So, I set out today to solve my problem. I spent a good deal of time looking at the off-the-shelf products on the market. Every product seemed to have made some drawback that I wasn’t willing to accept. So, I finally caved and built a NAS system. The result is a system that serves all of my purposes and then some, while being energy conscious.

Here is a list of the components that went into the system:

• AMD Athlon LE-1640 processor
• 2GB of RAM (PC-6400)
• 3x 1.5TB Seagate 5900 RPM drives with 32MB buffer

After assembling all of that I installed Ubuntu Server 9.10 on it. The installation went off without much trouble. I created a RAID-1 volume of 256MB using all three drives for use as /boot. I used the remaining space on the drives to create a RAID5 array. This gave me about 3TB of space to work with. I dedicated this remaining space to LVM and created the following logical volumes:

• root (mounts at /) – 30GB formatted XFS
• home (mounts at /home) – 10GB formatted XFS
• share (mounts as /mnt/share) – 500GB formatted XFS
• swap (used as swap) – 8GB
• timemachine – 600GB
• unallocated – ~1.5TB

The share volume is served up using SAMBA to the various computers in the house (a couple of laptops, an iMac, etc.). The timemachine volume is exported using iSCSI to the iMac for use by TimeMachine.

A quick test showed that sequential writes to the share volume yielded about 130MB/s of sustained throughput on the server. Once I upgrade to a GigE switch I will perform the same test remotely and see what sort of performance I get.