My First NAS

At the start of this year I began thinking about a dedicated storage solution for household use. Currently I use a multi purpose server running 24/7 for home storage, but since this one started to reach it's max capacity and read write disk performance is poor it was clear I needed a new storage setup and started my search for something that would fit my needs.

Eventually I came across the Helios64 by Kobol. This is a well designed ARM powered NAS which also looks cool. It allows up to 5 disks, which is sufficient for me because I planned to have a RAID10 set out of 4 8TB disks. It also offers two gigabit network interfaces. And something I like, it's build with the Open Source philosophy in mind.

The package you receive is not a plug-and-play NAS device. You will have to assemble the unit yourself, which is not hard at all because the documentation on the Wiki is pretty good. In fact I really liked putting this unit together. This way you have more knowledge and understanding of the various parts the devices consist of. It took me about two hours, from opening the package to first boot.

On the picture you see 4 8TB WD Elements disks. I have "shucked" those to have premium disks for an better price. It's a well known option if you have to fill up your NAS device with new disks.

I started to install the armbian OS (Armbian_20.11.0-trunk.32_Helios64_buster_current_5.9.8.img.xz) to the internal flash disk (eMMC) and chose to install openmediavault (OMV) from the armbian installer.

Now the device is doing a resync of the 16TB volume (/dev/md0), so time to write a small post. Will follow this one up with some more details and experience.