Guide Build your own expandable & headless NAS box (Atom based) !!!

One more step towards a networked home, I needed a NAS server where I could keep adding disks as necessary with no restrictions ! Every ready made NAS server in the merket has its own restrictions like huge cost, missing RAID capabilities, not expandable to more than four disks, missing NAS/Samba mixed usage and so on.

So build my own NAS box was the mantra. What I needed:

1. Cheap processor with low power consumption

I already had a dual core 330 Atom board at home, just had not found a use for it. This CPU would be perfect for the NAS.

Newegg.com - Intel BOXD945GCLF2 Atom 330 Intel 945GC Mini ITX Motherboard/CPU Combo - Motherboard / CPU / VGA Combo

Cost Rs 3500.

2. Small cabinet that does not take up space or power and makes no noise.

This was the tough one, especially in India. After a lot of research, I zeroed in on the Panache T3300 as the cabinet. It is small, in fact really compact and runs off a DC power board. This means that there is no PSU in the case (hence no fan/noise) and it runs off a DC adapter like a laptop. Disadvantage is the lack of a DVD drive.

View attachment 8549

Note the Panache box kept next to a WD external hard disk and a encyclopedia to get a idea of its size ! :bleh:

Panache

Cost Rs 3200.

3. Operating system for the NAS box

Lot of options here. Windows embedded, standard linux distros and more. But what caught my eye is the FreeNAS distribution. It is a embedded OS that runs off a 200mb image, configured completely from the web and works like a charm on the Atom. More importantly, very configurable and very expandable. Just perfect for my needs ! :hap2:

FreeNAS: The Free NAS Server - Home

Cost Rs 0 !

4. Install disk for the OS on the NAS box

An 3.5" disk is out of question on the small panache box. A 2.5" disk is acceptable, but still draws 4-8 watts of power for no reason. And the minimum size is 40gb when I just need one GB of space.

A little more research got me onto a fantastic solution. I found out that there are IDE adaptors for compact flash cards for about Rs 100. The bad news is that a compact flash card is expensive. But here also, I stumbled across a great solution. A CF adaptor that used cheap SD cards internally !!!

View attachment 8548

A 2GB disk for a grand total of Rs 1000 and uses 0.2 watts of power!!!

DealExtreme: $2.04 CF to IDE Adapter

Cost Rs 100

DealExtreme: $14.91 SDHC SD/MMC to CF Type-II Card Adapter (Upto 32GB)

Cost Rs 700 + Rs 200 for a SD card (Be a little carefull when you buy a SD card. It has to support DMA access, otherwise the OS will not install on the disk)

5. Memory. Less is more in this case !!!

A 512 DDR2 stick would have been plenty, but I had a spare 1GB stick with me and used it. Can hardly see any difference in performance between this and a 2gb stick.

All set, I assembled the Atom box and made sure everything is working.

View attachment 8550

Now is the time to download the FreeNAS OS and boot off the OS with a external DVD drive. There is a nice option to install the embedded system to the disk. Choose this and install the embedded FreeNAS OS to the attached compact flash drive.

Attach the external USB drives that you want to share, assign a IP address and reboot the machine. At this point, the NAS box becomes headless. No need for a monitor, keyboard and mouse. All you need is a power and network cables attached to it along with the USB drives. Connect to the NAS box from a browser at http://myfreeNASipAddress and configure the attached drives, the network shares, the services and everything else from the web !!!

You are all set. The network access is extremely fast and you can add as many USB drives as you want and share them on the network either via NFS or Samba. You can even setup software raid for the drives that need protection.

View attachment 8547

The headless NAS box up and running, attached to a monitor. See the power being drawn on the side. Just 0.11 Amps, which translates to a grand total of 25watts for a fully running NAS box. :hap2:

Total cost of the setup was 9k without the external hard disks. For a NAS server that is expandable to as many USB disks as you want with RAID options, this is worth it ! :clap:

P.S : If you want to use the data or information in this post, make sure you link to my original article at my blog : Random musings : Build your own expandable NAS box !
 

