What is the best old PC to buy to build into a NAS?

[gfrobe]

Thought I'd pick up an old PC on eBay and try to use FreeNas or something like that for additional storage (I'm a bit clueless on NAS at this point but will delve in soon). Wondering if anyone had any suggestions for ideal PC to pick up. Criteria I'm looking for:

- Miminium necessary spec to keep costs down
- small footprint
- low noise

Thanks!

[matt_cyr]

I've used old PII pc's with as little as 64MB of ram as file servers with no trouble at all.
My current file server is a PIII 600mhz with 512 that I picked up for $40, and it doesn't even come close to breaking a sweat.
If all you're doing is streaming files off of it, a low end PIII will be more then enough horsepower

[Clumsy]

Be carefull if you are thinking about encryption though, that will not be possible with an old PC - unless with say a via epia board that has onboard hardware encryption. You will also have to do some thinking about how you are going to connect the harddrives, newer drives are all s-ata, old PCs have IDE connections. There are adapters, but they suck (I have one in use right now, and had too much trouble with them to be worthwile). So you would probably need a controller card to have good results or go with old IDE drives. Then if you are thinking about wake on lan - you will have to check if the onboard chip supports that in the OS you are using, or get another PCI network card.

[Gamester17]

Low-end Intel Pentium III with 512MB RAM should be enough, though a newer FPGA Intel Pentium III might run cooler, in my opinion the only down-side to using older motherboards is that almost none of them support booting from USB so you can not use a USB flash drive for the NAS operating-system, instead you probably have to go with a CompactFlash to IDE/ATA adapter (but if you do make sure that it supports DMA, not all do, and FreeNAS requires DMA support). There is nothing wrong with the PCI SATA-II adapters that I tried for storage controllers, nor have I had any problems with software RAID-5 in FreeNAS on them (I have installed a couple such setups for friends who run XBMC).

I am not sure what you mean by small footprint nor how harddrives you plan to fit into it but if it will be 4 harddrives or more then make sure you get a really good computer case with plenty of cooling, preferably get one with at least 3 available 5.25 inch bays (DVD-ROM drive size) as then you can buy a CoolerMaster 4 in 3 cartridge to fit 4 harddrives and a its large 120mm fan into there which cools the drives really well.

[gfrobe]

Thanks for the replies. What I meant by small footprint was simply the dimensions of the PC. I'm just going to throw one 500gb hard drive in it so would like to have something small and unobtrusive if possible.

I have much to learn about FreeNas, etc. but why do need to worry about whether a PC boots from a USB drive. Does the NAS OS need to run from a separate drive than the main drive?

[sipart]

unless you really want to play with freenas why dont you just buy an empty nas caddy. I bought one in the uk for about £25. Its low power, small and supprts smb and FTP. Presume the spare drive is ide. The firmware on it is the same as used on iomega nas boxes.

Old pc's by their nature tend to be power hungry, noisy (especially if its going to be close by).

cheers

[gfrobe]

Hi Sipart,

I thought they were much more expensive than that. Can you tell me which one you bought?

Also, to throw the question out there, can anyone tell me the advantages of going with an old PC rather than a proper NAS device (or vice versa).

Thanks again all.

[sipart]

http://www.eclipsecomputers.com/prod...de=SK-U35I-NAS

I can't find the retailer I bought my first one from but here is one I found - I'm sure you could find plenty of other similar types on ebay (if your not in the UK then the link is a bit useless but you get the idea)

Just make sure they support SMB (most of the cheap ones do) to ensure you can create shares that XBOX (and PC's can) can see. Decide if you want IDE or SATA.

Advantages are:

Small footprint (easy to hide)
Quiet
Low power (greener!)
Cheap

Disadvantages
Less features than a PC acting as a NAS - but if you want to share stuff to stream and backup to then I can't think of a feature you would need to be honest.

I have two, my original Buffalo 160gb Linkstation - I stream music, pics and DIVX to my XBOX from that. I also have a wireless laptop connected to my HIFI and use MediaMonkey (free version) to catalogue the music so I can stream music through that as well. I use the other NAS as a backup for the music and pics.

Hope this helps

Cheers

[sipart]

Here's one the same as I bought from an online retailer (it was free P+P with them though):

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/LanDisk-Networ...QQcmdZViewItem

cheers

[gfrobe]

Thanks for that. Just so I'm sure, with each of the two enclosures you linked to, I can throw in a hard drive and be able to stream content from it even with my PC off? Is that right?