REUSE AND RECYCLE

FRACTAL DESIGN WAS good enough to send us its Node 304 case for this build, which may be an aging model, but we were glamored by its teeny-weenyness. It’s surprisingly difficult to find an ITX form factor case that can fit lots of hard drives in it; the Node 304 has room for six 3.5-inch drives, but is no bigger than two shoeboxes, so is ideal for hiding under the stairs. It’s a little tricky to work with if you have a large heatsink, but it has excellent airflow, with two fans at the front and a large fan at the back. It’s always tempting to opt for cheaper components, or even second-hand ones – and that’s what we did, using an MSI-88X AC motherboard and an Athlon A10-7800K APU, circa 2014. Integrated graphics are certainly de rigueur here, because this device will probably run headless for most of its life. We used three 1TB Hitachi drives and a spare 240GB SSD for OMV. This is entirely overkill, because the initial installation is only around half a gigabyte, but we can use that space for something later. To get OMV installed, we used the cross-platform Etcher utility ( https://etcher.io) to write the ISO to a USB stick. You can download said ISO from the OMV website. We got OMV to set our drives up as a RAID 5 array, having a total capacity of 2TB, and the ability to rebuild itself if any one of the drives fails. Power-wise, we used a Be Quiet! Pure Power 11, capable of delivering a totally unnecessary 650W. Again, we just used what was to hand, and so can you.