Building Westmarch, my Home NAS

 

A couple of months ago my main desk top computer, which I built two years ago at the begining of the COVID pandemic quit working.  Diagnosing the problem took me down a real rabbit-hole of possible parts problems and I ended up with some extra working parts at the end of that journey.  (The problem turned out to be a bad HDD.)  As a result I decided to see if I could cobble together a working home NAS.

I have two desktop PCs running Windows 10 Professional.  The primary one is the newer of the two and now runs an AMD Ryzen 5 5600X CPU.  The older one is in a small form factor case that my son gave me several years ago, and had been running an Intel i5-6500 CPU on an mini-ITX board.  I pulled that board, CPU, the 16 GB of RAM, and the 500W power supply for the NAS.

I also looked around on lots of online sites for a used computer case, something simple that I could decorate up as I felt.  It turned out, however, it was much cheaper just to buy a simple new case.  I opted for an Antec VSK3000 Elite and spent something in the neighborhood of 50 to 75 dollars including the shipping.

Since I wanted this to be a NAS for storage of files mostly, I thought it would be fun to decorate it out like a large book.  One of my favorite physical books I own is my special edition Lord of the Rings volume which contains all three volumes bound in a single book and is bound and boxed with red leather.  This is a nod to Tolkien's "claim" that he actually translated the Lord of the Rings from a book written by hobbits known as the Red Book of Westmarch.  This is all laid out in the appendices to the Lord of the Rings that Tolkien attached to the end of the final volume, The Return of the King.

So I started with the case.  Once it had arrived along with some red vinyl embossed with a leather pattern, I cut out appropriate sized pieces and applied the vinyl to the side panels. The case has no window on the right-hand side (viewing from the front) like many gaming cases do.  This was the easiest side to work with.  The left-hand side has a series of ventilation holes (519 of them to be exact), and these needed to be cut out using an exacto knife to ensure proper airflow.  To say this process was tedious would be an understatement and I now understand why spray painting is the preferred method for adding color to computer cases.

Starting Out

All finished

The second phase was to apply vinyl to the top.  This was pretty straitforward and anticlimactic after all the hexagonal hole cutting.

Phase three was spray painting the back of the PC with gold spray paint and clear cloat.  To match the decorations on the book, I decided to go with some gold accents, which included the back.  I had to mask up the case well so as to not spray on top of the vinyl on the top panel.  (Note to self: put the vinyl on AFTER spray painting.)

Painting the back

The final phase of the decoration was the most complicated and took the most time.  This was to paint and then apply vinyl to the front panel.  Unlike the rest of the case, the front panel is plastic.  I had to remove all of the buttons and LEDs, which required the use of a heat gun to soften up some of the hot glue.  I then sprayed it with primer suitable for plastic, three coats of gold spray paint and two cloats of clear coat.  There was some sanding and repainting necessary as I tended to spray too much on each coat when I first started.  Once the last coat of clear was dry and and had set for a few days, I cut out the pieces of vinyl for the various sections of the front panel, applied them and then carefully trimmed the edges with a sharp exacto knife.  Then I reattached all the buttons and LEDs.

The reset and power buttons

Done with the painting

Finished front panel

At this point the case looked more like something from Iron Man than Lord of the Rings, but adding some stickers I ordered from Etsy gave it the right vibe.

Stickers for the right panel

Sticker on the front

With the case done, it was next time to put the guts inside.  This was pretty straitforward.  I acutally put the drives and their cables in first.  I got a set of 4 3TB HDDs from Ebay with the intention of setting up a RAID with one parity disk for a total of 9 TB of storage.  Using the space for the 5.25" drive bay on the case along with the other slots for disks I got a total of 7 drives into the case.  One is the system SSD and I added two 500 Gb HDDs that I had available as well.  To handle this many drives with the small ITX motherboard, I had to buy and install a home bus adapter (HBA) in the PCI slot where the GPU would normally go.  This gives me a total of 8 potential SATA connections, 4 from the Mobo and 4 from the HBA.

Drives installed

It took a bit of kagiggering to get the power cables run from the power supply to all the drives, but after some frustration and swearing everything was finally connected and running.

The last step was to install and set up an operating system.  After a bit of study I went with TruNAS Core.  This is a free OS that has tons of flexibility, but which is also pretty simple to set up.  At least the setting up of the RAID drives and Windows shares on a local home network is pretty simple.  I've got all my important stuff moved over from the large HDD on my primary computer wherre it is now redundantly backed up via the RAID storage.  Really important stuff is also backed up on Dropbox or Google Drive as well.

Installing TruNAS

And it works!

I don't know if I really need a home NAS.  And there are lots of other server features in TryNAS that I will eventually try to implement, like automatic backups of the desktops and laptops, and a VPN setup to access the NAS when I'm not at home.  The case moding part of this exercise was a lot a fun and I'm glad I did it.  Plus I now get to learn about servers, which is interesting and challenging.

A final photo of my main desktop and the NAS

Moving forward this experience has inspired me to do case mods on the two desktops as well.  And I pulled out an old Raspberry Pi my son gave me several years back and seeing if I can't do something useful with it as well.