I have tossed around the idea of purchasing the DLINK DSA-323 for some time but have settled on powering up my old P4 3.0 Ghz and dropped in a couple of hard drives and installed FreeNAS…Life is good.
FreeNAS is built on FreeBSD (Unix). The user interface is very simple to use, and there are number of good how to’s across the web (just give a search of You Tube or Google).
Despite what this particular blog (Bunker Hollow) states, FreeNAS is not a waste of time.
I followed this site (for the most part) to do the setup: Network-Attached Storage With FreeNAS
My System:
P4 3.0Ghz@3.2Ghz
Asus P4C800E Deluxe Motherboard
ATI Radeon 7200 AGP Video Card
2 GB DDR OCZ Platinum RAM
1 X 80 GB WD SATA 7200RPM Hard Drive (OS & Storage)
2 X 1 TB Seagate Barracuda SATA Drives in Software RAID 1 (mirroring)
Infact the FreeNAS installation is so small you could run the system off a flash drive (embedded install), but I don’t recommend this route because the embedded install prevents you from “writing” to the operating system file structure outside of FreeNAS. Making it rather challenging to install additional packages (not required).
Highly recommend this NAS solution if you have an old PC just sitting around doing nothing. I am use mine to serve out files, music, videos, and pictures to my iMAC, PC, Laptop, and Playstation 3.
Highly recommend it.
