On the FileServer : The Hardware - Hotswap cages, enclosures and controllers

In this series of articles, I'm going to briefly jot down my setup. Hopefully this can provide some insights and ideas to those who are considering building their own NAS. Now, you might ask why a NAS at home? And even if we want a NAS, we can just buy one off the shelf, so why build? These are valid questions and I will share with you my thoughts. I'll then go ahead and list down the main components of the hardware I use.

So, why do you even want a NAS at home? Let's face it, in this digital age, you would have build up a lot of photos of your kids, families and loved ones. Probably videos too. You're likely to have a massive iTunes collection, and maybe a sizable movies collections as well.

Traditionally, you have a desktop (or laptop) and you dump everything on it. The more careful ones will buy an external drive (see some of my recommendations here). At some point in time, you realized you run out of disk space, or you simply need more. Or perhaps you want to share them with another desktop (or laptop) in the household? That's where a NAS will come in useful. It provides a central location where you can deposit your digital life.

Why build your own then? Yes, you can just buy any one of them off the shelf. But I prefer the flexibility of building my own and to also satisfy the geek in me. It isn't really that difficult, you just need a bit of planning and some basic system administration skills. In this article, I'll continue with the hardware I use and then in subsequent articles, I'll follow through with the software and the final setup.

In a typical NAS, one of the key features is that you want many drive bays, which can be easily accessible. Why is this? The more the drive bays you have, the more disks you can plug in, plain and simple. But why do you need it to be accessible? Drives fail. It's not a matter of 'IF' but 'WHEN'. When a drive fail, you don't really want to open up the case and pull the drive. You want to just yank the dead (or dying) drive out from its bay simply by pressing a button or lifting a lever. Because of this requirement, I install what is known as a hot swap cage. There are 2 types, 3.5" or 2.5". 3.5" are more common since they provide more value compared to their physically smaller 2.5" brother.

You can find these hot swap cages on Amazon, an example (3.5") will be ICY DOCK FlexCage MB974SP-2B Tray-less 4 x 3.5 Inch HDD in 3 x 5.25 Inch Bay SATA Cage - Front USB 3.0 Hub. This specific model provides 4 bays, and uses up 3 5.25" bays in your tower. This is also known as a 4-in-3 cage. There are also 5-in-4 cages available. You need to plan a little bit further and decide if you want the 4-in-3 or 5-in-4. I personally use a 4-in-3.

An example of a 2.5" hot swap cage is Thermaltake MAX-1542 Backplane HDD Cage Hot Swap Removable Hard Drive Kits 2.5-Inches SAS/SATA RAID Ready RC1400101A. In most cases, you don't want these unless you plan to use the smaller 2.5" form factor drives. For me, I do have some 2.5" drives lying around (as a result of multiple upgradings of laptop drives) so I got one of these. I use the 4-in-1 type which takes in 12mm 2.5" drives. I have personally saw 6-in-1 cages (Thermaltake MAX-1562 Backplane HDD Cage Hot Swap Removable Hard Drive Kits 2.5-Inches SAS/SATA RAID Ready RC1600101A) but they can only take 9.5mm drives.

Alright, so I have a 4-in-3 and a 4-in-1 cage installed. It can take in 8 drives. Typically, an Intel-based motherboard (like ASUS P8H77-M/CSM LGA 1155 Intel H77 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 Micro ATX Intel Motherboard) comes with 6 SATA ports. You need an additional disk controller to provide the extra SATA ports. I purchased an Dell PERC card off eBay. It's really a rebadged LSI Megaraid SAS controller card. This is a somewhat high-end card meant for servers so you might want to go for 'consumer' class controllers, like StarTech.com 2 Port PCI Express SATA 6 Gbps eSATA Controller Card - Dual Port PCIe SATA III Card - 2 Internal/2 External Card PEXESAT322I.

If you need more than 8, or perhaps you just don't have enough bays internally in your tower, you can opt for external enclosures. There are multi-bay external enclosures that run over USB3 or eSATA. I hunted for a while before settling for this bundle - TowerRAID TR4M+B - 4 Bay eSATA RAID 0/1/10/5/JBOD Performance Tower w/ 6G PCIe Card (Black).

One thing to note on the difference between an USB3 enclosure and an eSATA one. You cannot hot swap individual disks in an USB3 enclosure. This means if your enclosure has 4 disks, and one of them is dead, you have to bring all 4 disks offline before you can pull the dead disk. eSATA does not have this issue. However, in order to use all 4 bays in an eSATA enclosure, the eSATA controller card must have the 'Port Multiplier' feature. If you buy the bundle listed above, it will work nicely.

If you choose to still go with USB3 (it's definitely a lot easier to setup), you should seriously consider Mediasonic HF2-SU3S2 ProBox 4 Bay Hard Drive Enclosure with USB 3.0 & eSATA. For Singapore readers, just go SLS and buy it. It's known as Hotway Probox here.

Alright, that's all for now regarding hardware. Do also note that I don't build for performance (despite having a server class SAS controller) so you need to understand what you're buying if you choose to follow my hardware setup.

Do feel free to ask questions if you have any. I'll try to answer them, and stay tuned for the next installment where I'll talk briefly about the different drive types and what you need to look out for. And if you find my articles helpful, you can help to support the site by buying through the links above. Thank you!