Collection of guides and configurations to build a small home server / NAS

I needed to replace my old QNAP NAS DS112 because it has become awefully slow and, well, full. Instead of putting a bigger hard drive into the dated model, I decided to either buy or build a new NAS. Based on my experiences with the old one, I decided on the following cryteria:

• x86-based, so I have a maximum of software to chose from
• Linux-based, so I can follow available how-tos and documentation for manual software installations (even if targeted at desktop OSs)
• RAID for data protection (= at least 2 HDD slots)
• able to saturate my Gigabit-Ethernet home infrastructure
• maintain nearly full transfer speed even when handling additional load of wasteful protocols like smb and overhead of transport and disk encryption (= beefy CPU with HW accelerated crypto)
• be energy-efficent and stay below an avarage of 20W for 24/7 usage

This and my of course minimal budget lead me to either chose one of Synology DS218+ or QNAP TS-251+ 2-bay intel-based NASs or build my own along the lines of the one detailed in this article: NAS Basic 2.0 on elefacts.de (german)

Comparing the solutions brought me to the insights that:

• Although comparable in performance, the Synology is based on the much more recent hardware and would be my choice between the two commercial ones
• If I replicate the hardware of the synology, I could only barely save 100EUR in price, but have a bulkier form faktor and still no out-of-the-box software solution
• If I keep the same price point, I can achieve about 4-5x more performance with a more recent chipset in a diy build (still with added sw effort of course)

So I ordered the following parts

• from mindfactory.de
• • Asrock J5005-ITX J5005 Gemini Lake SOD/U3/4S3 M-ITX retail
• • 2x 4GB Crucial CT4G4SFS824A DDR4-2400 SO-DIMM CL17
• • 2x 4TB WD Red WD40EFRX
• from Amazon
• • Cooler Master Elite 130 Mini-ITX PC-Case
• • PicoPSU-90 12V DC-DC ATX/mini-ITX power adapter
• • Salcar 72W power brick (12V 6A)
• • 1-to-4 SATA Y-power cable
• I still had lying around
• • 120GB Kingston SSD
• • 1 Sata cable

Including the original prices of the things I had around and including shipping, I paid 5% more than the cheapest offer for a Synology DS218+. (Because I made a last-minute upgrade on the chipsets. Could have gone for a J4105 to keep within the budget). For this I got 2x the single, 3x the multi thread performance, added 6GB more RAM and got 119.5GB more space on the FLASH system partition.

Putting it all togetheer proved more complicated than originally anticipated. The Cooler Master 130 is, although well-built for it's cheap price, totally rubbish. Instead of offering a traditional drive cage to mount disks in (there would be space for about 6-7 3.5inch drives + a 5.25inch one), they opted to just give you 3 mount points on the bottom(3.5'), side(3.5') and top(2.5') with the option to put another drive of any size in the 5.25 inch bay. And even those are placed in a way that makes the use of 90deg SATA data/power plugs impossible (although they ship them with the case) and doesn't even let me mount them the other way around. With just 2 data drives and 'creative' mounting hacks (zip ties ftw!) I managed for my setup, but I will have to build my own drive cage should I want to update to 4 drives. You better chose a differnet case.

Plugin the DC-DC power adapter in had me puzzled for a while. The ITX connector on the board had clear asymetrical shapes to prevent pluging it in the wrong way around. But they didn't match up with the plug! I was shocked. Until I finally made the stubborn atempt to plug it in anyway and to my suprise the plug was actually 2x2 pins shorter than the connector matching the safety-shapes differently than expected.

The case has room for a full-size ATX/ITX power supply, which I didn't need. I zip-tied the small power brick into the case instead to have it out of the way. The 2 fans (80mm side + 120mm front) are overkill for the TDP-10W CPU. I kept them on auto-speed because the NAS sits in the basement anyway. If you are going for a living room-compatible noise level, you can deactivate the side-fan and reduce the 120mm to a minimum to put a gentle breeze on the disks and power brick to reduce the noise to the low hum of 2 spinning disks.

Although FreeNAS being the most advanced open source NAS OS, I opted for OpenMediaVault4 because I wanted a Debian-based System I know my way around instead of a FreeBSD-based system I know nothing about. As ZFS-support (one big advantage of the FreeNAS OS) is barely even usable on my setup (8GB RAM is listed as the minimum requirement), I didn't feel I loose out on anything.

The J5005 board has a UEFI-only bootloader without any traditional DOS-bootsektor fallback. This made using traditional installation media impossible. I therefore did not use an OpenMediaVault install image, but installed plain Debian stable (Stretch) first and then pulled OpenMediaVault from the package system.

tbd

I just followed the Debian installer. Keyboard layout, date/time and language can be set to your liking. I chose to manually partition the SSD and created a 500MB /boot partition (vfat) and use the rest for the OS (ext4). To limit wear on the SDD, I did not create a /swap partition. At the end you will be asked as what the system will be used. Although 'web-server' is a valid answer, de-select all, because it would install appache but we are going to use nginx anyway

I'm not going to use this as any kind of media-pc, so I also had no use for 'desktop-pc' with a window manager. I'm fine with a text console. If you need a graphical dektop environment, feel free to install it here. After booting into your new system for the first time, do a

apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade; apt-get upgrade

to get everything up to the newest version.