Thin consumers had been once thought by some to be the foreseeable future of computing. These rather minimal-electrical power devices would depend on large server farms to cope with the bulk of their processing and storage, serving only as a easy local way for end users to get access to the network. They never very caught on, but [Jan Weber] discovered an old instance and established about repurposing it as a NAS.
The Fujitsu Futro S900 was crafted up to 2013, and only experienced one particular SATA port from the manufacturing facility. [Jan] desired to add yet another as this would make the system far more valuable as a network connected storage server.
The motherboard style was meant generally for industrial control or digital signage apps, and consequently has a great deal of interfaces onboard. [Jan]’s very first target was some unpopulated footprints for SATA ports onboard, but soon after soldering on a connector, it was observed that the BIOS wouldn’t recognise the additional ports in any case.
Even so, just after reflashing the BIOS with a person from an alternate product, the port worked! The technique also appeared to then think about it was linked to several supplemental LAN interfaces, but other than that glitch, the hack is purposeful. Now, with a pair of 2 TB SSDs inside of, the S900 is a good lower-electricity NAS device that can retailer [Jan]’s documents.
It is a tidy hack, and a person that will probably attraction to those who like to operate their own hardware fairly than relying on the cloud. If you’re operating on your individual impressive NAS task, be guaranteed to enable us know!