minimum req's for a cheap diy NAS device? Software?

E

[evo]

Gawd
Joined
Dec 4, 2000
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I've been out of the loop for a while but I always come back here when I need answer :)

I'm looking to build a NAS, as i've quit gaming on my pc and moved to laptop land...now my current vaio has some great specs but im not interested in upgrading the hard drive every time I run out of space and have been thinking about building a NAS out of my old PC's.

I do have an old amd64 x2 box kicking around but I have no idea on the requirements and whether or not it would suffice for NAS work. its old enough to have an AGP x800XT AIW if that matters, but the more I think about it all I really wanna do is stuff it full of hard drives and have it work serving files and storage to my vaio (win7) and old hp dv6000 (ubuntu).

basically I donwload everything thru ubuntu, and use win7 on my tv to play it all back. Its getting tiresome transferring the files after download, and I'd like to have one device that could both receive the files directly upon download and serve them to the vaio when I want to watch.

Suggestions? Ideas?
 
FreeNAS has really light requirements, that PC would be overkill, my experience with it was far from stable but that may have been due to several factors, and I know others have great success with it. I opted for openfiler instead which was 100 times more stable for me, but lacked some of the cool features like FreeNAS' integrated bit torrent client. Openfiler is much simpler and straight to the point, which may play a part in it's excellent stability. That PC is way overkill for either of the two. FreeNAS was much easier to install, and I loaded the OS on a flashdrive so I could raid my disks without having an extra system partition, OF would not let me do that easily.

In the end, I went with Windows Home Server, which may be a better fit for the beefier hardware, I basically only run the uTorrent addon, and it handles my backups and av monitoring with it's built in connector.
 
Another vote for WHS. I love it since it can back up my PC's and stream videos or music to my Xbox 360. The only issues is that they are taking some features out of the new version that servilely reduces the overall reason to build a WHS.

If you are daring and want to learn a little, download FreeNAS. If you want your life to be easer, buy WHS.
 
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