One of the most popular articles we ran last year was a fairly simple step-by-step guide for anyone looking to add some large-scale storage to their network. The easiest, or at least, the cheapest, way to do this in the kind of scale we were thinking of, is to build your own file server.

This needn’t be the kind of titanic affair we’re sure some will imagine when you hear the word “server,” but bear with us. What you’ll be building is very much a normal, desktop PC, absented a few bits and pieces that should save you money and essentially just present itself as a massive swathe of storage sitting on your network, making itself available for your various media, backups and anything else you might reasonably need a mile of storage for.

Hardware:

First things first, you’re going to want to make sure you don’t spend an absolute fortune on your hardware. It might seem a really obvious thing to say, but you can keep things fairly cheap and cheerful when it comes to this stuff.

Motherboard, CPU & RAM:

Since we’re keeping it all under control, from complexity as well as a budgetary point of view, Ryan from our RMA department helped me put together a build that aimed to curb my tendency to shoot for performance on projects that really don’t need the extra horsepower.

Click through to take a look at our Core i3 530 Upgrade Kit

The motherboard, RAM and CPU we recommend all come as part of a single upgrade kit that we offer. We’ve gone with Core i3 for the sake of a little future proofing and as a just-in-case for those situation where you’ll want to eke out a little more performance from what amounts to an extra machine you’ve got sitting under the stairs not being used.

The upgrade kit boasts Intel’s Core i3 530 processor, 2GB of Crucial DDR3 RAM and an MSI H55M-E33 motherboard. It’s all fairly straightforward kit, but we thought it’d be best to list the various bits and pieces in case there was anyone who already has some hardware to use in a build like this that might be duplicated.

That said, you should save money if you opt for the complete kit, it may only be €10, but €10 saved is €10 saved. You can check out the Core i3 530 upgrade kit for more detail.

Case:

When it comes to the case, you’re going to want something that’ll give you a little room to breathe. The Antec Three Hundred comes highly recommended and excellently reviewed. It’s also Ryan’s first choice on a lot of the builds we put together that have to come in under a budget because it’s a solid case for less than €50.

Click through to see our page for the Antec Three Hundred

The Antec Three Hundred also boasts some really excellent customer reviews, with the vast majority rating it at 5/5, with many saying that it’s an excellent case or, in one review, “best case I ever used” without any regard for price, which is always nice.

Anyway, we won’t linger on the case for too long. Suffice it to say that the Antec Three Hundred is a whole lot of case for your €48.21.

Disc Drive:

While many will advocate the option to install an OS from a USB thumbdrive (since the flash memory will make the installation blisteringly quick and it’s generally a fairly painless process) there are always going to be those who would, for one reason or another, rather use a disc drive to manage their OS install.

Click through to see our page for Sony's NEC Optiarc

Since this isn’t likely to be playing any movies, there’s no real reason to shell out any more money than necessary going for anything that will play Blu-Ray. Instead, we’d recommend something you can get on the cheap that will get the job done and last.

In that respect, it’s hard to beat Sony’s NEC Optiarc – a solid DVD burner for €25.79 isn’t a bad old deal at all.

Power Supply:

When it comes to your power supply, you won’t need anything too titanic, but reliability is going to be a very important talking point indeed. With that in mind, we’ve opted for Corsair’s VX 550.

Click through to see our page for the Corsair VX 550

At 550W it’ll happily keep a machine like this moving along nicely, and the fact that Corsair offers a five-year guarantee on all of its power supplies should give you some idea of the level of stability you can expect from it in the long-term. It too boasts a solid customer review, noting that it’s quiet and cool, both ideal for the use we have in mind for it. On top of that, it’s won a heap of awards, so y’know… it’s not just us fawning over it.

Anyway, Corsair’s VX 550 is €76.13.

Storage:

When it comes to storage, just about everyone has had their share of good and bad experiences, leading to everyone having their own allegiences and grudges. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s always good to get it in before we recommend a drive, since there’s always someone who would have recommended a different drive.

Click through to see our page for Samsung's 1TB SpinPoint F3

We’re recommending as many as you’ll need to meet your storage needs of Samsung’s SpinPoint F3 1TB. It’s a solid drive, and at €77.50 it’s not going to be breaking the bank.

Software Side:

There are a few ways you can roll when it comes to server-side software. Nothing too groundbreaking, but it’s all relatively easy to do. The first is that you can download yourself a copy of FreeNAS and install that.

FreeNAS:

FreeNAS’ setup will guide you through the whole thing step-by-step, so there’s not too much point in our going back over it in too much detail here. The first thing you’ll need to know is that FreeNAS, while easy to install, isn’t too pretty until it’s up and running. Even then, it’s not great looking, but very functional.

FreeNAS really isn't too hard to fathom

All you really need to do is grab yourself a copy of FreeNAS (which you can do from the official page for it for the princely sum of… free), burn it to a disc and, provided you opted to pick up the disc drive, you’re home free.

If you have any trouble at all, then you can check out the fastidiously detailed guide to installing FreeNAS over at HowToForge. It’s not a tragically difficult thing to do, but it will require you to pay a little attention.

Once it’s all set up you can edit your various settings as necessary remotely, pointing a browser on any other machine on your local network to the server’s IP address. If you follow the how-to closely then it’ll default to 192.168.1.100, which should (unless you have a massively cluttered home network) ensure that you’re not bumping any other machines on your network around.

Windows Home Server:

The other relatively easy option is to just run with an install of Windows Home Server, which gives you some more interesting options than FreeNAS, which essentially just mounts any and all drives you add to the box as network drives.

If nothing else, Windows Home Server is a lot easier on the eye than FreeNAS

If you’re happy to install Windows Home Server then you open up an absolute raft of interesting options backupwise. We recently posted about setting up an automatic backup using Acronis TrueImage, which we feel may well be one of the better third party automatic backup clients out there, but installing Windows Home Server opens up more interesting backup options not only for machines backing up onto your server, but for those who want to keep a solid backup of their server elsewhere (there’s a name for people whose backups are that comprehensive). It’ll also keep an eye out for identical copies of the same file across your network, and neatly avoid duplicating them, saving on wasted space.

If you’re curious about using FreeNAS and Acronis then you can check out our blog on using Acronis to set up an automatic backup.

Moreover, regardless of whether you’re using Windows Server or FreeNAS, you can rely on Windows’ own backup software to backup your machines (assuming your machines are Windows, of course). The various flavours of Windows XP will sort you out with a backup if you’re so inclined, but on more recent copies things are a little less straightforward.

Basically, since Windows Vista, you’re going to want to have the Professional or Ultimate version of your OS to run automatic backups. Microsoft hasn’t gone into too much detail on why the option was dropped from Home versions, but we’d not be too surprised to learn it was something that most people simply didn’t use.