I now have a old dell 4200 kicking about and I am thinking of making a cheap NAS drive. I have a 80GB IDE drive in it atm but I will be looking on the market places soon to get 2TB of drives. (if your selling please tell) I want make this easy see on the network as everyone in my house doesn't know how to use a PC to save there life. I'm not use on what to do so links to useful pages would be greats. thanks for your help Edit: I want to make this to copy data over the net can this be done with FreeNAS?
Probably should have a mod merge the two threads together - two threads for one thing usually isn't acceptable... For the software, you would probably be best looking at some form of Linux or FreeNAS. FreeNAS has the benefit of a shiny web interface, an operating system actually designed to become a NAS and the ZFS file system. A FreeNAS (or Linux) NAS box would be fully accessible from a Windows machine, and probably from any mobile devices you may have. In order to stop another needless thread about RAID, backup and all the other things a NAS needs, look here at this relatively recent thread, which is applicable to your situation. FreeNAS
+1 to this. Much easier to manage FreeNas as you don't need monitor and just manage it via web interface
You can set up smb shares in either XP or Windows 7 which will share out the contents of a drive / folder on the network. For a more advanced solution as others have said, FreeNAS.
How "old" is this old Dell 4200? Or, more specifically, how much RAM do you have? It's been my experience that with FreeNAS, you'll want as much RAM as you can feed it - especially if you want to use ZFS. A very general rule of thumb is 1GB of memory for each 1TB of storage (your mileage my vary, void where prohibited, offer not valid with combined offers).
FreeNAS/Openindiana both support NFS and can use the Napp-it NFS is extremely good for home level data protection - there is plenty of documentation on the web
i think 1.5 GB or 2GB thanks. this will be put on hold as of no money and will be moving soon hopefully
Look at OpenMediaVault as an alternative to FreeNAS. Personally I think it is loads better. www.openmediavault.org
Openmediavault all the way, dead simple, lovely interface and loads of useful plugins for BitTorrent, print serving, media streaming, etc... It installs onto a USB stick hence saves you a wasted drive for the OS too.
