Introduction
There may be a lot of people like myself who have missed the “NAS bandwagon” and have made do with other fragmented storage solutions up until now: multiple storage drives on different devices (laptops, desktops, tablets, smartphones) with the gap being bridged between those multiple devices through space restricted cloud storage (Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive) or portable storage (flash drives, external hard drives, SD cards). However, there has to be an easier way to unify all your storage needs – and that’s what today is all about. Like many of our readers I am a technology enthusiast – I like to get hands on with things and do it myself rather than just buying pre-built solutions that often hold a significant price premium. Therefore, what better way than to get involved with the NAS (Network Attached Storage) craze than to build your own! Your own centralised cloud storage, fileserver, storage server, media centre or whatever else you want to do with it – how cool is that? And despite what people may tell you, or even what your own preconceptions are, building a NAS has never been easier. There’s a wealth of affordable hardware out there and more importantly an abundance of free software to help you configure your own NAS setup.
The aim of this guide is quite a simple one – to take you through my personal experiences with building a 6-Bay capable NAS within a strict budget of $220 using FreeNAS. Why $220? Well I wanted to build a 2 disk NAS box capable of streaming media and storing all of my files for the lowest cost possible, but I also want the scope to be able upgrade to 4-6 drives in the future. A quick search on somewhere like Newegg will show you that 4-Bay diskless NAS systems start from $300 and range all the way up to $700, so I wanted to better those NAS systems and do it at a lower cost. I am only a home user (like most of you will be) so I really do not need loads of advanced enterprise features and technologies – I just need a reasonably fast NAS server capable of meeting my storage and media needs. Enter today’s build which I believe meets all of those criteria at a hair under $220. This build was an interesting one as we independently chose all the parts for our NAS guide that we wanted to use and then went to the companies to see if they were interested in sponsoring our build guide. A few weeks of planning later and here we are – so a huge thank you goes out to AMD, ASRock, Kingston Technology, SilverStone Technology and Western Digital for providing the parts to our NAS build guide. At just $220 this diskless NAS has the potential to scale up to six hard drives and offers a variety of RAID configurations as well as support for on-chip transcoding. So without any further ado let’s introduce all the details of our $220 NAS system, we will start by analysing the parts we chose: how much they cost and why we chose them.
Forgive my ignorance, but what is the purpose of a NAS? We use cable broadband with WIFI in the house; all or computers have SSDs and/or HDDs. It appears a NAS is basically a local cloud storage system. My wife and I have three desktops, two laptops, two tablets (with WIFI only), and one smartphone. So what advantages would a home NAS offer that the “old fashioned” way lacks? I’m just looking to increase my fund of knowledge and know this is a great place to do so.
The benefit of a NAS is always on connectivity so any computer can access the data.
For example to get something from your main computer to another PC would require having your main computer on when the file is needed.
A NAS is designed for 24/7 access so you don’t have to go and switch a specific PC on for say a single file. Also, a NAS can be set up for low power consumption (as in this article) so it doesn’t run up a big electric bill.
Your typical PC will consume much more power as you wouldn’t throttle the CPU/GPU every time you boot up to share a file whereas a NAS would be set up for low power mode all the time.
My main PC uses around 150w just idling due to the fact it has a GPU, multiple fans, sound card, usb devices and a dvd drive. A NAS will have unnecessary devices disabled to save even more power.
Yes pretty much what Andy says below. It’s effectively a centralised form of storage that all computers can access, it doesn’t have to be “always on” but that’s normally the easiest way to make sure it is always accessible to everyone. The idea behind a NAS is that it is designed primarily for mediating access to storage but obviously there are a lot of things you can do with this storage. You can set up internet gateways so you can access it when you’re away from your home network, you could host a website off it, you could use it to stream music, films, TV shows, photos. You could use it as the destination for automated backups from your laptops/PCs in the house. The possibilities are as endless as your imagination really. In most cases people will just use it as somewhere to dump large files when their device is low on storage. E.g. I use a tablet with only 32GB of storage, really difficult for me to store films on it but it is really easy for me to stream films onto it from my NAS. Hope this helps.
Thank you, Gentleman. That was very enlightening. I can easily see advantages over our current system. Especially when I offload picks from our cameras and must upload to five computers just so they’ll be available when/if necessary. I’ve owned computers since the old TRS-80 and Commodore days and have been building them since 1991, but I’ve still not joined the 21st century as far as ease and practicality of connectivity; I bought my first cell phone from Walmart last February for $15 and have used it once. But a NAS, thanks to you guys, is something I’d like to do so I’m off to do some research. A new project with lots of benefits.
hey yall, welcome to the new century !!!
hey, good one, $220, a NAS with no NAS
NAS System.
Gents thanks for the great write-up. One question; what do you reckon, would the FM2A88M Extreme4+ mobo be a viable alternative to the one you recommended? My trouble is sourcing all of these from one (decent) place is nigh’ impossible in Australia, and the aforementioned mobo is available (altho it puts the price up a bit, there’s nothing in the price range of the other one)
Still a good option Steve. It has Gigabit LAN and 8 SATA ports so there’s plenty of room for expansion, you can have up to 8 drives with it. Remember that you could go even cheaper if you wanted to, it all depends on how many drives you need, for example you could use an AM1 motherboard if you only want to use 2 drives as most AM1 boards still have gigabit LAN. Best of luck!
thanks for that!
Hi i’m new at this where does the black cable from pso9b plug into the motherboard
for even less – sleek media center and expandable NAS – works great, super fast on over-clocked raspberry pi b+ http://www.ebay.com/itm/xbmc-Portable-Media-Center-Expandable-NAS-/171709257100?
40 Watts is quite high for a NAS setup. In Germany that would result in over 100$/year for electricity (running 24/7).