Anyone that knows me knows that I’m a pack-rat. However, I’m a pack-rat in the sense that I download everything I see on the internet and store it on my hard drive. I do it a little in life also, but I try to keep it contained mostly to virtual stuff. This keeps me from driving Jenny too crazy.

In October 2009, I purchased a 1.5TB hard drive. I realized recently that it was pretty much full, and I was having to move things over to a 500GB drive. I figured that it’s time to upgrade again, so I began looking into a standalone Network Attached Storage device.

Now, I mentioned that I do hoard some in real life, and one of those things is old PCs. In my closet, I had an old AMD Athlon XP 1900+ Processor and Asrock K7VM3 motherboard. It had 512MB of RAM still in it. I’m always looking for ways to reuse these old systems for various things, so I figured I could serve files from it. It had onboard video and lan, so all I really needed was to figure out what OS I wanted and a SATA card.

I did some searching on the internet and found two choices that really stood out, FreeNAS and Openfiler. To be short about it, I basically chose FreeNAS because I had never used FreeBSD before, and I wanted an excuse to learn a new OS.

I ordered my parts from Newegg as I usually do. My friend Brian gave me an old Thermaltake full tower case he had, so I ordered a 380W green power supply, SATA controller, and 4 2TB green hard drives. I went with the green drives and PSU because I wasn’t so concerned with performance as I was storage space. This way they will run slower and (hopefully) save power.

Part 2 coming soon…