Make your own nas?

[oxygene]

OK now I have no idea if this should be in general hardware, windows, linux, whereever lol so hopefully a friendly passing admin will move this to the relevant location instead of banning me for life.

Basically I recently came upon a machine which served no major use and didnt have many worthwhile parts. Then I thought to myself "hmmm this house has needed a centralised storage method for a very long while". So I thought to myself, having a perfectly working pc, albeit a little dated, would be perfect NAS material.
Now I assume just stuffing windows on it and sitting it in a corner with sharing enabled is one way to go, but I'm curious about others. Theres stuff out there like FreeNAS or some such thing, and I'm hoping people here have other ideas.
Basically I'm hoping for something which could wake on lan from a standby state which uses very little power, but I think thats more hardware related? And ofc one big shared folder which is accessable to everyone on the network regardless of user credentials, homegroup, passwords. Well maybe a password protection thing if pos.
Any help or experiance would be appreciated!

 

[oxygene]

*snip*

Hmmm Linux seams the way to go then. Unfortunately despite a lot of windows experiance I have zero linux skills, how hard is it to get these running?

Also, forgot to add above, I have a 100% working machine here, so hardware isnt a consideration. Its a 256mb ram 2ghz intel with a 320gb hd. Kinda crappy but for centralised storage of important files it should work. Atm it would be used for my mother as she has family tree research / photos / cat pictures spread over several pcs and in no real order.