I currently have a fastora raid 300 setup with 3×200 gig drives in it. But my computer room is a little too loud with that and the computer running at the same time. My motherboard supports raid mirroring with sata drives so I’m gonna drop some money on 2 500 gig drives and put it in there as my home nas server. Its kind of nice having a computer setup as your nas as you can remote control it and run other server things on it while your other computers are shut down. My server does thigns like record radio shows, run bit torrent downloads, update my podcasts while I am away.

I’ve been pondering the same thing, both for myself, and a couple of friends with families. A couple of more Linux-aware friends have recommended NASLite. The basic version is free, but even the one with all the bells and whistles is only $29. If you’ve already got a box that can be re-purposed, all that you’d be “out” is the cost of whatever drives you feel you’d need to add to provide sufficient storage space. You could then move all the video clips and music files to the server and off the individual machines. Add big enough drives and you could also implement workstation imaging of the individual machines back to the server so that no one in the house has to remember to backup. It’d be done automagically.

I recently purchased an Infrant ReadyNAS and a single 500GB drive. The ReadyNAS will dynamically expand the RAID as drives are added. This way I didn’t have to spend as much to get started since I can add drives one at a time. So far it is a very nice unit and easy to use. Now I just need a gigabit network for high speed data transfers.

Have you looked at Windows Home Server? You can start small and add more storage as necessary plus it will do duplicate copies of data.

I’ve been using a Lacie 320gb Ethernet Mini for the past 6 months and I am very happy with it. It has a logical heavy box, a great sturdy base, enough drive space for a typical non-video using home network and it’s cheap! Just like me! Do a search for Lacie products and you will find it easy enough….

For the price the Lacie is pretty decent. I think if some genius made something that sync’d with Tivo as well as did UPnP it’d be hot. I have a Windows box doing all that stuff now but I’d gladly offload uploading and downloading to the Tivo. The Linksys NSLU2 might do it after it was Unslung but that thing is soooooo sloooooow it’s probably not worth it.