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!

 

[Fuzz]

POsting for info on this also as my "attic PC" storage solution is as you have described initially.

XP pro, sharing enabled and a HDD in every slot available

 

[RomanNose]

The first word that comes to mind is ...
LINUX
Don't mess around with windows, you are bound to have a problem that is out of your control due to the nature of the OS.
I think you get much more features out of Linux for a nas, there are lots of options hardware wise but it all depends on how much performance you want. Personally I find it helpful for the odd encoding, remember that the NAS is probably the machine that you will send off the mundane tasks to do rather than using a desktop. If you really want real power savings then some atom jobby is the only choice, though I heard there are some difficulties when there is a large number of users trying to load files.
In terms of networking wise, I would say that you should have individual accounts for different people so that nothing can go wrong. For some users you might want to disable deletion and for others you might enable full access. This can be done with samba quite easily. At the moment it is a bad time in terms of hard drives, you can still go ahead with getting the parts though, but this is something you should consider as you will have to wait a while for it to recover.
Your linux distribution really depends on what you have hardware wise, my nas is a dual core and copes very well with mint. I find it can be helpful to have a common distribution, so that if it does go wrong you are more likely to be able to find an answer. Ubuntu flavours are probably the best choice.
Overall, I would say that you should first consider the processor and the size of the nas. The great things about a NAS is that you can practically put them anywhere, a large case is ideal though with as many sata connectors as possible. But then again, you might decide to have multiple low power devices.

 

[semi-pro waster]

I've gone with General Hardware on this one but as you say it could potentially go in about 3 different forums.

If you don't already have the hard drives then potentially it could be quite pricey adding on many more hard drives due to the recent price hike for them, you're also probably somewhat limited in expansion possibilities due to the fact it's a small case. However if you're not going to be taxing it too hugely then that may not matter.

 

[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.

 

[geuben]

For simplicity, windows home server is ideal ( I have the original version ). However it costs money.

 

[Atrox]

Don't mess around with windows, you are bound to have a problem that is out of your control due to the nature of the OS.

That's just as applicable to Linux. He could have a piece of hardware that has no Linux driver support. Or some similar problem.

Also, he has no knowledge of Linux. Messing about with the command line is time consuming and requires a decent level of knowledge to know what you're doing, instead of just throwing commands into the terminal you're copying from an online "guide" with no understanding of exactly what the commands are doing.

If anything, FreeNAS would be what I would recommend if *nix was a must. It can be configured via a webpage and is pretty easy to understand. Otherwise, with his lack of knowledge of *nix systems, Windows Home Server is the obvious choice.

 

[asim18]

Check out windows home server. If that appeals to you then get it. If not just stick any regular Windows OS on there and set up shares with various permissions.