Can i build a nas with an old pentium 3 pc

[expat]

hi,
i have an old pentium 3 pc that has been given to me and would like to know if it would be possible to utilize as a nas for streaming films photos and music.
i am not sure of the exact specs but they are as follows:-
pentium 3 celeron 466 mhz processor(coppermine)
128 mhz sd ram
20 gb pata hard drive
asus mobo not sure which one.
i was planning on using an external 1 tb hard drive as storage and investing in some extra ram.the board only supports 512 mb of sd ram max.
also i am going to have to install a add in usb 2.0 board as only usb is supported natively.
thoughts?
thx rob

 

[Emerald]

look at FreeNAS.org

 

[hang-the-9]

That system is too slow to stream anything over cell phone quality video.
If you are attaching an external drive to that thing, why not just attach it to your main system? A modern PC can handle file services as well as doing other stuff at the same time.

 

[j2j663]

You can try but don't expect great results. The processor is on the slow side but will really kill you is the 512mb RAM limit. Servers like RAM and you are going to want a minimum of 2GB if you plan on streaming videos or anything like that.

If you look into FreeNAS try and find an older version, possibly the one they have long term support for, the newer versions aren't as friendly to older hardware.