I'm hoping to get my hands on a very cheap old/broken(screen) laptop to turn into a NAS server at home, at around £50 including a few new parts (USB-2 cards etc) it should be cheaper than the around £80 that NSLU2's are costing. In your guys experience what would be the best software (OS) to install on this machine if i get one.

It can run at the OS level and all it needs to do for the time being is allow me and SWMBO to access the files on my USB hard-drives to save plugging/unplugging them all the ruddy time. And also so i can stream media to my eggbox 360. Over time i may want to set up software that allows me to use it as a download server through a web interface, but for now the media server is all that is required.

I have done some minor reading on FREE-NAS and DEBIAN, what would people on here recommend?

If you value your data I'd really not go down the old trashed box route. There are too many things that can lead to data corruption and you won't know until you've lost your data.

Don't know if im too worried about that, anything important (pics, documents etc) we keep on laptops backup on DVD-RW's, not the drives. The drives are purely videos, I'd be miffed if i lost all my TV series and Films but it wouldnt be so important. I'm aware of RAID solutions etc do provide data security but thats much more than i want to be spending.

Have to disagree RAID doesn't provide security on it's own, as if you trash the data you have still trashed the data and if you delete a file from a RAID array it's still gone.

If it's just for a play and a go then by all means have a go with Free-NAS, but I'd probably say just go and buy a box that has an ethernet port and USB on it and lets you hook your own drives in.

Not expensive and will share a drive out on SAMBA, but will also use a lot less power than a laptop on all the time.

i bought a ide>cf adapter and booted freenas off a 256mb cf card - worked fine but freenas didn't work well with my media streamer

ended up using xp pro via remote desktop instead (via an old hdd, not cf card)

other options would be ubuntu server or openfiler

one of the advantages of freenas is once it is setup you can run it completely headless - no kb/mouse/monitor need to be kept plugged in

You can do the same with windows

tell me how - if i try and reboot without these attached i get bios alarms and windows won't start.....

tell me how - if i try and reboot without these attached i get bios alarms and windows won't start.....

If you get BIOS alarms, then it's the settings in the BIOS and irrespective of the OS.

You should be able to turn off all alarms and not have to press F2 or whatever to continue (since you can't anyway :P)

I have a new PC box running win XP and use that as a Mediaserver. It's pulling about 25 watts when idle so not too bad, using efficient CPUs, turning off all hardware that's not essential, etc. I did try with dedicated NAS-type hardware, but found the limitations too limiting. Once you go down a software-type OS, whether FreeNAS, full linux, Windows, OSX or whatever, then your feature set is limited only by what software / services you run on it.

My PC is running as a torrent client, FTP server, web server, tversity and other DLNA client. It's easy and I just remote desktop to it from any other PC at home to change things. I do keep a keyboard and monitor connected all the time though, but it's in the attic so hardly a problem

You could buy a Linksys NSLU2 and a usb hard disk - the NSLU2 has a huge development community and there are several alternative firmwares for it. It has very low power consumption and you can install loads of different apps if you replace the firmware - see NSLU2-Linux - Main / HomePage browse for more details.

After only finding NSLU2's for around £80, just managed to get a brand new one for £50 on the bay, happy days! Just need to fix my laptop now.

been running freenas on a mini-itx board with 4 500gb drives as a music server / image back up repository for a couple of years now - works really well, easy to set u and maintain, can remote boot (tend to shut it down at midnight once its run an automated backup to save leccy) ftp into it if i want with ease.

setit up on an old board first to get the feel for it - worked well, so built something custom round the mini itx board. would recommend it

the nslu2 route looks interesting - might take a closer look as my NAS is begining to fill up and see if its more economical than upgrading the drives in the current box. besides it looks like something else to hackl around with!

I've got a Windows Home Server here, PS3 and XBox can see it to stream media. All of the PC's on my network have the client installed so they get backed up every night to it automatically. You don't have to do any mincing around with Raids etc as when you add a HDD the WHS simply adds it to it's 'pool' of storage.

It just works and has done for a while now, turned on duplication so that there is at least two copies of any piece of data spread across the disks (still not sure what happens if the main OS disk goes off though ) OEM was about £70.00 IIRC