Here’s a quick and practical project completed across three days. I spent the majority of my time researching and ordering hardware.

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Build a 4 what with a huu……. Ok – if you don’t speak geek it translates to “build your own secure file storage system for under $400” A comparable ready made box that does the same thing costs between $1000 – $1800. Cool, thrifty and green because it allows you to use a old pc that would have been destined for a landfill.

Storage is always an issue with a photography business and a passion for media. I’ve been reading about freenas a freebsd based operating system that can give that old pc sitting in the corner new life as a nas (network attached storage) it’s basically a computer that runs headless (no monitor or keyboard/mouse attached) and when connected to your home network gives you a boatload of safe data storage. The system uses software raid 5 (redundant array of independent disks) that saves data across 4 drives so if one fails the other three can rebuild it’s contents. No lost files if a hard drive crashes!

Construction was strait forward. I disassembled an old pc that had been sitting in the attic since we had moved in 4 years ago. After a bit of dusting I moved the motherboard to a new case, insalled case fans, nic, dvd-rom and the cf card as the primary hard drive. I booted freenas from the dvd-rom and transferred it to the cf “hard drive”. The next step was to install the sata controller and mount the 4 hard drives. At this point the hardware end was finished and the rest of the configuration is completed across the network with a html interface. Very cool stuff.

here’s my hardware list:

ATX case $0
celeron 700 cpu $0
256mb ram $0
128mb cf card $0
freenas os $0
ide to cf adapter $11.99
syba pci serial ata host card $31.99
10cm case fan $7.99
sata power adapter cable adapter $2.99 x4
18″ sata data cable $4.99 x2
samsung 3.5″ 1tb sata hd $79.00 x4

all this for a grand total of $393.87 !!!