Budget 6TB RAID-5 Network-Attached Storage (NAS) Under $600 DIY Guide

Setup Motherboard BIOS

There are some important motherboard BIOS settings you need to change in order to have a stable working NAS box so I’ll run through them now. Keep in mind that BIOS screens differ greatly, so consider this as a rough guide. Our goals are to set the time, load BIOS defaults or optimal defaults, change hard drive boot order to your SSD first, RAID second (or not at all), then change the overall boot order to CD/DVDRW drive first, SSD hard drive second, after that it doesn’t really matter. We also need to make sure that any overlcocking features are turned off or set to normal profile, you don’t want to be overclocking your NAS system, you want stability. Lastly we want to set any video memory to the smallest option available, and DVMT to Lite mode and memory to the lowest allowed.

1. Start up your machine and hold down the enter BIOS key, usually DEL or F2 button (sometimes F1 or F10) until you reach the config screen
2. Set the time if necessary, then TAB to the Exit or Boot menu OR look for “Load BIOS Defaults” or “Load Optimal BIOS Defaults” then TAB to it and hit Enter and choose Yes to any prompts to load BIOS defaults
3. We need to change the hard drive boot order, look for a menu item called Boot or Exit and an item call Hard Drive Boot Order, change it to boot from your SSD first, RAID second (or not at all)
4. Now we change the overall boot order from Boot or Exit menu to boot from your DVDRW drive first, SSD drive second and anything you want after that
5. (optional) Look for a menu item called Advanced or Overclocking and set it to Normal or Standard profile, we don’t want to be overclocking our NAS system.
6. (optional) Look for the Advanced menu item again, enter and look for Video Settings or Graphics Settings and set memory allocation to lowest option, look for DVMT and choose Lite mode and lowest DVMT memory option
7. Finally go to the Exit menu and choose to Exit saving settings option and reboot