I’ve always been a bit of a media hoarder. It started in the VHS era recording various programs from television, then to downloading MP3s from Napster and burning them to CDs. Of course, there was also retro game emulation, but NES, SNES, and Genesis games were measured in kilobytes; those titles could easily fit on several floppy diskettes if I needed to back anything up. At some point, the cost of hard disk storage came down enough to make consolidating my literal binders full of backup discs a practical choice: a shoebox full of USB hard drives took up less space than the equivalent binders. Eventually, my knack for collecting and repurposing second-hand hardware led me to some discarded NAS enclosures, and I dutifully filled them with those hard drives I had previously stored in the aforementioned shoebox. Of course, this ad-hoc assemblage of networked devices could only extend so far before it became a monster–there was one NAS for my music, another for video, another for backups, one for my wife’s media–and they all lived in a noisy cubbyhole just below the living room television. The COVID-19 pandemic gave me an excuse to finally hit the reset button on the whole unwieldy, dusty, noisy mess.

Like many others during the early pandemic lockdowns, I took to reconfiguring my living situation as a means to not only to occupy myself and avoid the anxieties of the outside world, but to also improve some part of my living situation. The collection of NAS enclosures was hard to clean, and because it was hard to clean, it made the fans less effective, which made cooling less effective, which made the fans work harder, which made the system noisier. Switching everything to a combined enclosure seemed like the logical first move in rebuilding my media center, so I set about planning to build a fully-functional server that could handle at least the 10 hard drives that made up my current NAS solution and be extensible and upgradeable to meet any future demands. I had built stand-alone PCs before, so the theory was familiar to me, but I had never tried to assemble anything on this scale before. I was going to need to do some homework!

The Project Magnavox HTPC that I built back in 2014 seemed like the logical starting point. My wife and I had upgraded to an Android-powered smart TV already and made the original set-top box concept obsolete (or, at least, redundant). The motherboard, processor, and memory were still more than capable enough to decode 1080p video, so basic file management should be a piece of cake. This would also offset the total cost of the project as I wouldn’t need to purchase those parts. The bulk of the cost would be sourcing a suitable enclosure: something that could house at least (10) 3.5″ drives, something that has good airflow for cooling, and something that doesn’t take up a lot of space. Additionally, I would need SATA Y-adapters to attach all the drives to the motherboard that I already had, and I would need to find an appropriate OS that could power the whole thing without much overhead.

For the case, I settled on a 9-bay tower from Antec that already had a couple fans installed as well as some pretty large vents for thermal management. (On a side note: I get annoyed at how all high performance computer parts are labeled “gamer” and usually come with superfluous LED arrays or odd geometric form factors. Is it too much to ask for subtlety? Does everything need to look like it was a rejected prop from an early 00’s movie hacker scene?). The MSI motherboard that I pulled from Project Magnavox only had 4 SATA ports, so I picked up a couple of 4-port PCIe SATA controllers and some power splitters to connect all the drives I was about to employ. I would also need to pick up a few “last-minute” parts from the local Micro Center (which, it would turn out, was an adventure in and of itself during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic) as well as 3D print a few adapters to fit my 3.5″ HDDs into the case’s 5.25″ drive bays.

One of the NAS enclosures I would cannibalize contained a mount for an additional 4 drives, so that also went into the case bringing the total up to 12 drives by the time I brought the server online! However, because I am using drives from a variety of devices and vintages, the available storage would only total to some 7TB. My goal is to replace drives with larger units as they wear out and grow the available storage over time. The final part I will need top install is an internal USB port. This is a conventional USB-A female port attached to a USB header allowing for USB devices to be placed inside a computer case. This port will host the USB flash drive that the FreeNAS operating system is installed on, freeing all available HDD space for storage.

Once assembled, it will be time to install the operating system and begin migrating data from the stacks of USB drives that I’m using as temporary storage!

