Building a NAS

da na · February 25, 2021

I'm building a cheap NAS with a SFF Compaq PC I bought on ebay and 2 4tb hard drives in raid 1. (Prolly going to use WD Blue as I do not need much speed and just need reliability)

What is the best OS for NAS? I would prefer a free OS (like a linux version, considering Debian as my main option)

And also how can I set it up so that everyone on the same network can access it?

Thanks in advance!

Electronics Wizardy · February 25, 2021

DO you have a seperate boot drive, id get a small ssd or usb drive for boot.

Debian will work fine, you can setup samba to make network shares.

da na · February 25, 2021

5 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

DO you have a seperate boot drive, id get a small ssd or usb drive for boot.

Debian will work fine, you can setup samba to make network shares.

This is going to be a thing which people upload probably around 20GB of data a week to, and is not frequently accessed... more of an archival server. If needed, I could get a USB to SATA and just boot from a USB stick on an internal sata port

Electronics Wizardy · February 25, 2021

2 minutes ago, wat3rmelon_man2 said:

This is going to be a thing which people upload probably around 20GB of data a week to, and is not frequently accessed... more of an archival server. If needed, I could get a USB to SATA and just boot from a USB stick on an internal sata port

Id just get a usb stick or 2 for boot. You can boot from the data drives in raid 1 if you really want to though.

Whats your backup plan, id say thats much more important than raid here.

Id probalby avoid the blues as many are smr now.

da na · February 25, 2021

3 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Id just get a usb stick or 2 for boot. You can boot from the data drives in raid 1 if you really want to though.

Whats your backup plan, id say thats much more important than raid here.

Id probalby avoid the blues as many are smr now.

I'm not going to back it up other than like 1x a month to an external 2tb hdd and it'll pretty much never be signed into or used for other than just a remote backup server. RAID is just incase one of the drives fails as I am going low budget with used drives.

I'm going to get a 30gb OCZ Vertex to hold the OS as I dont like to boot from USB, and I don't want anyone yoinking out any USB stick from which it boots by accident because of where it'll be stored