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Building a low-powered NAS

Rock and Roll

Article from ADMIN 56/2020

By Mayank Sharma

Build a network-attached storage box with Rockstor to manage your data.

External drives are a great way to add extra storage quickly and conveniently, but they have drawbacks. For one, their data retrieval capabilities are restricted to the computer to which they are connected. Although this might work for individual users with single PCs, it isn't a practical solution for most people who have a variety of data-consuming devices.

The go-to option for adding more flexibility to your data storage and retrieval policy is a network-attached storage (NAS) solution. With NAS, you can essentially share the storage with everyone on the network. More often than not, a typical NAS setup comprises a specific combination of hardware and software designed to provide file sharing through services such as the Network File System (NFS) and Server Message Block (SMB) protocols.

Although you can pick up a prefabricated NAS box from your favorite computer store, it doesn't take much effort to build one yourself, thanks to distributions like Rockstor, which offers the features and flexibility of commercial NAS minus the cost of proprietary software. Instead of simply pooling together attached disks, Rockstor lets you arrange available space into different RAID configurations and gives you control over how you want to store your data – whether spread across drives or at different levels of redundancy – for an effective backup solution.

A centralized data storage system will be of little use if you can't access the data across different devices. With Rockstor, you can access your data over popular network protocols, including Samba/Common Internet File System (CIFS), Apple Filing Protocol (AFP), NFS, and Secure File Transport Protocol (SFTP). Rockstor can also plug in to an Active Directory, Network Information Service (NIS), or Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) directory server on the network.

The best thing about this CentOS-7-based server is its focus on a single filesystem, Btrfs. Thanks to its copy-on-write and

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