Thinking of a PC file server... advice?

[donmei]

livingfortoday,

Then spend a few bucks for a plain old IDE drive and an ebay usb external box. $200 and you're good to go.

 

[livingfortoday]

livingfortoday,

Then spend a few bucks for a plain old IDE drive and an ebay usb external box. $200 and you're good to go.

I currently have 4 x 320GB drives, an external drive won't really cut it at this point, unless I do 2 x 500GB or 2 x 750 (for future expansion). And that's just gettin' pricey.

 

[shecky]

as an aside, based on discussion in this thread, i am about to build a network attached storage box for myself, and i am pretty much decided on the following:

Asus M2NPV-VM mobo
Thermaltake TR2 430w power supply
AMD Sempron 64 3000+ retail
Coolermaster Centurion 5 case

and some random 1 x 512MB RAM stick, plus a floppy and CDRW i already have lying around, as well at a 40GB IDE boot drive. All that above will run about $300 shipped from newegg (more or less). what i found out is that while that seems like a pretty beefy system for just a NAS, doing is much lower-end than that that only saves me $50 or so - i figure get quality stuff and not worry about it.

then its a matter of the main drives, which i am strongly leaning toward Seagate 7200.10 500GB SATA x 3 of 'em in RAID 5.

after doing some more looking around, i am hearing that FreeNAS may not be the most stable option, so i may go to some flavor of Ubuntu. granted i have never touched linux before (except for, some would say, OS X)

 

[daze]

Most real servers don't have a GUI. I think it's pretty simple, but I forgot how daunting it can be to someone who's always used GUIs. That said, there is something called WebMin that provides a web-based admin GUI to a Linux server such as you have setup. I don't use it, but I know people who do and they're generally pretty happy with it. Look around on Ubuntu forums if you need help with that. I'm pretty sure WebMin is an Ubuntu package so it should be pretty simple to install.

Thanks for the tip on Webmin. I've gotten it setup on Debian, and is working fine.