Recently found the time to finally build a NAS, based on Mini-ITX components. Although there are many off-the-shelf solutions available I found none that supports LUKS-encrypted BTRFS volumes.
Here's my parts list:
- CPU: AMD Athlon 5350 4 cores, supports AES
- Motherboard: ASRock AM1B-ITX 4x SATA, USB3 and Gigabit Ethernet
- Case: Eolize SVD-NC11-4 4-Bay SATA Hot-Swap, 200 W PSU
- RAM: 4 GB DDR3 Kingston Value
Unfortunately the board provides only 4 SATA ports, so I had to find a different interface for the system disk. A USB thumb drive would have been an option but I had an old IDE SSD lying around... As I didn't want to spend a noteworthy amount of money for a PCIe controller card I ended up buying the cheapest external hard drive enclosure with USB2.0 and IDE that I could find, and simply ripped the adaptor board from it.
Then I connected the USB-IDE interface to the internal USB pin headers using a 2 EUR adaptor cable. Not the nicest solution but does the job very well (you can't feel the ancient IDE interface at all) - and reusing old but working components always feels good somehow.
The operating system choice fell on Debian this time, because of its rock-solid package management system and the ability to have (somewhat) unattended security updates. I'm using backports to have a kernel version I can live with.
Unfortunately the fans that came with the case (140mm back, 40mm PSU) turned out to be very noisy even at low speeds. So I replaced them by a Noctua NF-A14 PWM and a Noiseblocker NB-BlackSilentPro PM-2.
The motherboard fan control did not offer me a suitable profile for the
case fan so I'm currently setting a fixed speed via /etc/rc.local:
# fan control
if test -e "/sys/devices/platform/w83627ehf.656"; then
echo 1 > /sys/devices/platform/w83627ehf.656/pwm1_enable
echo 140 > /sys/devices/platform/w83627ehf.656/pwm1
fi