Project Locker

This project started as an idea to upgrade my struggling Synology 215j 2-Bay NAS to something faster on the bandwidth side. The problem I found with older Synology NAS systems is the bigger the drives, the slower the I/O is. I was a the point I couldn’t get 1gbps with 8TB drives. I was originally wanting to get something with 4 hot swap drive bays that ran an embedded OS, like another Synology, but I found the cost was too high for a family man like me, plus most things were still 1gbps link and even 2.5 gbps hiked the price up alot. By mistake, on eBay, I bought a used Buffalo Terrastation Pro, but even with 4 disk bays, it would have the same performance as my old Synology.

At a loss, I hopped on Facebook Marketplace and found someone selling a 4U rack mount ATX case for $20. Looking at the pictures, it was pretty bad shape visually, but still looked straight and had a nice 5 ¼ bay in the front that matched the footprint of my Terrastation Pro’s hot swap bays (The seller looks like he got it from some old industrial application and said it had some sort of motherboard in it as well as power supply). At $20 I didn’t care as I am used to cleaning up systems and repainting them. I was also fortunate that the guy was riding though my town and was a quick exchange.

Opening up the case at home I found the expected dirt, dust and grime from an industrial application. At that point of extracting the motherboard, I was able to identify it as a AMD Athlon X2 system with 4 GB of DDR3 RAM; pretty old, but useful in testing things. (I did later fully test it and found it worked great as well as the power supply; a nice bonus to my purchase). I proceeded to disassemble the chassis and clean/wipe down all surfaces. I also separated out the pieces I want to paint. I ended up, as you can see, painting the front with a nice gloss apple green color and the handles with matte black. My wife, after seeing the assembled case said it looked like a locker and I quickly adopted the name “locker” for this project.

Now, onto how I was going to put the hot swap bay in the chassis. After taking apart the Terrastation Pro I found the drive case was easily removable from the whole things, but I still needed to chop off some areas to make it fit and get around some of my motherboards connections. The cage also needed to be mounted horizontal, which was not a problem. To solve the height issue, I use some metal standoffs I had. The only bummer with the drive sleds is that they did not do any pass-through, meaning you had to have a power/SATA combined cable that needed to be manually pulled on and off the drive. Luckily, Amazon has everything and I found some cables that pass through from the motherboard and power supply to the combined ends, plus had enough length to put on the drive before sliding in. I did have to combine and solder all the power points as the SATA pass-through power connector was flaky.

After the chassis was setup, it was time to install the system components. I ended up using a Gigabyte Q170M-D3H-GSM motherboard I had on hand, which supported 6/7^th generation Intel Core processors, DDR4 RAM, a NVMe slot and 6 SATA connectors on it. I already had 8GB of RAM, which should get me by until I can get some more. I did, however, have to buy a processor and I determined a Core i5-6400T was a good cost/frequency/power efficiency balance for me.

For storage, since I had the NVMe slot and 2 spare SATA connections, I added the corresponding storage from components I had laying around (256GB NVMe and 2x 256 SATA SSDs), gaining me high speed storage for my VM/Kubernetes remote storage requirement. Finally for networking, I slotted and existing 10gbps Intel NIC which had two ports, which I ended up bonding together.

Now that my system was complete, I simply validated everything was working and showing up before moving to the OS install. For the OS I chose TrueNAS Scale. (For the sake of the length of this article you can read my TrueNAS Scale review here) At the moment I have about 9 TB of storage total and I