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tech

building the perfect NAS – in a shoebox

So, I finally got arround to assembling everything that I bought for my perfect NAS.

I assembled everything in a shoebox, just for fun, looks terrific, see pics below.

Everything gets held to the shoebox by cable ties, and since cardboard tears very easily I reinforced it with duct tape… ha!

I’m using 2 Harddisks, 1 is a 1,5 TB Samsung 3,5″ and a 80GB 2,5″ from the former laptop of my current girlfriend, that holds the OS.

I decided on using 2 HDs because I want to be able to change OS easily, and that may include partitioning the HD.

So first I installed Debian 6. It worked okay, but I’m not a Linux guru, and so configuration always took more time than I felt comfortable spending.

And now… I’m using Windows 8….. ha!

When I first got my laptop (Lenovo X220) I wanted to install Linux. Ubuntu, or Fedora. But the battery live was half of what other people reported on Win 7. This was due to a bug in all Linux kernels past 2.6.39 (see here and here).

While researching on that topic I found out that Win7 has super energy-efficient drivers, mainly because MSFT dictates clearly hwo drivers will interface with hardware to the OEMs and hardware manufacturers. But, hey, in some cases monopolies can be beneficial.

And since energy is a huge issue with a NAS, that’s running 24/7, I decided to go with Windows. Also I’m much more knowledgeable with administering Windows, so that’s another plus.

As for longtime running stability, I just fired it up, so I’ll let you know.