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I'd like to centralise this somewhat and make it easier to keep safe and manage, so recently I've been giving a lot of thought to building a home NAS. I just need to figure out now what is the best hardware/software solution to use for it.
For hardware, as I don't have any old bits lying around and I don't tend to trust second hand parts from a reliability perspective (never can tell how they've been handled/used), I'd be looking at getting cheap new components to build this up.
What I'm considering so far is this:
CPU -
Athlon II X2 250 (3GHz dual core. $99)
Motherboard -
MSI 880GM-E41 (AMD 880G chipset. 6 x SATA, 2 x PCIe)
RAM -
2GB cheap branded DDR3. 2 DIMMS ideally, not that it'd make a any real difference.
OS Drive -
Standard 3.5" IDE to CompactFlash adapter. I have a 16GB CF card lying around from our old camera.
Case - (This one seems very hard to find an ideal solution on)
Antec 183
Zalman HS1000
Zalman GS1000
Power Supply -
Something that can withstand the initial power on current of all the drives in the box. Probably large. Quieter the better.
Obviously the hardware is a work in progress. I'd like it to be as extensible in the future as possible. I want to be able to load it with drives. Whip out my 750GB OS drive in my gaming rig? Throw it in the NAS for some extra space if we were running low. And because it'll be in the corner of the lounge being quiet is definitely an issue.
Software wise there are way too many solutions. Initially I was thinking of just running a simple appliance Linux/BSD distribution like FreeNAS or Openfiler. But I've got to thinking a little more now on maybe just putting Ubuntu on there as it'll give me extra room later if I find there's something else I want the NAS to start doing. What's the preference round here? I've fairly certain a standard RAID 5 is more than enough and I don't need to play with ZFS (although it might be interesting).
A decent web interface/UI to make adding additional disks or managing the RAID would be gravy.
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