Some questions about network storage computer

[drdoom]

Answers to a few of your questions:

1. You don't need much CPU at all, especially if you are not doing software RAID calculations.
2. When using Linux, you use a program called Samba to present CIFS/SMB shares, which are the formats that windows looks for as network shares.

It is actually extremely easy to install something like Ubuntu or CentOS, or even a much much lighter weight variant of linux, and run a NAS from it. How many drives do you want to use? What raid levels? Backup strategy for the NAS? recovery strategy for the NAS? All questions you will probably want to think about before building your own, or even buying a larger one.

Keep in mind the large "powerful" NAS devices on the market, the QNAP's and Synology's, etc. are all just dual-core Atom CPU's with 1-3GB of RAM and 1-2GB of flash memory storage for the linux OS they run.

Looking at them I thought that they were just stripped down PC's set up to do one thing. They are very expensive considering what you are getting. I want to use at least 4 drives with some form of RAID that gives data redundancy. I just checked the board only has 2 SATA connectors and PCI slots so I would have to get a PCI RAID card. Will that be a problem using a PCI controller card? I was planning on using Ubuntu since I am already familiar with it.