Since some years, I really enjoy hosting things. Hosting basically means running software on a computer, so that it can be used by others. A classic example would be to host a Minecraft server for some people to play together. So far, I do this mostly by renting servers from companies and hosting it there. This is nice, as some problems are left for professionals, such as hardware, electricity, storage, backup, security, etc.
But there is a catch: Storage comes at a premium. To rent multiple terabytes of space is quite expensive and can quickly cost up of 50€ per month. As I don’t want to spend such money on a monthly basis, I would like to have my own computing at home, that has access to plenty of storage space. This storage is often called a Network Attached Storage (NAS). I have thought about getting / building one for a longer time but not gotten around to start the topic. Here is what I set out to do:
Have a NAS at home. It should fulfil the following criteria:
- This NAS should be secured against hardware failure with a RAID system.
- It should have at least 10TB of net storage size.
- It should be able to have enough resources to run many programs
Nice to have criteria:
- It should be fairly portable and easy to take to different places.
- It should be able to make use of old hard drives I have laying around
- It should not be a commercial or closed-source product
- It should offer its storage to local computing, e.g. raspberry pies or small servers
Research
The first thing will be getting a good picture of what is possible. At this moment, I do not have a good overview of the options. I also have an old PC with many hard drives laying around that potentially could be repurposed as a NAS or server. But at this moment, I cannot judge if this will be conflicting with the RAID criteria.