Computing on Demand PC News & Reviews
The Build
The project was quite easy to build. The issues came about trying to keep everything neat and tidy in such a small case. Also, if I wanted to populate all available drive bays in the Node 304 with 3.5″ 2TB drives, I had to figure something out for the OS drive. Luckily, it worked out that you could install the 2.5″ SSD on the outside of one of the drive cages without any issue.
Although I have 8 2TB drives stacked up for the build, I am only going to be able to install six due to the size limitations of the Node 304. I will keep 2 of them handy in case I suffer from a drive failure.
The motherboard installs easily with plenty of room.
The PSU installs in the front of the case, this means the case is longer than it is wider.
Hard drives are installed and the 2.5″ SSD is mounted to the outside of one of the cages. Unfortunately, I didn’t capture in pics that you have to install the cage with the SSD attached to the side first or you won’t be able to get it past the frame of the chassis.
A few pics of the finished product.
Save some cash, use nas4free and find a motherboard with enough onboard slots and use ZFS. You wont have to buy an SSD (just a usb stick as it runs in RAM), nor will you have to buy a controller card that. If the controller card dies, it will be hard to replace or get your data back. Whereas with ZFS, you can just plug into any other motherboard and re-import.
I just happen to have 8x2Tb drives sitting around, poor mans build my a$$
The build is cheap… the drives aren’t. All the NAS reviews I do… I have much more than 8x2tb lying around. They can be had for 79 a piece now…
would like to know about the 40TB build as i’ve recently filled my 9.5TB QNAP 659Pro+ and want to go homebrew
The build was actually completed before this article/build as I my needs were immediate. However, baby steps… it will be published soon.
oh nice, look forward to reading it!