I’m going to confess that I am a bit of a hoarder or as I like to call it a collector. Movies, music, pictures, essays from high school to college, mountains of PDF from Freud and Jung to Keynes and Smith. E-books upon e-books some read most not. I love collecting all sorts of digital information!
I used to keep these on a variety of external disk drives. And even before I knew what data redundancy was, I was practicing it by copying my collection on multiple drives I had gathered over the years. Drives I still have in working order.
I don’t know why I found the existence of external hard drives to be a call to action to fill them with all the information I could. But in the days of Napster, LimeWire, and Pirate Bay this was not a difficult task.
This was made even more interesting when I heard of WD My Cloud which is an external hard drive that plugs into your router to be accessed anywhere, a Network Attached Storage, NAS. It had a mind blowing 2TB storage. Now a days this can be filled with three games but back in 2015 this blew my mind.
The WD My Cloud was my first taste of what NAS was and what it’s capable of. I loved the idea of being able to access my collection from anywhere in the world and did. I would listen to music, watch shows and movies, and upload pictures the second I took them.
I don’t know when my fascination with collecting all sorts of media faded. Maybe it was when Google Drive offered better options for saving and giving in my essays. Could be that Netflix and Spotify offered better quality and less hassle to stream. My pictures were now in the cloud and would easily transfer when I switched phones. There just wasn’t a need for external hard drives anymore.
Letting trillion-dollar companies keep and protect my collection was the norm for a while, but with every passing year and with new and more intrusive hacks into these companies my distrust grew and felt I had to take my money out of the bank and hide it under my mattress, so to speak.
I could go back to just storing everything in external hard drives, but I had grown accustomed to having access to my collection wherever I was. I needed a NAS. And for this I had two options which were either buying one, connecting it to my network and forgetting about it. Or the more interesting path of making one.
In the following post I will go about explaining the research, considerations, and steps I took in creating a NAS using an old Dell Optiplex 7020 and TrueNAS software.
