Home NAS

I haven't build something in a super long time, and I have had 5TBs of hard drives collecting dust. So I've decided to buy a small AMD APU board and make a little server for my house.

ASUS Mobo, with a 1GHz dual core AMD APU
8GBs of G.Skill RAM (it's cheap these days so why not? lol)
Some random 1Gbit NIC so I can use this as a firewall
5TBs across 5 drives, all Samsung Spinpoint F3s
SanDisk 32GB SSD as the boot drive
Antec 650W PSU (over kill, had it laying around)

I'm going to make a custom enclosure for it, working on bits in SketchUp right now.

I'll be cutting this piece out ina little bit and post that up. I have to say, using Dropbox with my phone makes this process wayyyyyy easier! "Back in the day" I had to take the pics on my FD-Mavica, transfer to the PC, upload, then post. Now I take the picture, and link it... Awesome!




-CollinstheClown

Looking forward to seeing it.. unfortunately the pics are in a secured area in your dropbox, so we get a 403 error.

I just recently built a little file server as well.. I went with unRAID and have been extremely happy with it so far.

Damn I had a feeling it too easy to use dropbox. I put it in my public folder, let me tinker with it.

*Edit: Should work now

Yep. Working fine now.

Got the motherboard tray done, need to get the proper screws tomorrow.

Heres the general idea:

Kinda doing this on a whim lol, not 100% on the case yet. Mostly using some scrap materials I have laying around. The bottom is 1/4" thick red plexi, the top of the HDDs is 1/8" thick black plexi. I'm thinking of a box with a ledge for the tray to sit on.




-CollinstheClown

Did some stuff!

Made the sides and back tonight. I still have to add fan holes in the back, but I wanted to make sure the PSU holes were correct, and the I/O panel was right. Last picture shows the amount of space between the PSU and mobo, I'm using the PSU as active cooling on the APU. It's passive, so it really doesn't need it, but I like to be on the safe side. OH, I also had to redrill all the HDDs, didn't take the direction 90° cables connected into consideration. :facepalm:

Hopefully in the next day or two I will have the front panel and the top done. I'm adding a VFD display to the front, to display HDD info and network traffic. I'm also mounting a 120mm fan to the front, to cool the drives.

Following that is cable management. I'm going to cut and make my own length cables. The PSU has 6 SATA connections across to leads. Going to make that 5 connections on one lead, with the connections about 35mm apart. Tempted to shorten the main 24 pin ATX line.

Hopefully paint it to finish it up, the sides and top are MDF which looks like crap. Hopefully get it glossy black before putting it in service.

More to come! :)

Almost forgot, I did some tests and it only draws 120 watts at startup and once everything is spinning it's under 60 watts! That's awesome in my book. :D




-CollinstheClown

Great work so far, and an great idea. What mobo is that?

D.

ASUS C60M1-I
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813131843

Cheap, silent, and low power. That's all I need for a NAS. :)

Enough SATA ports?

Just joined this site so I can subscribe to this thread; I'm old (born in the mid-1950's) and forgetful, so I'm hoping the e-mail alerts will help me to remember to check on your progress as time passes. Looks like you're off to a very good start; I've got a similar project in mind but I won't be able to get it off the ground until autumn arrives.