One of the reasons I upgrade my home LAN to 1Gbps is to gain higher throughput for access to NAS. My dad and brother have been using external HDD for backup and file transfer in the past, there's been close-call that HDD was corrupted and near data lost. Also, it's inconvenient to move files around with the external HDD. The NAS provides a centralize and reliable data storage for backup (w/ True Image), personal data storage/sharing (via CIFS and FTP), and media streaming via UPnP.

As we move our data to the network, 100Mbps ethernet is unable to catch up. A test show that write over network top at ~1MB/s, sending 1GB of data takes over 16 minutes. In addition, a 1000Gbps switch is relatively cheap ($65.99) these days. Onto the storage, each of 3 PCs on the network has about 300GB HDD installed. Therefore, NAS requires over 1TB of storage. This mean a typical BYOD RAID0/1 NAS is not sufficient as 1TB size HDD is still very expensive. Furthermore, SOHO-grade RAID5 NAS is also too expensive (i.e. Synology CS-407 costs over $600 w/o disks). After some search around on Fry's, I settled on a DYI system with a Abit AN-M2 m/b, socket AM2 Athlon 64 X2 3800+ CPU, and 1GB DDR2 RAM. It costs ~$170 without disks. Then I added 4xSATA2 HDD (for storage), 1xPATA HDD (for system), and a CDROM drive to the system.

This NAS is setup using FreeNAS. A friend of my setup a NAS earlier with this BSD based software and seem work quite well, so I decided to give it a try. I was a bit surprise by the problems I run into with the latest 0.686b "beta" version. It just failed to install on to the 10GB PATA HDD, period. After many failure attempts, I finally manage to install a older version 0.684b..... Then I found the on-board 1Gbps ethernet adaptor is not supported, I solved the problem by install a Trendnet NIC that works.

After setting up RAID5, mount point, CIFS, FTP, and UPnP on the NAS, the system is finally up and running. I put the system in the garage as our server room for 24/7 operation. Then a CAT5 cable is laid to my dad's room as the wiring closet, where the rest of DSL modem, wireless DSL router, and 1Gbps switch are located.



Stay tuned for part 2, we will look at some numbers.