Simple, cheap NAS PC using old HDD-s

JeyTee84 · December 8, 2019

I have a bunch of "scrap" 2.5inch and 3.5inch drives laying around from super slow ones to properly working ones, 120GB to 1TB ones.
Isn't there a quick and dirty way of setting up a "smart" NAS PC using some old harware and a bunch of these drives?

Here's what im thinking: I have an old mobo with an Athlon II X4 in it. It has 6 sata ports. Could I install a NAS OS on it that could use the disks in a "smart" way? Like putt in a 120GB SSD as a cache drive and plop in a few of these HDDs that would be used in a "redundant" way? What I mean is saving any data on 2 different disks and if any of the drives fail or gets too slow i'd see it on a WEB UI? I have a feeling that something like this already exists, i just dont know much about the topic.

Thanks in advance for any help, tips and ideas

mariushm · December 8, 2019

Download FreeNAS and install it on your machine.

If you want to check it out before actually installing it on that machine, you can always use VirtualBox : https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

Create a virtual pc, add a few virtual hard drives, and mount the ISO image in the virtual PC and go through the setup and play around with it.

WereCatf · December 8, 2019

5 minutes ago, JeyTee84 said:

Here's what im thinking: I have an old mobo with an Athlon II X4 in it. It has 6 sata ports. Could I install a NAS OS on it that could use the disks in a "smart" way? Like putt in a 120GB SSD as a cache drive and plop in a few of these HDDs that would be used in a "redundant" way? What I mean is saving any data on 2 different disks and if any of the drives fail or gets too slow i'd see it on a WEB UI? I have a feeling that something like this already exists, i just dont know much about the topic.

A drive being slow isn't a failure, so no, you won't be informed of such. As for the rest, FreeNAS can use an SSD for caching and does most of the things you mention, but it will treat all the drives in the array as if they were the same size as the smallest drive in the array (except the cache-SSD), so if your drives are of random sizes, you won't get all of their capacity.