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vinayaga said:
Yes it will in this case. In general, when a card is used to install a OS, the swap is what kills the card. These cards are typically rated at about 10k write cycles and a swap kills it within a few months because of the contant writes. But when you install a embedded OS like the FreeNAs, there is no swap, the OS uses the card to load itself and works off the RAm completely. Should go on for ever theoretically. In fact, if you install even a Windows OS and disable the swap completely, the cards works for a looong time !
Click to expand...

good work.. although you can make it last long WITH swap as well. I haven't used FreeNAS so not sure how you would do it there (though since it is based on linux so essentially should be same) but basically, in linux you can create swap (and you would also need to do the same for /tmp and /var) on the hard disk.
But yeah, if used solely as a NAS, then there is no need for swap and it can run completely from RAM (and the temp things can also be stored in RAM though it makes them volatile and you can't do much debugging if things go wrong across reboots).

archat68 said:
Thnx for the clarification.

Thinking of one such system for quite some time - but was held up due to budget.

One of the costliest part in the system is the cabinet - if it can be fabricated using acrylic - then it would come out even cheaper.
Click to expand...

would be better to use no cabinet than using acrilyc..cooling would be an issue otherwise..(i hope that panache model is not plastic but some kind of metal alloy..)
 
thanks a lot for all the research you did one this. I learned a lot from this detailed guide :)

One question:
How much noise is there in this setup ? There are 2 fans involved in this setup. One on the cpu and one in the panache case. so I guess they must be making some noise ... right ?
 
Bumping this thread. Need to ask few qns...

1. Suppose i have a atom+CF setup installed with latest FreeNAS. how all can i connect the HDD's?.

Can i connect few HDD's using the internal SATA connection and at the same time connect few ext HDD's using the USB in the mobo. Do i have to connect all the HDD before the installation or after the installation?.

2. And suppose i have data already on the HDD on NTFS format. will it be formatted?..

3. I have heard that NTFS is read only.. is that the case?. isnt that a drawback as most use the NTFS.

4. And UFS format.. whats the use of this?.. so that Mac and windows read/write to it?
 
m-jeri said:
Bumping this thread. Need to ask few qns...

1. Suppose i have a atom+CF setup installed with latest FreeNAS. how all can i connect the HDD's?.

Can i connect few HDD's using the internal SATA connection and at the same time connect few ext HDD's using the USB in the mobo. Do i have to connect all the HDD before the installation or after the installation?.

2. And suppose i have data already on the HDD on NTFS format. will it be formatted?..

3. I have heard that NTFS is read only.. is that the case?. isnt that a drawback as most use the NTFS.

4. And UFS format.. whats the use of this?.. so that Mac and windows read/write to it?
Click to expand...
Buddy,If you are going to buy atom rig wait for sometime because intel has already launched the next gen atom board&the board looks more promising with intel G31gfx..Also the board is passivley cooled..
You may check intel site for details...:)
 
ooh ..cool... but no need to go hifi r8?...need the cost be as minimum as possible. this does the trick and some more... have used it before.. :)

linky please..anyways
 
1. You can connect the HDD's either via the internal Sata ports or via the USB. You can connect them after the install of FreeNAS, but before the machine boots up.

Once you get into the FreeNAS menu, you add the detected drives one my one, then the partitions in each disk to the share list and make them accessible. I have never seen any USB disk not being detected by the Freenas till now.

2. No data is ever lost because you just mount the selected partitions into FreeNAS. Freenas does not do anything propreitery to the partitions, which is one of the best things Ilike about it rather than the bundled NAS boxes that insist on writing data in their own way. NTFS is supported if the partition is already formatted, but freenas cannot format it for you in NTFS.

