I Need NAS

Before I go into what I did today, I just wanted to say that I find a lot of value in the pictures I take, the videos I make, the music I buy and the rest of the important crap on my computer. Well, a few months ago, after I had a perfectly new Western Digital hard drive crash on me, I figured it was time to seriously look into backup solutions.

I finally took the dive and spent some money on some cheaper computer parts to make myself a NAS (Network Attached Storage) running FreeNAS. I figured it would’ve cost just a little less to buy a PCI SATA card to handle the SATA hard drives (the old motherboard still has IDE), but I wanted to spend a bit more on some parts that might last me a little longer. So I bought

  • a cheap motherboard
  • a cheap one-core AMD Sempron processor
  • a gig of DDR2 memory
  • two 2TB hard drives
  • and a power supply

So yeah, I basically started from scratch, lol. It’s okay.

I don’t feel like going through all the details of installing it, but overall it wasn’t that bad. However, I learned not to change any settings that I’m not familiar with. One setting ended up changing something on the BIOS, so when I rebooted, the computer was just dead. So I learned how to reset the BIOS today, lol… It involves putting jumpers on particular pins just for a few seconds then putting the jumper back in the original position.

I learned about ZFS, how to create a ZFS Virtual Device, how to create a mirror out of my two hard drives (so my backup has a backup in case one fails). I’m afraid 2TB isn’t gonna be enough to last us for a while so I believe ZFS makes it easy to scale to more and more hard drives. I did find out that FreeNAS has some power-saving options to turn off the hard drives after a period of inactivity which you can set.

I’m definitely going to need a better case to keep these hard drives cool. Right now, I don’t have fans blowing directly on the hard drives, which could most likely reduce the life of the drives.

So currently, I’ve got Kristine’s computer running Apple’s Time Machine to back up all the stuff on her computer. I’m curious as to how much space Time Machine uses up after a period of time. I’m debating whether we should even be using Time Machine or if we should just use this NAS as a fileserver which we manually transfer files to ourselves. If anyone has any thoughts on how to use this NAS, especially if you’ve got Time Machine running, I’d love to know. Also if anyone’s successfully gotten UPnP to work successfully with their PS3, let me know. The PS3 isn’t finding the NAS so I’m not sure what’s going on.

Leave a Reply