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Setting Up An NAS For The Home

An NAS refers to a network attached storage device. Something akin to giving extra hard drive space over a network, instead of having to add another hard drive locally to your computer. The release of Microsoft’s Windows Home Server takes the whole concept of NAS to the masses’ world of home computing. They give it a bright consumer glow, and TRY to make sure you only get it with the purchase of a new PC. However, the real issue is how NAS for the home has finally found a niche that portable storage devices have been unable to fulfill.

External hard drives and USB drives emphasize their portability. But no matter how much they’ll grow in capacity, that’s all they can do: provide portable data storage. They can’t stream media, provide restricted access to its contents, share data over a network using NFS, SMB, HTTP or FTP. This is where the NAS comes in.

Windows Home Server is interesting, but… Personally, it’s too little too late, and too expensive. Why blow a few hundred over a proprietary device, when you could easily go with an open source solution? Something that can interoperate with home networks big and small, homogenous and heterogeneous. For some of us, all we need to do is buy an extra hard drive or two for that PC or Mac gathering dust in the closet. Maybe even get a RAID or PATA card.

So contrary to popular belief, you do not need the latest and greatest to run a solid, stable home NAS . Of course, it doesn’t hurt if you’ve got the money to spare. You may also get better performance. However, since you probably won’t be having a 100 PC’s accessing your NAS at the same time, fulfilling the minimum requirements for your NAS’s operating system should be sufficient.

As an example, I used an ancient Packard-Bell (Pentium 120MHz, 96 MB RAM) as my NAS for a while. I installed Slackware on an equally ancient 1 GB hard drive. For the storage itself, I used an old Promise RAID card in JBOD mode to attach two 120GB Maxtor hard drives. It worked beautifully doing SSH, FTP, NFS, SMB, HTTP.

Besides the OS, the main point of concern should the network itself. If you’re still using a 10Base-T hub, it’s time to dump it and get a switch. You can use an old router as a switch. My Linksys BEFSR41 is still humming after about eight years now. The main reason is that you’ll get much better speed and connectivity between your computer(s) and your NAS using a switch, compard to a hub.

Second, you need to have some way of securing access without having a mouse, keyboard and monitor attached. For this reason, you really want to have SSH running. Alternatively, you could do things even more securely and use a direct serial port connection. However, such connections are always going to be REALLY slow in comparison.

Finally, decide if your NAS is going to act as your backup and storage or just storage. If it’s the latter, you need to come up with a solution for maintaining all the stuff you’re storing on your NAS. Some prefer RAID solution. Others prefer a CD/DVD burner. Whatever your preference, don’t even pretend that your NAS is immune to a catastrophe.