I’ve been wanting to obtain a NAS of some sort for a while now, and after seeing some of the abilities of the Synology NAS enclosures, I was set on just buying one of the Synologies.
However, after looking at the cost of the 4 bay NAS, I wasn’t so sure I could shell out for one.
So I’ve decided to build my own NAS rather than buying a pre-built one.
The pros of building my own is that it’s more flexible than the pre-built ones, and plus I also get some experience with some more Linux Distros on the side !
I’m using some old recycled hardware to save on money as I wanted to shell out as little as possible.
I’ve managed to scrounge up some old old parts to host this NAS on –
- Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe Motherboard
- AMD Athlon64 3200
- 4GB DDR400 Ram
- Generic Case
- thermaltake 430W Power Supply
- A few 500GB Hard drives
Not exactly the latest and greatest, but it should do for the purposes of serving up a few files and whatnot.
The first thing I need to do after I’ve got my hardware, is to choose a Distro.
I’m going to try three distros before I settle on one to actually use as my NAS, just so I can get a feel of the pros and cons of the different distros.
The three that I’ve chosen for this particular project are –
All 3 distros are free to download, so there’s no cost involved in obtaining the distro itself. Support can be bought for FreeNAS and OpenFiler.
A quick rundown on the features, pros, and cons that I’ve found of these 3 Distros so far –
FreeNAS
Features
- Replication – File system snapshots
- Data Protection – Raid Z/Z2/Z3
- Backup Services – Windows Backup / Apple Time Machine / Linux rsync / BSD Life-Preserver
- Encryption – Volume level encryption
- File Sharing – CIFS/NFS/AFP/FTP/iSCSI + more
- Web Interface – No CLI required
- Plugins – Add functionality easily
Pros
- Slick Web Interface
- Lots of plugins available
Cons
- Requires dedicated install drive
- Higher Hardware Requirements
- Not many plugins out of the box
OpenMediaVault
Features
- Based on Debian – Has all the normal Linux Features – apt/cron/avahi/Volume Management
- Web Interface – No CLI Required
- Plugins – Add functionality easily
- Link Aggregation – Make two NICs act like one
- Wake On Lan – Wake up the computer remotely
- Monitoring – The normal Linux monitoring abilities – Syslog/Watchdog/SMART/SNMP/etc.
- Services – The normal Linux services – SSH/FTP/TFTP/NFS/CIFS/rsync
Pros
- Nice Web Interface
- Standard Debian shell and commands
- Low System Requirements
Cons
- Requires dedicated install drive
- Not Many Plugins out of the box
OpenFiler
Features
- RAID support – Supports Hardware and Software RAID
- Clustering – Supports clusters with block level replication
- Multipath I/O – supports Multipathing
- Based on the Linux 2.6 kernel
- Scalable – Can do online resizing of filesystems and volumes
- Volume Sharing – iSCSI / Fibre Channel
- File Sharing – CIFS/NFS/HTTP DAV/FTP/rsync
- Web Interface – No CLI Required
- Quotas – User and Group quotas
- Based on rPath Linux
Pros
- Nice Web Interface
- Doesn’t require dedicated install media
- Low System Requirements
Cons
- Not many plugins out of the box
In the next part of this series, I will explore FreeNAS and see what it can do for me.
Originally I was having some issue installing it, so hopefully this time around I can get it to install !
Stay tuned for more 🙂
