I really need a safe place to keep my all music files, pics, business and family data. After looking at commercial NAS devices like the Buffalo Terrastation I've decided to build my own linux-based box with 4 >= 500GB drives in a raid 5 configuration for at least 1.5 TB of storage.

My current plan is to use a cheapo cabinet with at least 4 external 5.25" bays. In three of the bays will go a 4-in-3 SATA hot swap backplane for the data drives. The other bay will get a CD or DVD-R drive for installation media. Inside will be a small boot drive and the raid controller, gigabit card, etc. If any of the drives fails I will be able to hot swap the failed drive with a replacement, with no downtime and no data loss.

If you've been down this road and can share your experiences or have any other ideas for implementing a low-cost NAS server for the home, your input is greatly appreciated.

I've only played with them, I don't know that they meet all your requirements, but I've played with both freenas and openfiler. They both seemed good; the both supported raid. Openfiler did provide better performance than freenas.

Marc

I've gone this route, and I went for Debian on the server, as I'd pretty much learnt Linux from Knoppmyth and so I thought it'd be the easiest to get on with.

System:
Debian Stable (Etch)
Dual 1Ghz P3
ASUS CUR-DLS motherboard
1Gb of ECC PC100 RAM
2x Silicon Image 3114 SATA cards
6x 250Gb SATA drives in RAID 5 (mdadm)
2x 40Gb PATA drives
HP 7170 Dual Port Gigabit card (64-bit PCI)
4U rack mount case.

I went for SMB for my network shares, as my main desktop is still an XP machine.

It was an interesting learning curve, but worth it. The box is now also an sFTP and IRC server for a game development team I work with.
<quickplug>www.adellion.com</quickplug>

Setting up software raid isn't that hard, I found this page which gave me all the commands I needed:
http://www.networknewz.com/2003/0113.html

I'm realising that with everything it's doing the system is getting close to being under powered, so when I get round to upgrading my desktop PC I'll probably be building a new server.

I did have some of those hot-swap bays but they are noisy, the ventilation is provided by a cheap 80mm fan that's trying to draw air through 4 small holes. So I sold them on ebay, I can't hot swap, but I don't really need to, I'm happy turning the server off before switching hard disks.

If you do go the Debian route, feel free to ask any questions you've got and I'll try to answer them

_________________
Mephi
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R5.5
Opteron 2.Ghz
1Gb Ram, 200Gb Maxtor PATA
Avermedia 771 DVB-T
Hauppauge Nova-S2 (waiting to be installed)
MS MCE2 Remote

So you are looking at hardware RAID then? See http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html

Check out FreeNAS (www.freenas.org). I'm using it in Raid 1 with 2 200gb drives and it's working very well. The board is an old Celeron 600 with 256mb or ram and I even use iSCSI from my windows box.