Ubuntu Do-It-Yourself Network Attached Storage (DIY NAS): A Preliminary Look

I had just done an enormous amount of work in an unsuccessful attempt to get a Synology DS109 network attached storage (NAS) device to work in my Ubuntu 10.04 system.  It was an expensive unit, on my budget, even if it was near the bottom of Synology's line of products, so I was hoping for good things from it.  But I was not able to figure out why it wasn't connecting with my computer.  So while waiting for a reply from Synology's tech support, I did a search for do-it-yourself (DIY) alternatives.  This post describes a bit of what I found.

What I was hoping to find, in a DIY alternative, may be summarized in this excerpt from the previous post:

I decided to go ahead with the Synology project for now; I could return or sell the device if it really wasn't what I wanted.  I probably could have assembled another computer at equal or lower cost, with far greater potential storage capacity, with more RAID options, with a more powerful processor (for e.g., checksum calculations) if needed, with what might prove to be more options in the choice of software packages and commands to manage and adjust it, and with more flexible hardware troubleshooting options (i.e., more than just fix it or replace it) in the event of malfunction.  Its drawbacks would include time and expense for software and hardware selection, learning, installation, maintenance, and troubleshooting; physical space requirements; power consumption; and noise and heat generation.

If the Synology unit had been easy to use, I wouldn't have been able to generate that list of potential advantages of a DIY alternative.  I accumulated that list during the process of writing up the hassles I was having.  So now it was a question of how true those observations really were.

One thing for sure:  if I had taken seriously the idea of building a NAS myself at the outset, I would not have bought the Synology unit.  I did, in fact, have an old computer sitting around, one that I rarely used, mostly just for troubleshooting random hardware problems.  I was willing to convert it to another function. So, right there, I did have much of the hardware that I would need.  Its case design would accommodate a number of drives, if I decided to build a RAID NAS that would require that.

That took care of some of the objections to a DIY NAS.  What about space, noise, heat, and power?  There was no comparison:  the Synology was such a cool, quiet, sleek little thing compared to that whole computer case and its monitor and keyboard.  Even if I put the peripherals in a drawer and managed the server remotely (assuming that was possible), there was still the noise from its fans and power supply.  The trade-up in expandability and flexibility (with e.g., RAID) would come at a cost.  And that was the real question:  did I want the additional capabilities badly enough to accept the drawbacks?

Then again, it occurred to me that I didn't absolutely have to have the server remain on constantly.  Couldn't it hibernate during slack periods?  For noise reduction, couldn't I park it in a closet?  This seemed like something worth experimenting with.

What about hardware hassles?  I could probably just plug in the drives and, optionally, a RAID controller and be done.  The Synology unit did not have a RAID option, and it did not come with a drive.  The DIY NAS would have more things that could fail, but failures did not happen often, and with an optional RAID setup it would be better equipped to absorb them.  In terms of hardware, the DIY NAS was the winner.

And software?  The Synology software package had a nice GUI that, for all its good looks, had managed to confuse me and had thus failed to deliver a working solution.  If the Synology people came through on my tech support request, I would be ahead of the game there; but my request had been so broad and confused that I doubted they would be able to help much.  If it was a matter of devoting another five or ten hours, I was leaning toward trying something new, rather than beating my head against the wall with more efforts to understand the Synology software.

I decided, though, that I had probably better take a closer look at the software I would be using.  Ubuntu came with software RAID, and I had already had a bit of experience with that.  But what about NAS -- what software would I use for that?  I had gotten the impression that NFS was a good alternative to Samba for a Linux network -- simpler and faster, but possibly not as secure and apparently not as good for interfacing with Windows machines.  The Synology unit used NFS.  But this didn't really answer the question.  What software -- really, what operating system -- would I use to manage the DIY NAS?  Sources cited on the Wikipedia page for FreeNAS made it sound like a great solution.  It was apparently UNIX-based, and thus was some kind of cousin to Ubuntu, but it seemed I would have to invest some additional time to learn FreeNAS.  Ubuntu Server seemed like a more familiar, better-supported, and more flexible alternative.  Openfiler was another possibility.  A lot of people swore by Windows Home Server; I just didn't want to pay $100 for the privilege of going back in the direction of relying completely on Microsoft software.  Going in a different direction, there also seemed to be routers with hard drive connections, though I wasn't fond of the USB connection offered by the one I saw.

Those thoughts led to a thread that made me ask whether I wanted an NAS or a home server.  The tradeoffs described above were echoed in another thread I found, but now the discussion had mutated a bit.  If I was going to use a computer as an NAS, it seemed I might as well make it a home server.  In fact, that's probably how I had been thinking of it anyway:  a machine that could do whatever a computer could do, including RAID as well as NAS.

By this point, a couple of things had happened.  I had downloaded a copy of Ubuntu Server and had decided to try setting it up on that old computer, to see how easy it would make things for me in terms of network storage and RAID options.  I had read enough webpages to persuade me that setting up a home server could be somewhat time-consuming and thus would ideally be approached, for my purposes, as a longer-term project:  install the operating system, tinker with the hardware, and gradually move toward comfort with its maintenance and other requirements.  And I had heard back from the Synology people via email, not once, but twice in the space of three hours in the evening, East Coast time.  They were offering to set up a TeamViewer session with me for the next day.  So my working plan, at this point, was to get the Synology going, if I could do so the next day.