> So it came to pass, that all hardware was doomed to fail in time for it was crafted by men who were afflicted by the same curse.

My fileserver has served (*giggle*) me well for the past 4-5 years but it had been showing its age. I had recently had to remove one old drive that had failed and knew at least one other drive had some file sector issues. So I decided a full replacement of the internals was due and started looking at the best way to build a new iteration. I had previously run [FreeNAS](http://www.freenas.org/) on the existing hardware, using RAIDZ2 to provide redundancy in case of drive failure. This was back before the 8.0 rewrite and release and I ended up having a few troubles with getting it working again, so I swapped to Ubuntu with ext3/ext4 drives as a stopgap measure until I could do a full rebuild (with better drives, ECC RAM, etc). Life got a bit in the way though so I put that on the backburner and had been using this "temporary" setup for a lot longer than I would have liked.

However it finally came to a time where I had a bit of spare disposable cash and so I put together a components list, found some good prices and purchased everything I needed. In the end I decided upon the following system:

* [ASRock C2550D4I](http://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=C2550D4I#Specifications) Mini-ITX motherboard with integrated quad-core Intel Avoton CPU
* [Kingston 16GB (2x 8GB) DDR3 1333 ECC RAM](http://www.kingston.com/us/memory/search/?partid=kvr1333d3e9sk2/16g)
* 6x [2TB Western Digital Red NAS](https://www.westerndigital.com/products/internal-drives/wd-red-pro-sata-hdd?sku=WD2002FFSX) hard drives
* Antec Three Hundred (recycled from old NAS)
* CoolerMaster 650W PSU (recycled from old NAS)

![Shiny new parts!](/img/nas-1-parts.jpg)

The parts arrived over the space of about two weeks (motherboard and RAM purchased from [Newegg](http://www.newegg.com/global/au) in the US) and I got around to setting it up around Tuesday, 27th of October. I had some initial problems, one of the drives turned out to be dead-on-arrival but thankfully it was from a local supplier so I could head out there and get a new one the next day.

![Drives locked and loaded, that fourth drive down turned out to be DoA](/img/nas-2-drives.jpg)

Once it was all set up, I put it back in the little cabinet where I have my servers and got it all running with the latest build of FreeNAS. I ended up putting all the drives in RAIDZ2 so I have 8TB of usable space with a 12TB raw capacity. The motherboard has another six SATA ports so I may eventually look at getting a case that can fit twelve 3.5" drives and adding another zpool, possibly using 3TB or 4TB drives if my space needs continue to grow.

![All my servers in their cabinet](/img/nas-3-cabinet.jpg)

The new NAS has been christened "LBS" (after LittleBigSnowy, pictured below) and I'm still in the process of moving over my old content.

![LBS, hard at work](/img/nas-4-lbs.jpg)