Home Network Data Storage Device

It happened again- a machine on my home network died. Taking with it tons of data. It's mostly backed up. No huge loss. But I finally think it's time to get some sort of network raid disk. A unified place to safely store data accessible to the numerous machines on my home lan. So now I pose to Slashdot readers- what are your recommendations? I'm looking for something with RAID and SMB sharing. At least a quarter TB, probably a half, but with some room to grow. What have you used? What works? What fails?

Comments

Linksys NSLU2

[LodCrappo]

This might not be perfect for the original poster's needs, but it works great for mine which are somewhat similar. Basically the linksys NSLU2 is a little box with an ethernet port and two usb 2.0 ports. it runs a variety of linuxes, mine runs Debian. You can learn about the open source side of the device here: http://www.nslu2-linux.org/

You can hook up several hard drives (or other usb toys) via a usb hub. Performance is not great, but totally fine for storage of music and movies if you only have a few users on your network. It supports samba, ftp, nfs, http, probably any other way you'd like to access the files. You could do software raid or some other type of mirroring/backup if you'd like.

The main reasons I really like this thing for an at home server:

• Silent operation, no fans in the nslu2 and you can get fanless enclosures for the HDs
• Takes very little space away from your home office
• Very small power draw
• Easy to add/remove drives without any reboots
• Can power off drives that aren't used frequently, then turn them on when needed

I was amazed at how quiet my office became after replacing my PC file server with this guy and PC firewall with a wrt54g. I could actually hear the gf talking again, which is the only downside so far.