<html><head><style type='text/css'>p { margin: 0; }</style></head><body><div style='font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; color: #000000'><zaphodharkonnen@gmail.com><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><br>>
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NAS would need to operate at close to disk transfer speeds, 1 Gb<br>>
ethernet, be industry standard files sytems, quiet and cool.<br>>
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Can we do that? With ethernet, it can be setup up a long way from the<br>>
user which means noise is not a problem.<br>>
<font color="#888888"><br></font></blockquote></div><br>Even the dedicated storage 'appliances' are just servers with some disk behind them, running on a board with some fancy front end rather than a bash shell. The crux of it is how fast the disk is, what sort of array you have (if any) and what software you use to dole that out to client devices.<br><br>I'll make some assumptions that you have a laptop or two and possibly some media device with a telly attached. Given that you're on this group they probably all run linux of some flavour or possibly Windows or Mac as well. That means you'll need SMB/CIFS, and NFS to share stuff out to the clients, and either use a hardware RAID card or LVM/whatever from the Linux end. Any of the previously recommended canned distros will do a nice job of that, as would any of the major standard distros. If you want iSCSI that's also no problem.<br><br>Backup is a more important issue, and where most of the smaller commercial NAS units fail - there's never a tape drive attached. If you put together an old PC with a decent RAID card and NIC with a tape unit, running any of your favourite Linux distros, and house it in the cupboard under the stairs with an extract fan, you've got a quiet solution sitting there at probably lower cost and better performance than most NAS units out there.<br><br>However, and this is a big thing for home use, there are router/switch devices out at Dick Smith that can do router, switch, print server and storage (via USB HDD) all in one. Not the fastest, and no backup capability, but cheap and effective with minimal fuss. For my home, that would be the pick of the bunch. For work, a different story.<br><br>Hope that helps.<br></zaphodharkonnen@gmail.com></div></body></html>