i need more network storage at home. period. i’m outgrowing all my system drives and it would be nice to consolidate all my data to one location. i have a few spare harddrives sitting around so rather than build a complete nas server i wanted to see where the soho nas market was currently at.

 4 drive nas:
not just network-attached storage, these turnkey solutions come with built in printer sharing, additional usb ports, web servers, nfs/cifs shares…
promise smartstor ns4300n [$370] & qnap ts-409 [$570]

2 drive nas:
not as cool as the 4 drive systems, but they are a LOT cheaper for raid0 or raid1. also the dns323 has a twiki page if you’re interested in hacking the box…
linksys nas200 [$114] & dlink dns323 [$177] [twiki]

homegrown nas/server:
i might end up rolling up a nas/mythbackend server. this article, $340 zdnet nas, is a decent starting point… although if i roll my own, i’ll probably try to start with a base/stripper system from either dell or system76 because of their ubuntuforums.org support forums.

arg. lots of stuff to read through. i do like the fact i can toss all my drives in either one of the 4 drive nas’s and add larger harddrives at any time and the filesystem/nas should be able to expand automatically. since i already want to build another mythtv frontend/backend it would make sense to go cheap on this also. i just need some sort of stable, shared storage that’s not running on something i’m going to be tempted to mess with.

the dell d630n has 4 sata ports on the motherboard, but i’m not sure how the box will run with it’s 250w powersupply & 4 harddrives. whatever i use, i do plan on using it for a few years… hrm, maybe building a server/workstation isn’t such a bad idea. but i know how hard it is for me to NOT play with a system.. heh.