DIY NAS Part I - Introduction and Motivation

Network Attached Storage (or NAS as you know it) has become a buzzword in last few years, thanks to the evolution of smart devices being able to play media. Another aspect of this utility is a Home Theater system which allows consumers to play media available within the home Wi-Fi network on their big screen TV.

As you may or may not be aware, I have a decent amount of home videos and pictures stored on my external USB drive and I am constantly thinking about 2 things. First, they are priceless in the sense that once gone (as a result of disk gone bad or some other catastrophic failure), they can't be recovered and second, I want to be able to play it on my big screen TV, my tablet, my phone as well as my laptop(s).

So, my research for that perfect solution led me to explore quite a few options in past few months (say a year). But before I go ahead and talk about those options, I want to stress more on the things that I want to be able to do.

As it turns out, I have a huge amount of music and video collected over the years and given an option, I would also like that to be available 24/7 to be playable on my big screen TV. Most of the video content is 1080p (like the home videos) and they are all in different format (mkv mp4 m2ts etc). So I can say, these were my points of focus.

Storage: Storage is never enough, especially if you are talking about high definition media. I know that my collection will keep growing and with the amount of high-def movies, my 1 TB USB drive was almost full. Now this is probably the most trivial issue and probably the easiest to solve. Just buy a bigger one (today 2 TB USB 3.0 storage is available at a fairly good price) and toss the old one. Now once I have a bigger drive, what am I going to do with the smaller device. The resale value of old electronics is not a surprise to anyone and I hate to be the one throwing things working in perfect condition. Plus the USB drive wants me to have it plugged it to a computer (desktop or laptop) and having it available 24/7 means that computer has to be up 24/7, not something I am keen on doing.

Backup: As I said earlier I can't afford to lose the home pictures and videos that I have taken over the years and if that happens, it will be a huge blow to me (and I know my wife will never forgive me). To solve this the hard way, you buy another equally bigger drive and connect it to the same computer and from time to time copy all the data from the first drive to the other, so the latest media is up to date in both these devices. If you are technically savvy, just write a few lines of script to automatically sync the data every week (or everyday if you like) and you don't have to worry about this ever. The biggest problem here is the ability to have the computer up, all the time. This means your components are going to have more wear and tear and your electricity bill is going to be higher. That brings me to my next point.

Availability: I wanted my media to be available 24/7 on any device of my choice. This means something that does not consume much power but still provide me access to my media to all my devices (TV, tablet, smartphone and laptop). This means that if my device is not capable of playing the format of the media, my system should be able to transcode (in plain words, convert to appropriate format on the fly) the media to a format which the device can play.

Other: Other nice to have features should be to provide a nice user interface for me to browse my movies, to be able to continue where I left off. Also it would be nice to download subtitles from internet automatically for my movies. I would also love to queue torrents to be downloaded without having to keep my desktop running overnight. It would also be nice to be able to take a picture from my phone and upload it to this system (like my own personal cloud).

There are different kind of solutions that I looked at and they mainly fall into the following categories.

Windows/Linux based desktop solutions: Since this is a full fledged computer, you can connect your USB drives (containing media) to this, download free DLNA based media server applications (like XBMC or Serviio) and use smart devices (see below) to playback this media. There are a few problems with this. One is the power that a full fledged PC is going to consume. Also for some reason I am always afraid that one day something is going to happen to Windows and it is going to take all my data with it (trust me this is possible). I used this mechanism for a few years until I created my own solution.

Smartbox: This could be a smart TV, a smart DVD player connected to your TV or separate smart box such as Roku, Chromecast or Apple TV. It does not matter what you choose, but what is important is that these things should have enough processing power to be able to deal with high-def encoded media.

Ready made NAS boxes: There are a few companies which provide a good solution for a NAS. They have a small footprint and they have backup inbuilt (most case using RAID). Symbology and QNAP are one of the big names. But when I was looking at them I found that for the price point, their functionality is very limited. All of them run proprietary software so you are at their mercy if you want to add features. The processing power for the price was not enough for me to look into them. To give you an idea, a 1 GHz processor system will cost you at least $200 (with only 2 drive slot). If you are looking for more horse power and more storage, you are going to have to shell out at least $4-500 and I am not even sure they can be easily upgraded. If you know me well, you would know that I am not a person who likes to be stuck at the mercy of the manufacturer.

