Do It Yourself NAS

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

rubbervir.us shows how to quickly turn an old computer into a file server running Samba.

HowtoForge has detailed instructions for setting up a fileserver by focusing on the relevant parts of SME Server.

WhatPC? brings a complete NAS building guide involving Mini-ITX motherboards, Promise hardware RAID, and NASLite commercial NAS operating system.

Computerworld is recommending 10 free storage utilities for NAS and SAN use. Number 2 on the list is FreeNAS.

Howto Forge has a great howto for installing and configuring FreeNAS 0.68.

This tutorial shows how you can set up a network-attached storage server with FreeNAS. FreeNAS is based on the FreeBSD operating system and supports CIFS (samba), FTP, NFS, RSYNC, SSH, local user authentication, and software RAID (0, 1, 5). It comes with a powerful web interface and uses very little space on the hard drive - about 32MB.

SmallNetBuilder’s guide to building your own NAS device. In it they use a standard PC with an LSI Logic MegaRAID hardware-based RAID card. Included are step-by-step screenshots on setting up the RAID device using the MegaRAID’s bios, and benchmark of the machine while running Ubuntu Linux and FreeNAS.

SmallNetBuilder has benchmarks of file access to Ubuntu Linux and Clarkconnect over Samba. Included are instructions for setting up the software on both systems, and a guide to the hardware used in the project.

NewsForge reviews FreeNAS 0.66.

FreeNAS, an open source NAS server, can convert a PC into a network-attached storage server. The software, which is based on FreeBSD, Samba, and PHP, includes an operating system that supports various software RAID models and a Web user interface. The server supports access from Windows machines, Apple Macs, FTP, SSH, and Network File System (NFS), and it takes up less than 16MB of disk space on a hard drive or removable media.