I previously wrote about the hardware I bought for my new NAS. In this post, I’m going to go through the choices I made for the operating system and filesystem layout.

Operating System

Every great server starts with an operating system. For my NAS, I picked Ubuntu 24.04.

While there are a lot of great choices, this one seemed like a natural fit for me. I’ve been using Ubuntu for a long time, almost 20 years, so I’m familiar with it. That version is also an LTS version, so I’ll get plenty of life out of it before I even need to contemplate upgrading.

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Way back in 2015, I built a NAS. I’d had a “NAS” before, but it was old/spare parts cobbled together to approximate a NAS. This was the first NAS I built, where I bought parts specifically to make a NAS.

I remember doing some research, but ultimately just deciding to go with this wonderful guide from Brian C Moses. It was not the most powerful box, but it did what I needed and I got about 10 years out of it, so I’d say it was a success.

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