This is the story of how I put together the NASter system with mostly parts either pulled from my parts bin or bought used off the Chinese equivalent of eBay.
System specs [source in square brackets]:
CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q9300 (2.5GHz, 1333MHz FSB) [pulled out of the old workstation]
CPU Cooler: Lenovo OEM cooler (just a chunk of aluminum with a fan strapped on) [pulled out of the old workstation]
MoBo: Asus P5BV-C (Intel 3200 MCH/ICH7R, 2 onboard Marvell 88E8056 PCIe GbE NICs) [bought used online]
RAM: Kingston KVR DDR2-800 2GB x2 [pulled out of the old workstation]
RAM: Samsung Green DDR2-800 2GB x2 [pulled out of the old workstation] (Yes I am mixing brands, as it is all I have)
HBA: Abadia-branded ASMedia ASM1062-based PCIe SATA 6Gb/s HBA [bought new] (I need this for SATA 6Gb/s speeds and TRIM support)
Storage: WD Green 6TB [bought new]
Storage: Kingston SSDNow V300 60GB [pulled from parts bin]
GPU: AMD Radeon HD 2600 XT [pulled from parts bin] (I need this for DVI output for my HDMI/USB KVM)
NIC: D-Link DGE-528T GbE PCI NIC [pulled from parts bin]
NIC: TP-Link GbE PCI NIC [pulled from parts bin]
NIC: TP-Link Fast Ethernet PCI NIC [pulled from parts bin]
When the power bill of keeping the dual Xeon E5-2620v2 Battleship system on 24/7 stacked up to some threshold I have to revise my network topology to allow for a cheaper-to-operate NAS/router combo. At that moment I just upgraded my workstation to the E3-1231v3 Battlebird system and generated a ton of rejects that landed in the parts bin, and there is a whole stack of unused NICs in it.
The first plan was to pull an old case out of the parts bin and throw the original OEM workstation's guts that was just removed from its original chassis in. However the OEM board decided to throw yet another memory tantrum so I had to give up and order the Asus server board online. This is the second Asus server board I have used, and just like last time it worked perfectly, booted without a hiccup with 8GB of mixed-brand RAM and the Core 2 Quad I pulled out of the old workstation.
With the system POSTing I am adding components to make it a useable NAS and router combo system. On the hardware side I need storage that I have not bought yet. However on the software side Ubuntu Linux is my go-to distribution (yes I prefer doing it the hard way, but if you know your Linux administration setting up a router using iptables is pretty simple)
Next episode: Storage woes