Created on 14-02-2014 – Last update on 23-02-2014
The reason to buil a Home NAS
For 2 to 3 years I use a popcorn hour C200 as online storage in my home network. Also it downloads my movies and TV series for me with couchpotato and sickbeard. As for the download program I use NZBget. This setup worked very well for me. But now the time arrived that my home network needs an upgrade because it isn’t fast enough. I’ll already running a 1Gb network but copying some files from the popcorn to windows has a max. trougput of around 6.5 MB/s. The websites (CP and SB) are running but it isn’t very fast.
So, time to look around wat is on the market. The wishes i have are. Somthing that is fast and will saturate my 1Gb network. Somthing where i have room to expand (disk and memory). And something that will last arround 5 years or longer. And also not unimported the system needs to be energy efficient because it will run 24/7.
The Hardware
After searching the net my eye quickly fel on a new motherboard from ASrock the C2550D4i. It has enough room for expension (12 sata and up to 64GB of memory). It is powerfull whit it’s quad core but on the same time it is enegrie efficient (max. 20W for the MB).
The full specs. that I have orderd now for my new Home NAS is
First I’ll will use some exsiting hardware in my possession.
After a few days I could pick up my order.
The Build
To start, I had an old IBM netfinity 3000 case. It is standing a few years in the garage for now. And before that it was heavily used for more than 5 years. You can imagine that the case needs a cleanup. So first thing to do is strip out al the old hardware,cables, and other stuff that was in it.
The Secound part was to clean of al the dust from the casing parts and the frame it self. Finaly the NAS while be behind or in a closet so cleaning up is enough. This will not be the most beautiful NAS for looks. but it is the content that is in it.
Now it is time the rebuild the case whit the new hardware. The tricky bits are the placement of the MB and if it was posibble to reuse the leds on the front wiht the power button.
The old MB was placed on 2 plastic slides. And each slide has two mounting points. It took some fiddling before the MB was properly fitted and I could only use 3 screw holes. But it is in place and will not fall off.
The next thing to do was screwing in the Seasonic PSU.
And then it was time to look at the PCB where the LEDs and the power button where on. I used the orignal cable because of the tight fit on the top. But the connector on the other side woudn’t fit on the MB. I took an old connector that will fit on the MB. And after some soldering I coud connect it to the new MB. At first it wasn’t working. I had to change some signals end at the end it finally worked. One working power button, Power Led, HDD Led and a Network Led.
So now the hard parts are done and the last bit is screwing on the outer panels and the HDD’s and installing the memory. I also used some gaffer tape to streamline the airflow inside the case. I hope the fan inside the PSU is enough to cool the complet system. But time wil know.
I installed the SSD and some temperary HDD’s (40GB and 80GB). The temp HDD’s are for freeing up the data on my excisting HDD’s of 320GB. When the HDD’s of 320GB are installed I will use them first for testing and benchmarking the system.
Powering On.
Time to powering on the system. And look if everything is working as supposed to. And it does. Al devices are recognize by the system. And no error’s find. Now the first thing to do is setup an IP address for the BMC module. That was the easy part I discovered. Finding the default password of the BMC module was a bit harder. I thought I will find it in the paper manual but I had no luck. Then, just on the Internet after a few links I found another MB from ASrock that had a default password of admin/admin. So I tried it and it worked. Afterwards I found on the CD supplied a manual for the BMC module where the default password was written.
While looking around on the BMC module I saw all the fun things I see on the ILO (HP), iDRAC (Dell) or IMM (IBM) boards. Logging, sensor (temp,fan speed, etc), auto video recording and of course remote management. The last one is the most interesting especially if the system lays on a difficult to reach location or a remote location. Trying to start the remote management I get a message that I need java. So installed the java and acknowledge al the security warnings but eventually I got no picture in the remote management (black screen). For now I gave up but I will continue to get this working but you will read this in a new post here.
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