OptiPlex 7040 NAS

I’ve decided to turn the OptiPlex 7040 into a NAS to use for my photography data storage, using Ubuntu Server and Samba, because I’ve always wanted a NAS that worked better than (or actually worked at this point) the WD MyCloud that I bought about 10 years ago, and that I have more control over.

I bought a NICGIGA 2.5 Gigabit PCIe Ethernet adapter and a 10-terabyte WD Red Plus HDD for storage (that will cover the data that I currently have on my G-Drive USB-C 4-terabyte hard drive twice over), and I took the 500-gigabyte Samsung SSD that I had in the Lenovo M72e and used that as well.

Taking some ideas from Cathode Ray Dude‘s I Built… a really fast NAS? video, this is how I plan to use this setup:

The NAS will be connected to the current network I have, but will ONLY be use with my office/studio computer, except for maintenance, using the 2.5 gigabit adapter connected to my 2.5 gigabit switch. Probably obvious, the 10-terabyte HDD will be used for storage of all of my data. Ubuntu Server and Samba will be installed on a 128-gigabyte M.2 SSD and the 500-gigabyte Samsung 860 EVO SATA SSD will be used as a drive to work from over the network. This way, nothing is being stored on the office/studio computer and I’m also not working from my storage drive.

On top of this, which took me a few days to research and figure out, I have a Linux shell script to run an rsync command nightly to backup the working drive to the storage drive to make sure that nothing gets lost. In the near future, I will put the rsync script up on the Codes & Scripts page.

Unfortunately, I’m not fully taking advantage of the 2.5-gigabit setup since my office/studio computer is still running over gigabit, but I’m kind of on a budget; a second adapter for that computer will come soon. But running this over gigabit is pretty fast. I can run Capture One sessions and catalogs with no lag after the initial loading, which isn’t that slow either, and transferring files to and from the SSD is decently quick for things that I’m not necessarily in a rush to do. I’ll be interested to see how much this speeds up with a 2.5-gigabit adapter on both ends.