I’ve wanted to set up my own Network Attached Storage for quite a while now. Well, I found a sweet deal on this 5-bay NAS on Prime Day on October, and I finally sat down and got it up and running this week!

I put two 4T WD Red drives in it (also on sale Prime Day!), and put a price watch on those drives in camelcamelcamel so I can hopefully fill the other 3 bays over the next year or so.

Here’s what I’ve learned so far:

• It was actually really easy to set up. I put the drives into the bays, plugged it into my network and the wall. Then I installed the management software on my iMac and stepped through the drive setup. I want to say that within 30 minutes it was ready to go.
• I know very little about servers.
• Things that I hear about that sound intimidating (Docker anyone?) are usually not that hard once you get into it.
• Google is my best friend. (OK, I knew that one already!)

The one thing it did without asking me was set up the drives on a RAID array with RAID 1. I wasn’t planning on doing it that way, but I’m going to leave it for now. I think once I add a couple more drives I’ll rebuild the array using a higher RAID… I feel like for my purposes mirroring the data isn’t the best use of drive space.

Here’s what I have installed on it so far. Of course I started by looking for an anti-malware, and Clam Antivirus is the one recommended by the OS so I figured I’ll try that out. (It’s part of Cisco so right away I feel like it’ll probably be good!) And right off the bat I knew I wanted to set up a VPN server (there was one by Terramaster ready to install), and learn a little more about Docker. I also set up a Plex server to see what that’s all about (not sure if we’ll actually use it or if I’ll end up taking that one down in the end).

Oh, and I set up an Apache Guacamole instance in Docker but don’t have any machines to connect it to yet–guess that should go on my project list!

So many things to serve = so much to learn!