Turning an old PC into a NAS
You don’t need to pay through the nose for a new NAS, as Nathan Taylor explains.
If you’ve never owned or used a network attached storage device, there are two things you should know about them: a) they’re awesome; and b) the commercial ones are basically just PCs running a specialised version of Linux. Their main advantage is their industrial design: the ease of installing and removing hard drives. But you pay quite a bit for that industrial design, and many commercial NASs have their flaws.
The most common flaw is a very weak processor, especially in the less expensive models. Very cheap NASs, those in the $200-$400 range, very often use extremely low-powered ARM chips. Which is fine for file sharing and media streaming from your NAS, but if you want to do something a little more demanding, like live transcoding, broadcasting, or IP camera recording and management, then those cheap chips are not going to cut it.
Here’s the thing: you can turn an old PC into a NAS very easily. And even a five year old PC is likely to have vastly more horsepower than a low cost NAS. And, if you’re no longer using it, it’s free! So this month we’re going to walk through how to do that with one of the more user-friendly free NAS solutions.
THE INGREDIENTS
To make this whole thing work, you need just four things:
An old x86 PC. It doesn’t matter if it’s five or even ten years old. Even a low-power PC can get it done. It doesn’t need a monitor, keyboard, or mouse (though these are useful to connect to it during initial setup, once the NAS software is installed they’re no longer needed).
Storage. This is the real kicker. NASs are mostly used for storing lots of media files (for streaming out to your various devices around the home) as well as network backups. That means that they need as much storage as you can give them. Your old PC may not have that much storage, so you might have to add more. That will probably involve cracking open the case and checking the number and kinds of available hard disk connectors, and perhaps purchasing new hard disks (or salvaging older disks that will work in the PC). It’s actually not that hard, assuming your PC case has available physical drive bays and SATA ports/ power connectors. But it will involve a Philips head screwdriver and some fiddling inside the case.
A NAS operating system. There are plenty of free ones available. A blank CD or USB drive. To install the OS onto it.
FLAVOURS OF FREE NAS SOFTWARE
Aside from the physical server, all you need is a NAS OS to install on it. There are actually a whole host of free NAS operating systems. FreeNAS (freenas. org) is the most popular, powerful, and best supported – but it’s also somewhat complex. There’s also Openfiler (w w w. openfiler.com), NAS4Free (w w w. nas4free.org), CryptoNAS (cryptonas. senselab.org), OpenMediaVault (w w w. openmediavault.org) and literally dozens more. Here, though, we’re going to focus on Amahi, one of the most home-user friendly NAS solutions. It’s based on Fedora Linux and doesn’t have the range of capabilities of FreeNAS, but it gets the job done and is easy to set up and manage with the cloud service and mobile apps.
INSTALLING AMAHI
So, let’s go about installing Amahi. Follow these steps.
Go to the Amahi website and create an account. This is not strictly necessary, but it makes things vastly easier to manage and gives you an easy hook into the configuration and web services. Once you’ve set up an account, go to the control panel and take a note of the Install Code. This will come in handy later.
Download the setup ISO from the Amahi website. This is a CD-ROM disc image that can be burned to a disk by right clicking on it in Windows. If your main or NAS PC doesn’t have a CD or DVD drive, then you can use a USB stick instead. To turn an ISO file into a bootable USB drive, you can use a very simple app called Rufus (rufus.ie), which will take an ISO file and turn a USB stick into a bootable drive based on the ISO.
Plug a keyboard, mouse and monitor into the PC you’re turning into the NAS. This is only temporary.
Put the CD-ROM or USB drive into the NAS PC and boot it up. Assuming your PC’s BIOS is set up to boot from CD or USB, it should boot into the setup process for Amahi. (If it’s not, you’ll have to access the BIOS and change the boot order). It will start with a simple text menu. Select the Install option. Choose your language.
Next comes the main configuration screen. First, click on the Amahi Server Setup button. This is where you’ll enter the Install Code for the server. That will link the server to your Amahi account. You’ll also likely need to set the keyboard settings, and, if you like, your network settings (although you can fix those later).
Installation will proceed as Amahi downloads the latest version of the NAS OS.
Once it’s done, it will boot to a blank screen with a login prompt. This is it: Amahi is now installed. You can actually disconnect your monitor, mouse and keyboard from the NAS PC now. It only needs network and power. From here on, you can manage the NAS PC entirely through a web browser.
Go back to your main PC, and head back to the Amahi website control panel. You’ll see it will have changed and your new server will be registered. Note the HDA IP address – this the IP address of the server on your local network.
In a new tab in your browser, go to http://hda/, which should take you to the login page for the Amahi server. If that doesn’t work, just type in the HDA IP address from the Amahi website control panel into your browser’s address bar, which should also take you to the server.
On first boot, you will have not have a username or password setup (unless you did it in the install page). To log in, use username admin with the password administrator.
That will take you to the control page. There’s an awful lot to touch on here, and we don’t have space for it here, so we recommend heading to the Amahi wiki at wiki.amahi.org/index. php/HDA_Admin_How_To to learn more. Or you can just play around: click on Setup or Apps on the top right to configure the basics of volume and shares, as well as install those apps you’d like to have on your NAS.
Try out the mobile apps and generally experiment. There’s no harm in trying new things – at least until you’ve got some data you can’t bear to lose on there!