DIY Network Attached Storage

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Today I spent the afternoon building a NAS (network attached storage) appliance.  I have been looking for a better place to store virtual machine backups, and this seems like a good solution.

I started with a 2U rackmount case, the Norco RPC-230.  I like this particular case for several reasons: First, it has a shallow depth that allows it to be mounted without rails, and it is sturdy enough that it won’t sag.  Secondly, being 2U allows for a standard off-the-shelf power supply unit.  I do not like scrambling to hunt down an odd-ball power supply when my server goes down.

I went with a fan-less mini-itx motherboard from Asus that comes with a dual-core Intel Atom processor already integrated.  This is one of the few Atom boards that met my three qualifications:  four SATA ports, no fans, and a decent price.

For storage I selected two identical Seagate 1 Terabyte drives. The data on these will be mirrored (RAID 1).

I finished it by installing the fabulous and open-source FreeNAS version 8 on a 8 GB USB  thumb drive, freeing the entire RAID pair to be used for storage.

For reference, here is a list of all the hardware for the appliance, cleverly linked to my Amazon affiliate account: