Building a NAS Device w/ Embedded OS?

An Anonymous Coward asks: "I've been thinking about building a NAS device similar to the Quantum Snap Server Has anyone come across anyone else working on a similar project? One that at the very least uses a small integrated board and some sort of embedded OS? Ive seen several systems that run a full Linux OS and separate boot hard drives, but this solution seems a bit too bulky for whats really required. Something that features a FTP/HTTP/SMB interface would be pretty slick!"

Comments

Microware

[gerardrj]

Microware's OS-9 is an ideal solution for such a project. The OS will run in a few K of RAM and has complete network stacks as I recall.
THe OS runs on most chips from 6809(68K now) onward.

what's wrong with linux (or bsd for that matter)?

[StandardDeviant]

If bulk is your thing, I'm sure you could find a small board that Linux (or certainly netbsd) will run on (example: embsd.org's board), and fitting a full-featured install of either of the above OSen onto a CompactFlash device from SanDisk (ide adaptors are available for not much, media is pretty cheap) isn't hard... Heck using the PCMCIA slot on that board, you could have (up to) a gig to play with via IBM's microdrive for the system "disk". This means that you'd be using an operating system with a much larger user community that whatever proprietary thing you went with, and not to be neglected, the free OSen would be, well, uh... free. ;-) SAMBA, netatalk, ftp, nfs, afs, coda, etc. all pretty much guarantee that your little *nix machine could talk to pretty much anything with a power cable. The embsd board has a PCI slot, so you could easily stick a raid adaptor on it, and with 3 10/100 interfaces you probably don't have to worry about network I/O... All in all, a pretty cheap solution: $255 for the board, $0 for the OS and software, maybe $300 for an ata100 pci board and a couple of big ass IDE drives... This would scale up to N many scsi drives / raid, blah blah... all while taking up way less space and pwr than a desktop (the embsd board also has a bios that allows serial-console-only admin of everything, a la the PC WEASEL).