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jonasEvery cloud starts with a foundation: storage. For a personal cloud, this is probably the most essential feature. My goal was simple—create a central storage system accessible to any device on my network. With this setup, I’d be able to back up my data effortlessly and share files across devices with ease.
For personal use, this is typically achieved using a NAS—a “Network Attached Storage” system. Most operating systems and applications can connect to a NAS to store and retrieve data.
Instead of buying a prebuilt NAS (which would have been simpler), I opted for the “hard way”—a recurring theme you’ll notice throughout this blog. Why the FriendlyElec CM3588 NAS board? It’s cost-effective, customizable, and has powerful specs for the price. Plus, building it myself felt like a challenge worth taking on.
I found a great deal on Alibaba for the full board (including the NAS-Kit and expanded RAM) for €40 plus shipping. The board doesn’t come with storage drives, but it does have four M.2 slots—a great feature for high-speed storage. Naturally, I needed to pair the board with an SSD. While SSDs are faster than HDDs, they’re also more expensive. In the end, I spent around €80 on a 1TB SSD to complement the board.
As is often the case with Alibaba purchases, the board took about two months to arrive. When it finally did, I hit my first challenge: it wouldn’t boot or post. After some investigation, I discovered that FriendlyElec provides firmware for the board, but flashing firmware to a device with only a single blinking LED as feedback is… let’s call it an “exciting” experience.
Thankfully, the SSD fit snugly into one of the M.2 slots. However, the board didn’t come with screws to secure the drive—a minor inconvenience. Once installed, the SSD worked without any further issues.
This is where things got complicated. FriendlyElec provides firmware that comes with OpenMediaVault preinstalled. However, configuring it wasn’t as straightforward as I’d hoped.
The firmware had some unusual default Linux package repositories set up, which I ended up changing back to the official repositories. Unfortunately, this broke parts of the installation, most notably the media codecs, which became completely non-functional.
Once I switched to the official repositories, I ran into a cascade of broken dependencies. My guess? The preconfigured repositories likely included custom or tampered packages, causing conflicts. Fixing this was a painstaking process: I had to manually purge broken packages and reinstall them one by one. While I didn’t bother with reinstalling all the media codecs, I eventually got the core dependencies working.
Despite these hiccups, I managed to get OpenMediaVault running, and the system was finally operational.
With some patience (and a fair bit of waiting for the hardware to arrive), putting the hardware together was relatively straightforward. The real challenge came in installing and configuring the software.
In the end, the system turned out to be significantly cheaper than a preconfigured NAS while offering much greater power and flexibility. Sure, a prebuilt system might have been easier, but where’s the fun in that? For anyone who loves tinkering and learning, building your own cloud storage is an incredibly rewarding experience.
With the NAS up and running, I’m already eyeing my next big project: turning this little powerhouse into a full-fledged media server. With its solid RAM and CPU, it’s more than capable. Stay tuned—I’ll share the details in an upcoming post!