My wife and I are both self employed, and in particular, my wife is a graphic designer with quite a large storage need, even just on working projects. We both have a significant backup requirement. She needs daily, I need rolling backups with history. So I built my own Ghetto NAS using the following stuff:
One
LINKSYS NSLU2 Network Storage Link for USB2.0 Disk Drives @$85
Two
VANTEC Nexstar 3 NST-360U2-BL External Enclosure @ $30 each
Two
Western Digital Caviar SE 500GB 3.5″ IDE Ultra ATA100 Hard Drive @ $105 each
You also would need a free socket on your router to network it to your machines (which I would assume you have since you are looking into a NAS), though technically if you only have 1 machine, and an available network socket on it, you could just do a crossover cable and won’t need a router if you don’t have one. Also you need some network cable, however long you need it to put your nas where you want. Obviously a wifi bridge could be used as well to get it somewhere that cabling might be a pain to deal with.
The only important part is the Linksys NSLU2 which is a small Ethernet to USB2 hub (for lack of a better explanation) that acts like a very basic computer on your network, that shares out 1 or 2 drives, or folders. It has a web based management interface, so you just log into it the same way you would manage your router most likely, but even if you never have, its very simple, and the instructions are pretty good as well for how to set up your storage the way you want.
With the NSLU2 you can either make 1 BAD (BIG ASS DISK) though i think it actually is 2 drives, not actually 1 Big Ass Disk, or a kind of ghetto RAID where 1 disk automatically backs up the other disk. The later is how we are set up. We have two 500Gb drives attached to the NSLU2, but only 1 is publicly accessible on our network, so the max storage on our NAS is 500Gb. However, the other drive backs up the main drive , so if we have a drive failure we don’t lose our backups. For us, that is a required level of protection that we can’t live without, and it has saved us once already since we had a drive blow out.
The setup is straightforward and you just need to assemble everything. You need to put the Hard Drives into the drive enclosures, which is 4 screws and 2 plugs each, easy. You plug the NSUL2 into your network via the ethernet socket, open a web browser on your computer and then navigate to the IP address the instructions tell you to. Plug the newly enclosed drives into the NSLU2, using the supplied USB cables, attaching 1 drive to each socket, if you are using 2 drives. Mind you, the only reason to use 2 drives is to get double-backups, or to make a really big NAS, though i think it actually is 2 drives, not 1 Big Ass Disk. But if you only need 500GB, or even 750Gb which the specs say it can take per drive, then you would only need 1 drive, leaving you room to upgrade to even more space in the future if you need.
Once everything is all hooked up, you will need to format the drives, which is done via the web interface for the NSLU2. Finally, once that is all done, you choose how both drives should work, mirror automatically every day at a specific time, or just as normal storage space. You can setup groups, users, private or public folders, and quite a few other settings to manage how your data is stored. Music for example would be public, but your documents maybe private.
The device is a little slow, but not too bad. It’s quite acceptable I think when you are only paying $350 for a 1Tb storage, or a 500Gb mirrored storage system.
The NAS also works perfectly with BOTH the MAC and the PC, with 3 PCs backing up to it, and 1 Mac (OSx).
If you have any questions, leave a comment, I might have experienced the problem and might be able to help you out.
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