Well, I have decided to build my own NAS with raid-1, as the chassis on the market just plain don’t do what I want for the price I want.

I want:

• min of 2 drive bays
• User installable disks

Looking online that left me with 3 options, a Dlink, a Qnap and a Linksys. All were resonably expensive when disks were added, and none really could recover from a lost disk with grace.. Also if the mainboard went I realised I’d be screwed if I couldn’t get an exact same controller in 3-4 years time (no mean feat).

Soo….

I’m building one. I’ve worked out prices for a system (including disks) are rough equivalent to a box without - if using a mini-itx box.. with 1.5 Ghz processor and 512Mb of ram, I can get case, cabling, mainboard, and memory + 2x 250 Gb disks for ~£220 (edited from original £150) - my calculations were a bit out.    With different parts sourcing I think I could get it down to £200 by sourcing the disks from an alternative.   Minus disks its still viable alternative to the Linksys and Dlink products (both going for £120-150 without any sata disks - and a lot more flexible).

Question is now freenas or go for a native Debian install (I’m prob going to do latter - purely as this allows me to add itunes etc server capabilities)!

And yes, to the nay-sayers, I know this will use a little more power than the linksys/qnap, but thats more than made up by the fact I can expand to 4 disks if necessary… such fun! And the box will be able to be ssh’ed into and run downloads remotely for me.. Such possibility.

Another downside though is the fact the case I’m getting is slightly larger, and thus will require me to free a little space. That said it does take 4 disks, not 2.

Upsides are of course in event of failure I can just replace mainboard with another mini-itx, powersupply etc easily. All bases covered, and equivlent price to a commerical soln, and a new home project.

(Note to all this is all in aid of getting the Sonos setup with a nas, as I don’t want the monster powered home PC with no raid acting as the server).