"Small yet deceptively spacious" 
Following on from a thread here about NAS options, I've decided to build myself a FreeNAS box as there isn't a NAS appliance out there that'll meet my needs.
Most of the boxes out there are either too simple, slow or too buggy and have lame vendor support for fixing the issues. The Buffalo Linkstation Live V3 was looking like the winner, until I read there were multiple issues with the Bittorrent client... that and it was missing a major piece of functionality I needed.
Buffalo's Linkstation on paper is excellent, however I think it's let down by shady software. Thecus's offerings look excellent in the all departments, however they're ridiculously expensive (£350+) once populated with decent size drives. Finally Qnap's options look good, but again their cheapest solution without drive is £180~, stick a 1TB drive in there and you're up to £250 for an appliance box.
Anyway, back to what the box needs to do:
So on to the fun stuff, hardware. Originally I'd been working to the budget of the Linkstation Live - £170. Despite doing much searching around, this is a bit tight but as I figured I'd be getting all the functionality I wanted and it fitted the brief I'd stretch a bit more and go for a mini-ITX setup.
Fingers crossed everything turns up tomorrow for a build over the weekend, will update the thread with more when it's here.
Any comments/suggestions? Experiences with FreeNAS customisation, or addition of modules and addons would be greatly appreciated.
Cheers
Following on from a thread here about NAS options, I've decided to build myself a FreeNAS box as there isn't a NAS appliance out there that'll meet my needs.
Most of the boxes out there are either too simple, slow or too buggy and have lame vendor support for fixing the issues. The Buffalo Linkstation Live V3 was looking like the winner, until I read there were multiple issues with the Bittorrent client... that and it was missing a major piece of functionality I needed.
Buffalo's Linkstation on paper is excellent, however I think it's let down by shady software. Thecus's offerings look excellent in the all departments, however they're ridiculously expensive (£350+) once populated with decent size drives. Finally Qnap's options look good, but again their cheapest solution without drive is £180~, stick a 1TB drive in there and you're up to £250 for an appliance box.
Anyway, back to what the box needs to do:
- Serve out a NAS share for media and backups over a LAN for 2 laptops, PC, 360 and an iPhone.
- Act as a downloader for HTTP/FTP/Bittorrents.
- Be secure yet accessible as it's going to be Internet facing for access to the download manager.
- Be configurable as a web proxy server (how many NAS appliances can do this... yup, none!) as I have a mate in Spain who wants to be able to use the iPlayer and 4OD.
- Small and quiet as per a dedicated NAS device as it's going to be in the lounge.
- Low power usage.
So on to the fun stuff, hardware. Originally I'd been working to the budget of the Linkstation Live - £170. Despite doing much searching around, this is a bit tight but as I figured I'd be getting all the functionality I wanted and it fitted the brief I'd stretch a bit more and go for a mini-ITX setup.
- Noah Mini-ITX case. I'm a sucker for brushed aluminium fronts, and as it's going next to an Antec Fusion HTPC case I figured it needed to look the part. Bonus with this case is it comes with an 80W PSU unit too.
- Intel BOXD945GCLF Atom mobo with 1.6ghz CPU. Can't fault this board for the price, £60 delivered is a stonking deal. It's got 2 SATA ports which is more than enough for the above case, and an additional PCI slot should I want to expand the SATA drives at a later date. It's also got an IDE port... which I'll explain why is good in a moment.
- Samsung Spinpoint F1 Eco - 1TB HDD. Admittedly I haven't done quite as much research into this as I should have, but having had Sammy disks in the past and knowing they're quiet I'm confident this one will be up to the task. As the LAN is the bottle neck here, I'm not fussed about the fastest performance...
- 1GB generic DDR2-667 RAM. FreeNAS recommends a minimum of 128MB, 512MB if using RAID setups. The 1GB is overkill, but given it's only a tenner it's a bit of a no brainer.
- 256MB IDE Flash Module. From what I've read FreeNAS recommends your OS install is completely seperate to your share drive, and in fact is designed to run from a LiveCD or a USB/Flash module. Always quite liked the idea of these modules, so perfect opportunity to give one a go.
Fingers crossed everything turns up tomorrow for a build over the weekend, will update the thread with more when it's here.
Any comments/suggestions? Experiences with FreeNAS customisation, or addition of modules and addons would be greatly appreciated.
Cheers
Pathetic I know... It's currently running XP now with more or less the same specs as yours, and I have it plugged in to my stereo system so it's essentially a glorified MP3 player at the minute 
