Over recent years the cost of network attached storage has gone down in price considerably. It used to be a few thousand pounds for just 1TB of space, how you can have 8TB of space in a RAID 0 configuration NAS for under £600!

To do this you will need to source the following components;

4x 2TB Western Digital Caviar Green Hard Drives designed for SATA II

a 4 drive NAS enclosure with dual network ports for better connectivity.

For this example I have sourced all of these products from eBuyer.com!

The hard drives are available at

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/183971

The NAS enclosure is available at

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/132657

This comes to a total of £528.72 plus delivery at £11.50

Putting these hard drives into the NAS enclosure is a fairly simple process, with effectively being slot and go casings, which makes the whole process a lot easier.

Once you’ve put everything together, following the included instructions I was able to get everything setup in a matter of minutes, using the web based interface.

In order to get the maximum out of your drives you should use a RAID 0 configuration, however I normally use a RAID 1 configuration which only gives me 4TB of space, but does provide a high level of redundancy should one of my drives ever fail! It is something that I would always recommend you do. This NAS enclosure also supports RAID 5, which would give you 2TB of usable space, but a lot more redundancy protecting more mission critical information.

So there you have it….for under £600, you can build a new 8TB NAS and have it up and running within as little as an hour.