Homemade 16TB NAS dwarfs the competition with insane build quality (video)
By Sean Hollister 
posted May 7th 2010 4:59AM
posted May 7th 2010 4:59AM
posted May 7th 2010 4:59AM
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@david1984 I was actually going to up-vote you, but then I see you're advertising your site.
For shame...
I love a good NAS, and this one's pretty damn slick. I hope there'll be more and more options for larger NAS in the near future...there's some good ones already, but I want a little more selection (and price competition)
What about features????
And can we buy it?
8 drives at 2TB/drive is a 14TB RAID 5 array since you lose one drive worth of space in the array. Nice reporting, Engadget.
Why not a 12TB RAID 6 array for some decent redundancy? Seems silly to place all your faith in that many consumer grade drives during a rebuild.
@JohnnyRocketpants THANK YOU. At least I'm not the only one who questioned the RAID config, despite the prettiness.
looks like they got the total available space mixed up with raid, as there appears to be 2 smaller drives that probably boot the system. seen in the 2nd video. i'm guessing as one clearly shows 320Gb so the other making up the slack, hence "total" available space being 12.7...... but definitely not the raid array alone.
@JohnnyRocketpants
Engadget didn't report anything wrong. The NAS has 12.7TB usable space. The reason it isn't 14TB is because hard drive manufactures count in Terabyte but operating systems use Tebibyte so you loose more than 1TB with a system this large.
Also RAID 5 has redundancy, RAID 6 is basically RAID 5 with 2 parity blocks so you can have up to 2 drives fail and still be able to recover the data. Since you'll loose an additional 2TB of memory it generally isn't worth it in a consumer device. It is highly unlikely that two drives will fail simultaneously, hard drives even consumer ones are phenomenally reliable and this system is just holding media files so the drives wont have very high data access rates.
@xdarkfluxx You do understand that to rebuild it the harddrives will have go through 14TB of data and create 2TB of parity data and not get any errors? This could take days with even a speedy raid card and computer. This means the drives will be under heavy stress for that entire time. The chance of another identical drive used in identical conditions failing is much higher than the chance of some other random drive failing. This is amplified if they were manufactured at the same time and purchased from the same location.
If these drives were don't have there TLER modified or can not be modified (WD started disallowing the setting to be changed on consumer drives to force people to buy the otherwise nearly identical raid versions) it is very likely that drives will often fall out of the raid if any kind of decent hardware raid is used.
Raid is was not created to be a replacement to backups, it was created to either increase performance or to increase the amount of uptime that a system can have.
@Turner Joy
If you scrub your array regularly then you are pretty safe. The UREs will happen when you have parity to recover them with and remap the sectors.
With the right RAID setup though, even if you do encounter a URE during a rebuild you will just lose that one stripe and this will result in most likely a single corrupt file.
@Stick this guy is awesome
He is to hardware, what geohot is to software (iphone and ps3)
@Stick
NERDS!!!!11!1!!1!1
I love a good NAS, and this one's pretty damn slick. I'm hoping for a little more selection in the ready-made NAS field..there's some good ones already, but especially with larger capacities, I wouldn't mind a little more competition, on speed, quality, software and price.
I'm surprised those drives work after running arc-welding voltage through them!!
@Hunta2097 I was wondering the same thing. But you can see towards the end of the second video that he replaced almost all tech with brand new ones before final assembly.
@Hunta2097 Exactly my thoughts :D
@Hunta2097 You clearly didn't comment before watching all the way to the end of the second video.
@frauhottelmann
It does not matter how high the potential might be, if the circuit is not complete it will not damage any component.
Similar to birds sitting on a high voltage transmission line, but they never get electrocuted.
@TheSmartGuy I just noticed, that he didn't use the actual equipment during the build process ;)
@jamlc1m Oh yeah - now I see. He has used his drive-henge collection for the dirty work. Excuse my blurred vision, I was up late watching elections!!
@Hunta2097 Dummy drives, the real deal comes out pf package at the end of part 2.
@Hunta2097 Well if pay attention he unwraps a whole new set of hard drives at the end of video 2. The ones seen in video one are place holders so he can get a reference on size and placement. But man I wish I had his skills....
@Woovie He clearly DID comment before watching the end of the second video.
You clearly didn't proof read before clicking "Submit". I hope I don't suffer the same fate! ;-)
@Hunta2097
Goodness. I bet he wished he had a CNC mill.
Well I don't know about in the US, but here in the UK we've all got equipped workshops like that.
@TimmyRaa
LOL I was like wtf this guy has a production facility in his garage!
@TimmyRaa - Actually, I was impressed that he built it with fairly pedestrian tools. No milling machine, no metal shear, no band saw, and no CNC. He used mostly hand tools and did quite a bit of filing. Even the welder he used is not that expensive. I think one of the best aspects of these videos is they show that someone actually COULD do this without a machine shop.
This guy is amazing. I had never seen his other mods and my mind is blown.
Also, he always has some cool music in his videos.
For some reason, this reminds me of old floppy disk holders that I uses to have.
@meeku
I was going to comment the same thing. Back in the day, a case with 50 of those 5.25-inch floppies was a mere 60 MB. Now we're talking 16 TB. In other words, about 300 THOUSAND times the storage in the same size/shape. Amazing stuff...
@Mr Blurrycam Mmmmm. Diskboxes!!
@meeku +1
@meeku I was also going to say the same thing.
Good thing he mounted the disks at that angle. You see this in all PCs and notebooks, as it practically quadruples MTBF.
Not.
@konsumkritiker
It doesn't matter how the drives are positioned, as long as they are firmly mounted in place to prevent vibrations (which they are).
@konsumkritiker
He clearly built it like an old floppy disk storage space. Are you too young to remember? That's why the hood is lexan too
Pretty impressive, but what is that rotating platter good for?
Just for show?
@Golgo
I wondered this too, and would definitely be scared to death to leave eight 2TB HDDs spinning there...
@Mr Blurrycam
Obviously its for the timelapse in the end where he shows the build from start to finnish
@Golgo
It helps you to visualize while building. This seemed to be a sort of ad hoc project.
MAD SKILLS!
The videos are great and this NAS looks great!
However, the air flow definitely needs some work done. The hard drives being so close to each other with no fan to cool them off is just asking for early drives failure I'm afraid.
@weekender I was thinking about that too...
@weekender Theyre only 5400 RPM drives so they should be fine.
@weekender
At first just looking at the picture, I thought the same thing. Have to say after watching the video along with the rep of those GP Western Digital's I don't think he'll have a problem with heat. Great build Will.
@weekender
Yeah, that's a good point. Also, I've read that Western Digital "Green" drives don't work well in RAID arrays because of their power saving features. There are raid enterprise versions of the drives. Let's hope that's what he used. But other than that.. awesome videos!
@weekender
Hard drives do not need to be cooled, despite what people say.
@DoctarPeppar
Then why does my Hitachi 7k2000 go over the manufacturer's temp. spec when I turn off the cooling fan in front of it?
@DoctarPeppar
I wish that were the case! A lot of hard drive failures (in the data center that I work in anyways) are thermal. The arm the the read-write head is mounted on gets warped from heat and the head crashes into the platters.
@weekender - Did you miss the 120mm fan at the rear of the case? Granted it's not much, but it's better than passive cooling.