So I haven’t posted in a while. But I am working on something that I hope takes off. It’s a NAS device that I’m building using a Mini-ITX board, a notebook computer CPU, notebook drives and memory and a very small Mini-ITX enclosure. This actually has a couple use cases – the NAS appliance, but also a very small virtualization platform too. Perhaps by booting ESXi from a USB drive that I can have mounted on the board and closed up in the enclosure. I was really searching for higher capacity drives, but the best I could do with 2.5″ SATA is 500GB. So I’m left debating RAID 1 with only 500GB available but with needed redundancy, or a stripe set with a very fast 1TB capacity and no redundancy. It’s all about trade-offs I suppose.
Some components were delivered today! So I have sitting here in front of me, the main board, CPU, Memory and the two 500GB SATA drives. 
I will most likely be able to start the build by the weekend. I’m waiting on the enclosure, the Pico PSU and the PCIe mini wireless adapter. I want a wireless option for this, but I also chose a main board that has 2 GbE interfaces for bonding options. I chose a robust board with RAID and dual Gb NICS plus a dual core CPU, which is probably overkill for a home NAS device. But it will rock. I would like to get this built, see how it all goes together, get a small footprint Linux on it and test and eventually use it for our home data. But the next step after this project is to see if I can build one with less expensive components but have comparable performance and robustness. More is to come…
