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The case I went with measures a smallish 9.84 by 8.27 by 14.72 inches (250 by 210 by 374mm), more than small enough to fit inside my desk. This is perhaps the most important building block of any NAS, even if you aren’t building your own-the case you put it in will dictate future expandability and the physical location where you can hide the thing.
![drobo dashboard drive says good but red outline drobo dashboard drive says good but red outline](https://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/unity-transform-2020-labeling-comlexity.jpg)
The case: Fractal Design Node 304 ($69.99 when I bought it, $89.99 now) These should be more helpful if you’re trying to build a cheaper and more appliance-y NAS. If you’re following along and hoping to build your own, I’ll also give a few alternatives that I consider. With those goals in mind, these are the main system components I chose along with some of the reasons why. It needs to fit behind the door in my desk, which means I’m sticking exclusively to Mini ITX-sized components. Physically, I’d like it to be as small as possible without compromising any of the above goals.I was hoping to spend somewhere between $500 and $600 on the entire project before shipping and taxes, with the understanding that around one-third to one-half of that would probably be spent on the hard drives alone. I don’t want the costs to get out of control.It needs to have room and ports to accommodate more drives, and if my needs change and I want to make it do double-duty as a quad-core workstation or gaming box in a year or three, I want to be able to do that without replacing half the components. I’d like it to be flexible and future-proofed.
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I have a Boot Camp partition on my iMac for when I need to play heavier games, but it would be nice not to have to lose OS X every time I needed to hop into Windows for 10 minutes.
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#Drobo dashboard drive says good but red outline upgrade
My main problem with the Mac Mini I was using is that my upgrade options are extremely limited, so I had that at the front of my mind. Part of the benefit of building my own NAS box was that I could afford to be incredibly specific about what I wanted. Inspired by our recent articles on building a living room gaming PC and a DIY router, I decided to take the more Ars option. I could go ahead and build my own, which would give me the flexibility to build basically whatever box I wanted. I could spend more money on a better, faster NAS, one that wouldn't disappoint me with its performance. I actually really liked the box itself and WD’s browser-based management software, but the wimpy ARM processor was slowing down everything from file transfers to thumbnail loading, and that didn't fill me with confidence about its future-proofness.Īt this point, I had a couple of options. This model gave me 2TB of mirrored storage for just under $300. I eventually settled on a Western Digital M圜loud EX2, a basic two-drive consumer NAS that I thought would satisfy my requirements.
![drobo dashboard drive says good but red outline drobo dashboard drive says good but red outline](https://i.imgur.com/jDoRZuu.jpg)
My first attempt to solve the problem was with a home NAS (or Network Attached Storage) unit, a basic model with just a couple of drive bays and the ability to run a handful of media and VPN server apps if necessary. It’s not as expandable as I'd like it to be, its Fusion Drive setup offers no redundancy, and as a general-purpose computer it is rendered unnecessary by the 27-inch 2012 iMac on my desk that's still happily humming away. It's an older Mac Mini with 1TB of storage space, and though it has worked well enough for several years (and through more than one OS X Server review), it's not a great choice for someone who primarily uses it as a file server. Recently I began outgrowing my home file server.