3. Hmm, Im not sure of this as to whether I have NTFS or ext2 on my disk. Will check and tell you.
m-jeri said:
Bumping this thread. Need to ask few qns...

1. Suppose i have a atom+CF setup installed with latest FreeNAS. how all can i connect the HDD's?.

Can i connect few HDD's using the internal SATA connection and at the same time connect few ext HDD's using the USB in the mobo. Do i have to connect all the HDD before the installation or after the installation?.

2. And suppose i have data already on the HDD on NTFS format. will it be formatted?..

3. I have heard that NTFS is read only.. is that the case?. isnt that a drawback as most use the NTFS.

4. And UFS format.. whats the use of this?.. so that Mac and windows read/write to it?
Click to expand...
 
I was jsut wondering, would it be wise for raid with external HDDs which require their own power supplies? You will have to give them all power backups. Also with RAID you wont be able be flexible with hdds, you will have to get the same size hdds and then you cant add/remove any right?
 
Agreed. Sometimes we go overboard with getting the latest and the best just to stay on the cutting edge. I would rather get the most cost effective option for my need. The chip hardly heats up for NAS work and I cannot hear the fan at all, so it does not matter if the next generation chip uses passive cooling.

m-jeri said:
ooh ..cool... but no need to go hifi r8?...need the cost be as minimum as possible. this does the trick and some more... have used it before.. :)

linky please..anyways
Click to expand...
 
vinayaga said:
1. You can connect the HDD's either via the internal Sata ports or via the USB. You can connect them after the install of FreeNAS, but before the machine boots up.

Once you get into the FreeNAS menu, you add the detected drives one my one, then the partitions in each disk to the share list and make them accessible. I have never seen any USB disk not being detected by the Freenas till now.

2. No data is ever lost because you just mount the selected partitions into FreeNAS. Freenas does not do anything propreitery to the partitions, which is one of the best things Ilike about it rather than the bundled NAS boxes that insist on writing data in their own way. NTFS is supported if the partition is already formatted, but freenas cannot format it for you in NTFS.

3. Hmm, Im not sure of this as to whether I have NTFS or ext2 on my disk. Will check and tell you.
Click to expand...

Ahh

Thats good to know mate...

can you check and tell whether u can write to the NTFS partitions also???
 
Current atom solutions in India seem to be all 945gc based which has a 22W TDP. It would be nice if a 945GSE based mobo could come around. With a 6W TDP I guess power consumption would go down significantly.
 
lide said:
Current atom solutions in India seem to be all 945gc based which has a 22W TDP. It would be nice if a 945GSE based mobo could come around. With a 6W TDP I guess power consumption would go would significantly.
Click to expand...

Intel Desktop Board D945GSEJT - Overview

The above board from Intel uses the 945GSE chipset. It has integrated DC-DC Power Unit.

Also the new D510 and D410 based boards have a lower TDP :) but yet to be available in India ;)

kekerode said:
from version 0.684b onwards ... NTFS writing is supported :hap2:
Click to expand...

Have you tested FreeNAS with NTFS? In FreeNAS there is warning saying using filesystems other than UFS is not recommended and can cause data loss. So does anyone have first hand experience using NTFS with FreeNAS?
 
varkey said:
Have you tested FreeNAS with NTFS? In FreeNAS there is warning saying using filesystems other than UFS is not recommended and can cause data loss. So does anyone have first hand experience using NTFS with FreeNAS?
Click to expand...

yup ... two of my HDDs pre-formatted as NTFS from XP are mounted with write-enabled in FreeNAS 0.7 ... and they r working just fine .. both read and write.

Only two issues are there

1. Can't format partition as NTFS in FreeNAS itself.
2. Any file created in NTFS partition using FreeNAS is having default access which is "Full permission to Everyone" .. so some of the old versions of livecd's may not have implemented this so they will see file without any permission ... but this is no issue in Vista/Win7 .. fully tested there by myself .. I'll get XP from somewhere and test for that too.
 
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