You should check out NasLite from www.serverelements.com if you are short on cash. It doesn't support RAID but here's what I did: I rescued an old Celeron 366 eMachine from the trash and removed the CDROM and 4GB HD. Then I found 300GB Hard Drives for just under $100 each on Newegg.com and bought 2 of them. I put a $19 D-Link Gigabit NIC in it, and booted up to the NasLite floppy. You can administer it from telnet, so it can run headless. Now I have a.6TB file server that only cost $220.00. I basically use one drive for data, and I use an XCopy script each night to back it up to the second drive.
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You should check out NasLite from www.serverelements.com if you are short on cash. It doesn't support RAID but here's what I did: I rescued an old Celeron 366 eMachine from the trash and removed the CDROM and 4GB HD. Then I found 300GB Hard Drives for just under $100 each on Newegg.com and bought 2 of them. I put a $19 D-Link Gigabit NIC in it, and booted up to the NasLite floppy. You can administer it from telnet, so it can run headless. Now I have a .6TB file server that only cost $220.00. I basically use one drive for data, and I use an XCopy script each night to back it up to the second drive.