My NAS Server 2 (Part I) – Introduction

Throughout this series of posts, I’ll be describing the specifications of my home network-attached storage server (NAS). Before I get to the details in later posts, I’m first going to set out what I’m trying to achieve.

• Mass storage – I suppose this is the most important reason for the server. I want to have enough space for all my media.
• Cheap – Well maybe not ‘cheap’ but from my perspective, at least ‘good value’. The original point of the server was to get the cost-per-gigabyte below that of external hard drives. With the added benefits of a NAS over a USB/FireWire drive, this becomes less important.
• Easily expandable – With hard drive prices ever decreasing, I want to be able to add space when I need it – not all up-front.
• Redundancy – Now, we all know that RAID is not a backup, but for my purposes, it will suffice. I don’t want lose all my data if one HDD dies, but the data isn’t important enough to make a separate copy elsewhere. It’s my experience that hard drives rarely fail beyond being able to get data off them, so if I have to spend a bit of effort recovering data and the rest of the data ins’t available while I go about this – no big deal.
• Online – What’s the point of storing a load of media if you have to faff about in order to access it? I know a lot of people go about it this way, and it is certainly the cheapest, but it also bring about my last point…
• Easily manageable – By this I mean I don’t want to have to keep track of where what is. That is to say, the less ‘volumes’, the better.

You might be wondering why this post is titled My NAS Server 2. Well, I’m actually going to be writing about my second NAS. I’ll take the opportunity to write about the experiances of my first NAS in the next post, which should give you some brief insights into how I arrived here, and the reasons behind some decisions I may overlook later on.