Cheap NAS using FreeBSD - practical considerations?

[Andrew P.]

Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
> 
>>-----Original Message-----
>>From: owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
>>[mailto:owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org]On Behalf Of David Gerard
>>Sent: Monday, December 27, 2004 12:00 PM
>>To: questions at freebsd.org
>>Subject: Cheap NAS using FreeBSD - practical considerations?
>>
>>
>>
>>Let's say that, as fine as NetApps are, I can't afford their prices. So I
>>set up a FreeBSD box with a whole lot of disk attached and use that as
>>network-attached storage, serving files by NFS, with gigabit ethernet.
>>
>>Setting up such a box is trivially easy. But what are the practical
>>considerations? Have any of you done this, or know anyone who has? 
> 
> 
> Maxtor's MaxAttach NAS 3000 products were exactly this - FreeBSD on a PC 
> motherboard in a rack mounted case with a web interface to manage
> them.  The rumor was that Microsoft got so upset about it that they went to
> Maxtor and gave them a free license to use Windows as an embedded OS
> for their MaxAttach NAS 4100.
>

That's something :-) I only built a separate FreeBSD file-server because 
I have to run Windows on my PC and I can't trust M$ software with 700Gb+ 
of data. However, some people store many terabytes with Windows Storage 
Server - and look what happened in UK a few weeks ago :-)

Andrew P.