Home-built NAS box

[wannabediyer]

Hi,

Hope this is an appropriate forum for this question. Please direct me elsewhere if I've landed in the wrong place....

I need a relatively large amount of storage and have considered buying something like a Buffalo Terabyte box, but the cost is prohibitive.

So, I'm considering building a NAS box using a barebones machine with a RAID card (4 channels), 1 system disk (for either FreeBSD or some Linux variant) and 4 RAID5ed disks. I'll just plug it into my home network, mount it on linux machines with NFS and Windows boxen with SMB.

I'm likely to use www.freenas.org on the machine.

Does anyone have recommendations about a good set of components for such a system? I'm probably just going to go with plain ol' IDE disks (rather than SATA). I've looked at a system with an Aopen Miditown QF50a, Celeron CPU, 256 MB memory, and a Promise SATA 150 RAID controller, but it actually gets pretty close to the price of the Buffalo Tech system. Gotta be able to do better than that...

Here's hoping someone might have good ideas!

 

[pwnage]

NAS boxes can be tricky.

just my 2 cents but, i think you could build a really cheap computer. get a mobo that has onboard video, a good NIC, DVD rom, 512 - 1GB or memory, and go with SATA drives. i think you will like them. you might also want to consider adding more drives to the raid. maybe 5 or 6 with raid 5 you will lose 1 hd worth of space due to the parity.

Segate make great drives and so does western digital. seagate offers a 5yr warrenty on most of their drives and i think WD does too.

the NAS boxes that you see SUCK. they arn't worth the time or money.

Sempron proc's are cheep and would do fine for an NAS box.

go to newegg and put something together. if you look you sould be able to find parts for cheep. look at combo and bundle deals too.

i hope this helps

 

[p05esto]

Yea, just find any ol POS box and stick some large, cheap drives in it and "share" them which you map to from your other computers. Once it's up and running unplug monitor/keyboard etc and let er sit in a closet somewhere. Perfectly good and perfectly cheap!

 

[godlyatheist]

check this out be sure to read all 3 parts

 

[Guest]

I agree with Pawnage, build your own NAS from a PC, it will serve you better and you will have a PC you use/connect to.

I am writing a Wiki on this at the moment.

http://snarfquest.com/wiki/index.php/LINUX

 

[ohime]

check this out.. you can build your own NAS.....
http://www.movedl.com/computer-hardware-7/step-by-step-on-making-nas-network-attached-storage-from-home-92/

and if you want to buil it with RAID

http://www.movedl.com/computer-hardware-7/step-by-step-on-setting-up-nas-with-raid-using-freenas-95/