I don’t really need to go into further detail about why I’m building a server, but one of my main concerns was its reliability and resilience. My multi-drive NAS enclosures were all set up as RAID 0, which provided absolutely no protection against data loss, but that was–of course–the most space-efficient setup at the time. Wanting to improve my setup, I was looking for an OS that could handle more advanced RAID setups as well as allowing me to run server-side applications such as Plex, OwnCloud, and Pi-Hole as my needs evolved. After some research, I settled on FreeNAS, a FreeBSD-based OS developed by iX Systems that seemed to suit my use case and–more importantly–is mature and popular enough to have a large community support base.

Installing FreeNAS

The first thing to do, obviously, is download the installation media from the FreeNAS website. You’ll need the version for your processor architecture, so I’m grabbing the 64-bit version. Once downloaded, I’ll burn it to a USB jump drive using Balena Etcher like I usually do with Raspberry Pi images. Of course, you can use your preferred application.

Side note: I find it funny that we still refer to the process of writing a bootable image to a USB drive or SD card as “burning” even though we’re not literally burning the information to an optical drive. It’s one of those interesting linguistic artifacts that has outlived its origins like “hanging up” a cellular phone or “tuning in” to a streaming broadcast.

A couple of things to note before installing: The process will require a keyboard and display connected to the system. You’ll also need to connect the system to your network. For the installation process, I actually have the tower connected to the living room television since it was the most conveniently accessible HDMI monitor. I already have my SD card boot drive installed inside the case, so just pop the installation media into a free USB port, and power on the system.

Press enter or just wait out the autoboot timer, we’ll use the “Boot Multi User” option. The next screen should present you with the main installer menu. Highlight “Install/Upgrade” and press enter.

When you’re presented with a list of connected drives, you’ll want to choose the one that you set up as the dedicated OS disk. For me, this was the USB SD card reader and 32GB MicroSD card that I installed inside thee case previously (which is pretty easy to find–it’s the only 32GB drive in a list of multiple-terabyte options). For you, it should be something similar: an SD card or USB (don’t worry about corrupting the drive, it’s pretty simple to replace the OS) and not one of the storage drives. Once you’ve confirmed your selection, the installation process will begin. This will take several minutes, so grab a cuppa tea while you wait. Once completed, remove the installation media and select “Reboot System” from the main menu.

Configuring Network Settings

Once rebooted, FreeNAS will present you with the console setup menu. Towards the bottom of the screen, you should have an IP address that will allow access to the FreeNAS web interface. From a separate computer, try navigating to that address in a web browser. If it connects, congratulations! You shouldn’t need any further setup and can proceed to configuring your drives. If it doesn’t connect, choose “Configure Network Interfaces” from the menu and select your chosen interface. Since I’m connected via ethernet cable, I’m setting up the eth0 connection. The following settings should get work for any direct connection to a router:

Reset network configuration? n
Configure interface for DHCP? (y/n) n
Configure IPv4? (y/n) y
Interface name: eth0
Saving interface configuration: Ok
Configure IPv6? n

At this point, you should reboot the server which will automatically renew the DHCP lease and assign a working IP address. Navigate to that IP address from another computer’s web browser, and you should be presented with the FreeNAS web interface and a prompt to set up a user name and password. You should also be able to reach the web interface from the URL freenas.local. Once logged in, we can start setting up storage pools and shares.

Configuring FreeNAS

When you first log into FreeNAS, you’ll be presented with a setup wizard that will walk you through the process of setting up your storage pool–the name, drives, and various options including user names, email settings (useful for receiving notifications), RAID configuration (RAIDZ2 FTW), etc. Once the basic configuration is complete, you can add disks to the pool and you’re ready to start building a library!

Specific configuration settings are really outside the scope of this article, but the FreeNAS User Guide is extremely helpful in that regard! Much of what I write here is intended to clarify what appears in the official user guide, and should be taken as a supplement to–not a replacement for–that document.