Don't get me wrong. The ready-made NAS devices are close to perfect solution for someone who does not want to make their hands dirty, but it wasn't cutting it for me. Then I started looking at customized NAS boxes and found that DIY NAS are the most popular kind of NAS presently. I will try to list some pros and cons for a DIY NAS

Pros:

• Since this is a real PC, you can pick and choose the components you want to put here
• Since you build it yourself, it is going to be far more cheaper for the kind of powerhouse it provides. To give you an idea my kickass NAS costed me close to $450 (plus my time in building it)
• You can upgrage the system parts wide. i.e you can add more memory, HDD, upgrade your CPU etc.
• Making something yourself gives you a sense of accomplishment
• Since this is a real PC with a real operating system (more on this later), there is tons of help available online by opensource developers
• Since this does not run proprietary software (to some extent) you can add more functionality to it if need arises.

Cons:

• This is going to be a little pain in the neck, if you are not handy
• You are going to have to take time to build the hardware and install/configure the software.
• You may have to do the software installation multiple number of times (if you don't know what you are doing) in the beginning, until you get it right. If you read the documentation and follow the steps, correctly, you will be fine the first time.

So, there it was. I made my decision to try out a DIY NAS. I hope I was able to make a case on why this was the right decision for me, and why this may be the right device for you. In the next part, I will talk about choosing the hardware and software and getting right at it.

Speedtest result for comcast

Sears' 5 minute guarantee is crap

I like Sears, I really do. They sometimes have good stuff in great prices and I get things from there if I find them to be good deals (well, that means they are on fatwallet). So, I recently ordered a set of two tool bags and had them shipped to store (because shipping to store is free and more importantly, I hate to pay for shipping).

So there I was, at their store to pick up my bags. Finding the merchandise pickup section was easy and I went there. Now when I reached there I saw a computer kiosk where I scanned my order (from the email I received) and the machine found my order. It then told me to look at the overhead monitor to look for the status of my merchandise.

By this time, I was pretty impressed with the automated system (I am a person who would rather deal with a system than a person). Now when was waiting for someone to get me my stuff, I was looking around and this is what caught my attention.

"Percentage of customer served within 5 minutes" and the numbers were 90 some for the day before and over 90% in the earlier month. Now I was kind of pleasantly surprised at their efficiency. Now Sears sells all sorts of stuff and that includes big heavy item. Finding the item and correctly and bringing it to the waiting customer can be time taking and I wouldn't mind waiting 10 or even 15 minutes to get my item. But there it was, shining in front of my face written in bold, at this point I was pretty impressed.

Then I saw another poster for Sears' 5 minute guarantee. It basically says that they will give a $5 gift card if they can't get you the stuff within 5 minutes. It was time for me to look at my order status. There was a digital clock ticking near my name and it was over 1 minute now. On the same screen there was another section for completed orders and I saw numbers like 4:36 and 4.50 for already completed orders. I was a bit surprised and starting to get an idea of what was about to come.

I waited some more time and my clock was over 4 minutes now. The feeling was like waiting for the result of some test. At 4:36 I could not believe what happened. The clock stopped and my order was moved to completed. I then understood the meaning of 5 minute guarantee. It basically means, they guarantee that the clock will not go over 5 minutes. Anyways, the screen was showing my order as completed but I still did not have my stuff with me. With this happening, I was not really hoping to for my gift card but just waiting for my bags.

After a couple of more minutes, a guy comes out, looking clueless, and asks me.
"so, what are you waiting for sir?". "...
"mm..my 2 bags", I replied, showing him the printout of the email I had proudly brought with me.
"ok, let me see if I can find that".

The guy disappeared for about 15 minutes and then came back without my stuff. He then went back inside the big room and disappeared again. At this point I was starting to lose my patience but then someone came back with a set of bags. I almost screamed with joy but the feeling was just for a moment. He asked me.

"Is your last name Sanchez (or something sounding similar)?"
I replied in negative.
"Then this is not yours".

Once again I was left there wondering why couldn't they just take the label (which contain the recipient's name) out of the bags and just give it to me (okay, that was not really what I was thinking). He then came after 5 minutes with the bags and gave it to me. I looked for the label to confirm this is actually my order and guess what, there was no label (wink wink).

I finally left the place kind of happy that I was able to get my order. It was late already and I really wanted to be home to play with my lovely daughter, the feeling of which far outweighs the $5 gift card I did not get.