Building a DIY low power NAS

DIY low power NAS Overview

DIY low power NAS build log

I’ve been looking for a silent, low power but capable thin client to use as network attached storage (NAS).

After a quick scout around parkytowers, I decided on a hp t630, so went to scour ebay.

I came across an hp t630 on ebay for less than £20 with 4gb ram and a 32gb sata ssd.

Once it arrived it was time to upgrade!

Stoarge Drives

I upgraded the ssd in an old notebook with a kigspec ssd a while ago and its still ticking away nicely so i decided to go with them again and ordered 2 x 2tb sata 2280 sata ssds from aliexpress.

As stated in the specs on the hp site, one of the ssd slots is for upto 2280 ssds and one is for 2240s.

It infact has enough free physical space for a 2280 but no way to screw it down, so ive used a small plastic shiv tucked under the one that is screwed in and over the second ssd to hold the it in place.

HP also say the second slot is only usable for upto 32gb ssds but the 2tb drive in that slot was picked up in the bios (as was the other) and is working perfectly so far.

OS Drive

Ive decided to run open media vault as the os for my diy low power nas.

As both m2 slots are in use i have to boot the os from an sd card and i didnt want a flash drive hanging out of the front usb 3 port and for some strange reason you cant boot from the internal usb 3 port!

So i went looking for a wifi to sd card adapter and found this on aliexpress for a great price.

So i now boot the os from a 64gb sd card, and have the ssds to use as purely storage devices.

Upgrades Installed

So this is how the diy low power nas looks with the two ssds and the sd card adapter .

Ram	8 gb
Storage Drives	4 tb
OS Drive	64 gb

diy low power nas omv overview