Build Your Own NAS, part one.

Well, it's been too long since I updated in general, and way too long since I let you know how my little project with the NAS is going, so here comes...I dug up the VIA specs and started rounding up parts. From previous embedded projects and trashed servers I have disk and memory laying all about so I figured "this is no big deal".

As it turns out, it is a big deal in some respects. I dug out a flash card with an IDE adapter for the boot image. Easy enough to hook up. I then found some varying size EIDE disks I can use if I can't get the flash up and running for the install (just playing it safe!).

Then I went looking for memory. I've got no less than 20 sticks of memory lying around the house that are not being used. This should have been easy. It wasn't. All of the memory I was able to dig up was either Dell laptop memory or ECC server memory. Nothing DDR1, non ECC.

So I thought about hitting up memory chip vendors to help with the cause, and decided "to heck with it", popped out to NewEgg and ordered the memory I need. It's currently sitting in a UPS warehouse in DeMoines Iowa. Darn Christmas shipping traffic.

Meanwhile I'm working with Adaptec and Maxtor to get SAS drives and a controller for the project. The problem I'm running into is that it sounds like they are looking forward and producing PCI-X and PCI-E, while my VIA motherboard uses plain old PCI. I'll keep you posted on this one, it could cause a major speed bump that causes me to build two NAS devices - one with SAS, one with SATA. Or might just cause me to round up all of these old drives laying around and use them to build my NAS instead of shiny new SAS drives. Either way, the crowd over at Adaptec has been great trying to help me along here.

Steve Schuchart and I are writing a "He Says, She Says" (I'm the She, I guess, since Steve is definitely a manly-man :D) Build vs. Buy NAS article, I'm hoping to get this done in time to write a "Really Build your Own NAS" sidebar.Until next time,Don.