NAUGHTY BUT NAS

WELL, THAT WAS FUN. Except for the building part. Before you embark on such a project, consider this: Do you really need a case this small? Life is much easier when you have room to breathe. The final build was certainly messy, but perhaps with a differently arranged motherboard and PSU, it would be less of a plastic jungle. The fans in the Node 304 aren’t the quietest creatures, but with them set on low, noise was tolerable, and idle temperatures stayed well below 40 C. Incidentally, if on first boot OMV tells you that it can’t see the network (and the network cable is definitely plugged in), it’s possible that DHCP negotiations just took a little too long. You can log in locally with the username “admin” and password “openmediavault” then type “ip a” (everything without quotes here) to see the correct IP. From then on, you can do anything you want by visiting that IP address in a browser, and using the slick web interface. As is customary with all things Linux, reading the relevant documentation is a good idea, but your first port of call should be “Storage > Disks” to wipe the drives (this is especially important if they have been involved in a RAID array before), and then create your RAID array. You have a few choices filesystem-wise—we went for traditional Ext4, but on a larger array, Btrfs might be a better idea. To be honest, we would wait for OMV 5.0 until you did that, because it will have much better support for the new filesystem’s manifold bells and whistles (in particular, its built-in RAID pooling and magical self-healing abilities).

It was a shame not to be able to fit the case with its full complement of six drives. Indeed, it’s possible to run the OS from a USB stick, so we could have had a fourdrive array (RAID 6 or 10), with two “hot” spare drives. That was all moot thanks to our motherboard’s weak offering of just four SATA ports. RAID 5 is probably fine for our purposes, but on larger (or older) drives, the relentless reading that a rebuild (if the array fails) necessitates will probably kill another drive as well as your redundancy. And by extension all your data. Oh yes—RAID is not backup, so back up your precious files. It left very little room behind the hard drives, and with the case full, there probably would have been airflow issues. Perhaps a modern CPU and smaller cooler (say a Ryzen 2200G with stock cooling) would be more suitable. It would also have been fun to use the experimental SnapRAID and MergerFS plugins (see June 2019 issue, pg. 17). But in the end, we were impressed with OMV, and pleased to make use of old hardware.

The Hyper 212 is one of the best 1 budget coolers there is, and we liked that it just fitted into our case and no more. Just being a NAS doesn’t require much of the CPU, so it shouldn’t generate much heat. We never saw temperatures exceed 50 C, which was achieved while streaming hi-res movies with the Plex plugin. Be Quiet! makes lovely PSUs, but 2 650W is far more than we needed— 400W would probably have been fine. The fan ends up exhausting a little close to the ground, so carpeted floors are no friend of this machine. Using old drives like this is a little 3 risky, and consumer drives in general aren’t meant for serious data storage. We just wanted the drives out of our main machine, and probably would survive if the data on them was lost. OMV can monitor SMART statistics, which can warn you about impending drive failure.