Home-made NAS?

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PopeKevinI

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I priced NAS boxes and decided I'd just as soon build my own. I've got an Adaptec AHA1200, and am looking to pick up a couple more 120 GB drives to build a RAID5. I've got a stack of 20 GB drives I can use for boot drives.

So here's the fun part. I can build a decent PC from spare parts and only need to buy two extra drives to get the ~335 GB I'm shooting for. What I don't have is a NAS-type solution. This is going to be storage for pretty much everything; MP3s, videos, documents, et cetera. My wife will need to be able to administer it if necessary, so a standard Linux distro is out and I'm not looking to buy another Windows license.

Does anyone know a good Linux distro or other alternative that I can set up as a NAS solution? Primary requirements would be a solid web admin interface and support for the AHA1200.
 
Somewhere I read of a linux NAS that used a webbased interface, it looked pretty decent...
 
I think NASLite has a web based interface, or you could use a regular Linux distro and Webmin to administer it.
 
NASLite is interesting, but a little Googling indicates it doesn't support most RAID controllers.

I looked at Infrant, but I've already got the hardware and would hate to buy something else if I can use what I have on-hand.

I'd like to find a NAS-specific Linux distro just to make it something my wife would be a little less intimidated by.
 
If it is for home, why even bother with any admin at all? Either make it one big partition and share it out, or divide it by filetype and share those out.

Either way, it isn't like you should have to be doing any admin on a regular basis. Throw in a cronjob to rotate your logs, show your wife how to reboot it if it flakes out and you're done.
 
eastvillager said:
If it is for home, why even bother with any admin at all? Either make it one big partition and share it out, or divide it by filetype and share those out.

Either way, it isn't like you should have to be doing any admin on a regular basis. Throw in a cronjob to rotate your logs, show your wife how to reboot it if it flakes out and you're done.
Click to expand...

Aside from the fact that I simply want to play with whatever options exist (with a minor interest in perhaps using them in products I sell later), I'd just as soon have something that is tweaked for the particular task I have in mind. I'm not particularly good with Linux at the moment and I'd rather not spend weeks learning what I need to know to run a decent file server off older hardware.
 
If you're not prepared to use Linux then there is a hack which will enable WIn2k Pro / XP Pro to do RAID 5 just like the server versions. Google is your friend.
 
leathered said:
If you're not prepared to use Linux then there is a hack which will enable WIn2k Pro / XP Pro to do RAID 5 just like the server versions. Google is your friend.
Click to expand...

Yeah, didn't wanna buy a license, really don't want to get any more illegal than I already am :)

I've got a controller that is RAID5 capable, anyway.
 
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