N.A.S. Storage (non proprietary ip protocols)

[ArchAnGeL]

I am looking for some NAS storage - 160-250 gb

The main use of this will be to store multimedia that will be accessed by my xbox + xbox media centre.

Because of this, it must be accessed by standard tcp/ip rather than some of the proprietary protocols, used for example in the netgear sc101, which require software to be installed on the clients so that the drive appears as a local drive.

I would also like to connect the drive to a local computer by firewire or usb2 so that I can fill it up quickly rather than over a 100mbit network.

OR,are there any gigabit lan drives and it so, if I connected one to my switch (100/10) and directly (via crossover cable) to one of my gigabit lan ports on my motherboard, would it transfer prefereably over the direct gigabit link.

cheers for any help

 

[ArchAnGeL]

Hmm, I just built one with an old P3 computer...It's got RAID1 250GB...
There are many free Linux based NAS O/S's, most of which are the ones used by the prebuilts you get. Samba etc is all you need. FreeNAS, openfiler etc are OS's designed for this.

Buying a prebuilt box might be easier, but it is more costly, especially when my system only cost about £120 including 2x 250GB HDU's in RAID1 - I don't think you could get this for less than £400 as a standalone. This way you can add firewire/USB/Gigabit LAN to your heart's content (although running gigabitE on the PCI bus might kill the HDU transfers a bit due to both requiring the bus for access).

I had considered this as I have a p3 box rotting in the loft but it's the excess space that I could do without.