The fairy tale was quickly told, but the deed was done for a long time.
More than a year and a half ago, I wanted to build my own NAS, and the beginning, for collecting NAS, was putting things in order in the server room. When dismantling cables, cases, as well as moving a 24-inch lamp monitor from HP to a landfill, and other things, a cooler from Noctua was found. From which, through incredible efforts, I removed two fans - 120 and 140 mm. The 120mm fan almost immediately went to the home server as it is quiet and powerful. But what to do with a 140 mm fan, there were no thoughts yet. Therefore, he went straight to the shelf - to the reserve.
Somewhere, two weeks after putting things in order, we bought a NAS from Synology, model DS414j. Then I also thought, why two fans, if you can have one and a big one. Here, in fact, the idea was born from this - to make a NAS with one large and quiet fan.
So, it was a saying, and now a fairy tale.
Since, I had experience with a file, even earlier I built a six-disk basket into a home server, then I roughly imagined the outlines of the future NAS. Full face is a large and quiet fan with a grid, the profile is a regular rectangle, slightly larger than a two-disk basket. And everything else, to the maximum harmonious and not bulging.
And work began to boil ... for a year.
Designing and again designing, before starting work, I am convinced of this, for the umpteenth time. But, since this is a hobby, and the deadline is almost impossible, I did it and improvised, and did it again, and improvised again, and so on until it worked.
So, where to start and what materials to use?
It was decided to use aluminum corners and aluminum plates, as they are moderately strong, light, and most importantly, aluminum products are malleable for experiments. Further, I bought an aluminum corner 20x20x1 cm, 2 m and a corrugated sheet AMg2 1.5x600x1200 mm. From the sheet, in the future, I also planned to make the walls of the case for the virtual machine server. So, the beginning of the photo.
Appearance, of course, not so hot. But most importantly, the functionality, which then was enough in abundance.
In terms of size, the future NASa was guided by the dimensions of a 140 mm fan, two baskets for 3,5 drives and a power supply. The size of the NASa "smart part" board did not play a big role, since, compared to other components, it was still quite small. And, I thought, somewhere, it will still turn out to be screwed.
What happened later, the board of the "smart part" of NASa took its place.
In the meantime, work on the placement of NASa elements took place, a future case for a virtual machine server was born in my head, but more on that in the next article.
By cutting, drilling holes and joining together, we finally managed to assemble a suitable box.
I thought that for the first practical work, on the manufacture of NASa, it is quite normal. And he began to settle all the components in their places, put the disk baskets at the bottom, the power supply at the top. Although the NAS is currently positioned differently, the power supply is at the bottom.
And as I said earlier, the production of NASa took a long time, primarily due to the long delivery and selection by characteristics and prices: disk cages, power supply, USB-to-SATA converters, NASa "smart part" board. Then I also needed "L" shaped cables, which I also ordered in the same large, well, very large, electronics store. Since 5V and 12V are perfectly enough to power SATA drives, the power supply chose two-channel: 5V and 12V, with a power of 75 watts. I used the wires for power supply from the β5Vβ and β12Vβ terminals from an old standard computer power supply, and for supplying 220V, I cut off the C13 female connector and connected the wires to the βACβ terminals.
And here is the result, all the components are assembled in the case.
If you look at the device from the side of the drive cages, then for the "smart part" of the NASa there was a suitable place, to the left of the power supply and above the drive cages.
So what was used for the "smart part" of the NAS? Particularly big-eyed, they could see in the photo, and yes, this is OrangePiOnePlus.
I liked this board, first of all, by the ratio of price and toppings. Since, in the future, I did not plan to use the NAS for another purpose, except for file storage, I chose the board specifically for this device. Two USB ports for two drives, a 1G network port, an SD card slot and 1GB of RAM - everything you need and nothing more.
On the SD card, for 2 GB, I uploaded the image of the server Ubuntu 16.04, the system booted up and started testing. Testing consisted of network copying to and from the NAS and between drives.
Copy to NAS.
Copy from NAS.
Copying between drives in a NAS.
And here is the finished version of NAS, which went to the far and dark corner of the cabinet.
Summing up, I will say the following, for more than six months now, NAS has been performing the role of backup storage and pleases with its work - it is quiet, modest in power, and reliable. About reliability, I note that in the first month of the NASa, one disk ceased to be seen. But the system worked and the data was saved every night. At first I sinned on the hard drive, but after replacing it with another, obviously good, the miracle did not happen, the disk continued not to be seen. The next item to replace was a USB-to-SATA converter, and yes, a miracle happened, the disk was seen both the old one and the one that was intended for replacement.
This fairy tale ends.
Source: habr.com