Old PC as a NAS box

davecummings

davecummings

davecummings

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Joined
17 Sep 2007
Posts
8
Hi all,
I have built myself a new PC, but I do now have an old PC:

AMD 2400
512mb Memory
on board video
on board NIC

What I want to do is make use of the spare hard drives I have lieing around and use them for backup & storage - I have the following drives:

2 X 120GB
1 X 250GB
3 X 80gB

My question is how to build this into something suitable for network storage, and what O/S would you put on it - I know Windows very well and have no experience with Linux/Unix ?
 
i have done the same all the computers in my house now use sata, so i made up a pc of all the biggest old hdds i had and networked it to the router. Mine has a version of xp on it. Its also hooked up to the tv so if i need to i can use that as a monitor, but usually i just turn it on and leave it. You can also use remote pc to control it
 
I recently did a similar thing. I used an old PC but with an F1 640gb drive, and installed Windows Home Server. Works like a charm for a central file store and it also has an automated backup feature for each PC on the network. I've not explored it enough yet but for what I want it's working well :)

There are also linux packages that do a similar job for free, but I have no experience with Linux so decided to shy away from that option.
 
If you want it to be a dedicated NAS box then FreeNAS is the way, it's supposed to be pretty simple to setup.
 
I don't really want to hijack, but then again it's too similar so not worth making another thread over.

I have a spare box from a failed mediacentre job, what i'm looking to do is:

- Media Storage: Back up all my old dvd's as I don't want to take them all to uni, already got them backed up on harddisk
- torrent server: want to leave it on 24/7 so might aswell use it for torrent instead of my work pc.
- Network management: Even though my 54gs does a good job and is much better than the netgear I had before, sometimes I think I'm putting too much strain on it. Already have a second network card in the PC to connect to gigabit. Not essential right now but a possibility in the future?
- Backup space for other family PC: Can just be a folder, doesn't matter how it works.
- Web Server: Not essential, can try this at another date.

Box will be serving 3 standalones, 2 laptops and 2 media centre pc's, at least one of them using MCE2005. Am I best having this file server running linux or just keep it on xp? The only linux experience I have is with putting a live cd in the drive, browsing the forums off it then forgetting about it. If so what's the best way of doing this?
 
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