Do It Yourself NAS

Toms Hardware reviews the Drobo USB DAS device.

bit-tech.net has a good overview of different RAID levels. Pros and Cons of each level are explained in a clear manner.

In the last few years RAID has become really quite popular. Once purely in the domain of high-end enterprise servers, today, any self respecting enthusiast motherboard had better have onboard RAID if it wants to be taken seriously. The abundance of onboard RAID controllers mean that it’s not unusual to see small arrays in today’s home computers. The reasons for this can be for increased speed, increased reliability or simply for bragging rights. After all, two or more disks are better than one, right?

SmallNetBuilder checks out the rackmount Thecus 1U4500 which can hold four SATA drives.

George Ou over at ZDNet.com has a blog post about adding a good chunk of storage to his computer. All that is needed to duplicate this is 3 free drive bays, 5 free SATA ports, and a power supply that can handle the extra 150 watts while the drives spin up.

Fast forward 15 years later, and I just bought 2.5 terabytes of hot-swappable SATA-300 storage for just under $730.

George Ou over at ZDNet has RAID benchmarks for various flavors of RAID, based mainly around the RAID10 and the Intel ICH8R RAID controller.

SmallNetBuilder walks through building a 16 drive RAID5 NAS with FreeBSD 6.

SmallNetBuilder reviews the  Linksys NSS4000 NAS.

SmallNetBuilder has a writeup of the different types of prebuilt NAS devices available.

SmallNetBuilder has a list of NAS devices benchmarked by different criteria. A homebuilt Ubuntu NAS device make an appearance in several benchmarks.

Debian Administration looks at setting up Software RAID5 with the new Debian installer.