500/640GB have 4, 750GB/1TB have 6 and 1TB+ have 8 or more, but this is not always the case)  Not massively more unreliable, it depends how much you use it, but there is a definite trend. Also, if you use a RAID setup to make your data storage more secure, the larger the hard drive, the more problems caused when one of them fails as the greater the chance of further errors when restoring data.
As for manufacturer, I have no real advice on it at the moment

->Nas software: At the moment, the large ones are FreeNAS (free), NasLite (~£30),  and Ubuntu – setup as a NAS (free). I’ll be testing them more later.


-> I personally recommend some kind of RAID mirroring setup. Raid 1 allows you to make two identical copies of every file, great for two hard drives, or Raid 10 allows this without any speed loss, but the favourite for NAS is currently Raid 5, which allows recovery of data upon the failure of any single drive at the cost of having to use n+1 drives, where n is the number of drives to make the desired amount of storage.
You will probably need a RAID card: the only problem being that most Atom motherboards don’t support a RAID card fast enough… in which case, this is great for those with other processors…
You’ll need a Pci Express slot on the motherboard for a decent raid card which you can only get on u-atx boards so Core 2 Duo is the best bet.

-> Hot swap bays: Useful for constant swapping, or for turning 3x5.25” bays into 5x3.5”. They range between £50 and £100.

Now, to build it!

I haven’t got this far, but a picture tutorial will accompany when I do.