NAS - What Do I Need?

[Jokester]

What it boils down to is that I'm looking to have all my hard disk storage remote over Ethernet away from my PC, but still have it treated as a local disk drive by Windows XP/Vista.

Is this possible?

What do I need?

Ideally I would look to get 2 discs in RAID 0 (going to max out the network bandwidth with anymore if it's not already I think) and then a single disc. Is there a single device that does this or would I need to go with 2 different boxes (I suspect this will be the cheaper case)?

Jokester

 

[Deanje]

I'd suggest using FreeNAS on an old machine and then mapping the share you create as a network drive.

I've just set up a NAS box using FreeNAS myself, it works very nicely and has a few software RAID functions if you're not feeling flush enough for a hardware solution.

 

[HomerJ]

Ther are several different NAS boxes one thing I will state is do NOT touch the Netgear SC101 or SC101T as they are not true NAS boxes.

Currently I am using a D-Link DNS-323 which is a 2 drive capable SATA NAS with gigabit ethernet and has worked a treat. Just make sure you update the firmware before you start to copy files to the drives.

The NAS boxes from Thesus and Qnap and Synology are meant to be good but I have not used any of those so cannot comment.

If you have an old machine sitting round then I would definately have a look at the FreeNAS option as it iwll give you greater flexibily