Scott Bates
This is a quick summary of the first NAS I built for home use. Used for media storage and image backups. I built this in 2014 with spare parts laying around and it was decommissioned in 2020 when I built the replacement.
Pros
- Cheap. Probably under $120 for everything including the case and cables. Compared to an 8 bay Synology or Drobo this was a great value
- Small form factor
- Easy to setup and get introduced to how things work
Cons
- Old hardware
- Unpredictable Raid cards
- No hot swap bays
- Limited to 8 drives
- Almost no CPU / Memory to run virtual machines
Hardware
- MOBO: ASUS Micro ATX P8B75-M
- CPU: Intel G1610 Ivy Bridge
- HDD: 4x 3TB WD30EFRX RED RAIDZ1
- HDD: 4x 500GB Seagate Barracuda RAIDZ1
- Raid Controller 1: RocketRaid 1640
- Raid Controller 2: RocketRaid 1740
- RAM: 4x 8GB G.SKILL DDR3
- CASE: NZXT Source 220
- PSU: Thermaltake XP550 NP
- OS: FreeNAS