Low Cost Network Attached Storage?

leperjuice asks: "I've been looking at options for Network Attached Storage for my home network. I can't run a single machine as a file server, and a NAS box sounds like an ideal solution. The problem is that the products are targeted at the business market, and the only item that comes close to a SOHO level is Quantum's Snap Server and those are still somewhat pricy and non-upgradeable (you can't buy a new drive and slap it in). Are there network attached SCSI/IDE enclosures, for example? Or am I stuck with having to transform a crappy box into a server? "

Comments

Linux or xBSD + Pentium + HD == NAS

[Ledge Kindred]

I have two 50GB+ servers on my home network. One is a P133 and the other is a P166, both with 64MB of RAM, both running linux (although one ran FreeBSD for a while). They both serve NFS and Samba. One does DNS for my internal network. The cost to me for the two of them was probably about $500 and here's why:

The parts are mostly scrounged from pieces discarded during upgrades to my workstation, begged off of friends, and occasionally bought. (Like the Intel 10/100 Ethernet card and Promise PCI UltraIDE controller for the main server and the two 26GB and three 13GB hard drives used between the two boxes.)

The most expensive components were the hard drives, but you can now get 20GB+ hard drives for about a hundred bucks mail order. For the rest of the components, you can almost certainly find people who are willing to give up a piece here and a piece there from stuff lying around the same as most of the parts for my servers were. I would bet you could build a dedicated server with a good amount of hard drive space for just a couple of hundred dollars. (A friend of mine consistently claims he can build brand new K7 servers with buttloads of hard drive space for under $500, but I have no idea where he gets his prices.)

You don't need a lot of RAM and you don't need a lot of CPU - my 64MB P133 can easily keep up with at least half a dozen machines all talking NFS to its exported filesystems. The two most important things are: a) big disks, and big IDE is cheap and fairly speedy nowadays (although I still prefer SCSI), and b) fast network cards, and the Intel EEPro 10/100 cards are under $50 in the stores, forget about mail-order prices.

Because it's so cheap to do this sort of thing with the free OS's that it's been many a time I've contemplated putting together a $500 box with a mid-range CPU and a couple big-ass hard drives doing software RAID, build a little web-based interface to edit the /etc/exports file, make sure SWAT is enabled to web-configure Samba, and sell them as $5000 Networked-attached-storage machines. (Although the bigger corporations probably wouldn't touch them until they had a $25,000 price tag on them...)

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