DIY Network Attached Storage

After a (rather busy) summer, I have finally elected to return to my "do it yourself network attached storage" project. I've done some reasearch, and picked my operating system -- FreeNAS (http://www.freenas.org). Their site describes it thusly: "FreeNAS is a free NAS (Network-Attached Storage) server, supporting: CIFS (samba), FTP, NFS, AFP, RSYNC, iSCSI protocols, S.M.A.R.T., local user authentication, Software RAID (0,1,5) with a Full WEB configuration interface."

There are a number of things I really like about this implementation. First, it's tiny -- and I mean really, really small. A full implementation takes about 30 megs for the operating system, leaving the rest of your disk space available for storage. Secondly, it's based on FreeBSD, so you know it's going to be rock solid, and require very little maintenance. Finally, in a heterogeneous network, this is ideal -- it talks to everybody. We have Macs, linux work stations, and windows all trying to play nicely together. This solution is perfect for our needs.

Give it a look.  It's stable as a rock, and works like a charm.

Build your own NAS device

I believe it is a universal truth that data will always expand to fill all available media -- even if you do nothing with that data. At least, that always seems the case with us.

We have been considering picking up a few Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices for awhile now, so as to increase storage capacity without adding significantly to the space and power consumption in our server facility.

Naturally, this seems to me to be an excellent opportunity to repurpose some old hardware and build my own NAS device.

Before you go too far down this road, though, consider the fact that there are quite a few not-too-expensive NAS devices out there that will work quite well for small office/home office environments. A quick visit to tigerdirect.ca, for instance, shows that you can find a decent sized NAS for well under $500.00 without too much effort. However, serious NAS devices with RAID configurations, redundancy, and 1 TB+ disk space are still very pricey -- so much so that it is probably cheaper to build your own.

I'm going to start the research now, and keep you posted. Here are my goals:

1) Must support Windows/Mac clients
2) Must be fault tolerant (i.e. RAID)
3) Small form factor
4) 1TB+ storage capacity
5) minimum power consumption/heat generation

I'll keep you posted.

Update: This looks like a nice case for the price....