Planning to build a NAS

Image courtesy of Lifehacker

Now that I am mostly settled down in Australia, I think it is the time to kick start that old project of mine: building a NAS box.

I looked at the prices of of- the-shelf NAS enclosures online and the ReadyNAS 104 which I was looking at when I was in Japan, is still an economical option at around $240. But all of these ready built NAS enclosures have one problem that I am not very happy about. They use proprietary filesystems or not-so-easily mountable ones in Windows. Thus, I am still leaning towards the DIY solution. But it is expensive, however at first. But in the long run, it would be economical as I can easily upgrade the hard drives. If I get a proper case, I would be able to add as much as 6 hard drives in it. A six bay ready built NAS would be very expensive.

So here is the list of components I have come up with.

• Case: Fractal Design Node 304 (mini-ITX with support for ATX PSU and six 3.5” HDD)
• Motherboard: Gigabyte H97N Wi-Fi (because of 6 SATA ports, dual LAN ports and Wi-Fi)
• CPU: Intel Celeron G1840 (cheapest Intel CPU that would fit the above motherboard and I plan to under-volt the CPU as much as possible)
• RAM: 8GB DDR3 1600 (no specific brand, will be getting the cheapest; and will be under-volting)
• SSD: 120GB (no specific brand; will be getting the cheapest – just for the OS and other utilities; 120GB is overkill but 60GB is only slightly cheaper)
• PSU: Corsair V350 (cheapest PSU with a known brand)
• Video card: AMD R5 230 1GB card (because the onboard video cannot drive my QX2710 monitor, and can be used as a backup video card for troubleshooting the main PC)

The total cost of the NAS box would come close to $600. I wish I could get rid of the video card and go for a cheaper motherboard + CPU combo by using an add-on controller card, but it is difficult with mini-ITX. But having the PC as not-so-crappy. I can use my GTX 970 whenever I want to troubleshoot something, but it is too much of a hassle; so I suppose the above configuration will stay.

I will be using Windows Server Essentials on the NAS, so yes, Windows and NTFS! I won’t be using RAID. I will manually setup daily backups. I will be using the two Western Digital Green 4TB drives that I bought last year from Japan for the data. I think they are about half full and I should be able to survive with them for some time to come.

So that is about it. Now it is time to start shopping. Fun times after a long time!!!

Bought my first car–it took me 31 years!

Last October when we visited Australia for our first visit after getting the PR, we could see a clear picture of the situation with public transport in Melbourne. It is OK, but for someone who has spent the last 5 years in Japan, it was a huge let down. In Japan, you don't need a car if you live in a metropolitan area. Even in Sri Lanka, you don't need a car unless you live in a rural place. Australia is not an efficient country. It probably is because Australia has a lot of resources with a very little population density. So, they do not seem to care much about improving the public transport system , hence roads are the main medium of transportation.

That means, I needed a car. And I needed to buy one soon, as I would need my cousin’s help as he knows about cars. And after I move to my apartment, I would be far away from him, and it would not be practical for him to come look for cars.

I was originally planning to get a cheap car and get a decent one later on, but after talking to my cousin, I felt that I had to spend at least $6,000 on a car if I did not want any immediate repair work. You can get a 10 year old car with that amount, but they would have travelled over 200,000 km. Australia is a large country, and to travel about 60km a day is not unusual. Some travel even farther. The roads are good and very (VERY) wide with 3-4-5 tracks on each direction, so if you can avoid the city, you can get to your destination pretty quickly.

My target was to get a car with less than 100,000 km on the clock and below the $7,500 price tag. I found few cars that fit the criteria, but obviously I was not the only one who was looking at similar cars. Unfortunately, I only could check out the cars during the weekend because that is both my cousin and I would be free. So I missed out on few opportunities.

One of them was a 2007 Honda CRV, but ironically that happened on a Saturday. It had been done only like 100,000km and the owner was asking about $10,000, but we could not make it in the morning and someone grabbed it before we could check it out. There was a 2005 Honda Accord which had done only 57,000 km for $8,400 and sadly that was also grabbed by someone else.

Renting a place in Melbourne

Like I mentioned in the previous posts, I was living with my cousin after migrating to Australia. But now that I have a job, it was about time I moved out of my cousin's place. Let's be honest now, it is a hindrance when someone else is living with you.

I looked for available places for lease on RealEstate and Domain mobile apps, and noted down a few. It is easier to check them up on the phone because the apps show the places on the map.

On the day before I was supposed to start working, there was a schedule for inspection of a house near the work place. I went there, because I was free on that afternoon. That was when I realised the state of renting in south east of Melbourne. This area is old, so the houses are old; some of them look like my parents' parents' houses. Most houses do not have air-conditioning. They only have heating; some very rare ones don't even have heating! People in Australia seem to have a made up a habit of spending the hot days at shopping malls. There are of course new houses; they demolish old houses and build three small houses on the same land. And they are expensive. But there are cheaper and newer houses if you are willing to go farther from civilisation, but I did not want that. I set a maximum rent target of $350 per week, which is still crazy high compared to what we paid in Japan. Sadly, you should be really lucky to get a cheaper rent in this part of the country.

So that first house was a bad one. Then there were few inspections on the next Saturday. I went there early in the morning by train. The first house was a $340 one and it was quite large, had a split air cooling system but was pretty old still. I wanted to look around a bit.

After that inspection, I paid a visit to my friend's place in Clayton and he drove me around to the other inspections. We checked about half a dozen houses and towards the end of the day I was able to shortlist 3 places: two houses and an apartment.

One of the houses was right in the centre of Clayton and they asked $360 for it. It lacked an A/C but considering the fact that we could simply walk to do the grocery and that I could walk to the office, I decided to give it a go and I could apply easily as it could be done online.