The FreeNAS™ Project

[Maasbommel]

There are several complete free NAS projects available to built your own NAS.

One of them is FreeNAS:
http://www.freenas.org/

FreeNAS™ is a free, open source, Network-Attached Storage operating system based on FreeBSD®.

It can be used to build your own NAS based on a PC or server that has a 32bit or 64bit architecture.
It can be installed on a USB Flash disk, where it boots from freeing up all normal disk space for NAS use.

FreeNAS Features:
http://www.freenas.org/features

FreeNAS Wiki:
http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Main_Page

FreeNAS Community:
http://forums.freenas.org/

[scorpioso69]

I built my own little FreeNAS server with an old quadcore CPU, 8Gigs RAM, 2 x 2Channel SATA PC-Express controller cards and 9 x 2TB drives in a FreeNAS RAIDZ array. So it's similar to RAID5 (striping with striped parity, but better) and it works wonderfully. Total storage is about 16TB. I have 3 TVs with a networked mede8er at each TV, no harddisks in the mede8er's.

Shortcut on each mede8er takes me straight to the media folders.

Only 1 issue: FreeNAS recommends 1Gig RAM per 1 TB storage, so you can see I'm running at half the recommended RAM, but I can't upgrade on the motherboard anymore. It still supports throuput of over 80MB/sec sustained, e.g. copying a 20Gig MKV from my gaming machine's SSD to the server.

When my friend wanted me to build him a FreeNAS server, the rsync facility oin freenas was amazing, to sync all my stuff to his new server, on a 1gig backbone, it was running at 800Mbits sustained.