Build a NAS from "old stuff" for Data Replication

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I have a ton of old stuff, cases, mobo's, CPU's, GPU's & HDD's from the last 10 years.

The HDD's are a mixture of PATA, SATA I, SATA II & SATA III.

The PATA will be binned but the others should be good, eh?


I want the NAS to perform data replication from my workstation.

A "consultant" was telling me earlier such a thing is widespread, very easy to set up & action, but after a bit of google, still have no idea what tools to look for.

Any pointers would be helpful

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Blimey, just checked out Freenas. Most of my old stuff for the bin then.

Might be worth reprising that WHS machine.

My tightwad chip is accelerating.

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Thanks for the continued replies peopes.

TonyRPH said:

Possibly a good starting point would be to define exactly what you want to use it for.

Smiler. said:

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I want the NAS to perform data replication from my workstation.
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This ^^ doesn't really tell us much.

1) How much data do you have?
2) Will you be using the NAS for music / video streaming?
3) Do you have any other form of backup?

How technical are you?

Do you have any exposure to other operating systems (e.g. Linux)?

FreeNAS is good, however it seems to have (or is getting) somewhat enterprise like these days, especially with hardware requirements.

Have a look here for alternatives, all of these can act as a NAS, they are just Linux, but easier to configure than just installing a Linux distro such as Debian, Ubuntu or CentOS for example.

Yeah, some good points there.

Since posting this thread, I've been doing a bit more research into what's what & none the wiser really.

I have this notion that the the data on a single drive (say 2TB capacity) in a workstation can be backed up incrementally every hour or something whilst the workstation is on.

This is pretty much what was suggested by the chap I spoke to last week (reseller of CAD stuff).

The last best solution I used was WHS, 2002 (I think that's the version), which stored all the data & at the end of the day, I could run a full or incremental backup. I used to do the incremental on two alternate drives & then a full once a week.

As I mentioned earlier, I'm minded to maybe resurrect that but I don't really want to store & access data on a remote machine.


I don't intend to use this for video, music or streaming. Anything like that would use a separate device.

I have been using Acronis but it's very time consuming & prone to errors. Another plus for the WHS is that the backup is usable by connecting the disk to any PC. With Acronis, you need to have the software to access the data.


I'm reasonably technically capable but didn't really get on with Linux (although it was on a really old laptop (10 years +).

Would be happy to have another look though.

grumbledoak said:

Have you considered power consumption? Most PCs are a bit more than the 12W - I think - my NAS draws.

Quite a bit less. More details about your NAS please.

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By way of closing this, I went with Windows server Essentials in the end (6 month evaluation of the software).

I had an old dual Xeon 2.25GHz workstation with 24GB RAM kicking around which whilst was not at optimum spec, exceeded the minimum.

Will see how that goes.