Marti's blog

NAS (networked storage servers) can cost a real bundle. In fact anything that can take more than two hard drives tend to be in the 500 € (about the same in dollars), if not more for something with a nice embedded software. And that is without counting the drives of course. Well I still needed to store some datas over a network and after some searches found what must be the cheapest possible NAS: 25 €! Here's how it breaks down:

• 1 old PC a in tower case (Pentium III with 256 Mb): 0 €
• 1 CompactFlash card, 256 Mb: 0 € (got it free with a coupon that came with my camera, but it's too small to use for taking picture)
• 1 CompactFlash to IDE adapter: 15 €
• 1 Serial-ATA controller: 10 € (30 €, but got a 20 € coupon for it, optional if you don't mind using IDE drives)
• FreeNAS, open-source: 0 €

As you can see, the whole trick is reusing old stuff and FreeNAS, which is a neat embedded FreeBSD distribution aimed at building NAS. Installation was very easy and did not require any Unix knowledge: just burn the ISO on a CD and boot it. From there you can either keep using the CD to boot and store the settings on a USB key (automatically detected), or do a full install over either a disk partition, a USB key (if you can boot over USB, but most old PC can't) or as I did, some flash memory installed as an IDE drive. All you have to set up is the initial IP configuration, everything else is done through a nice and user friendly Web interface.

As far as features go, it's got everything you expect a good NAS to have and even more, including SMB, FTP, NFS, RSync, AFP, RAID (0,1 & 5), UPnP, iSCSI, filesystem support, etc. The beauty of FreeNAS is that you can opt for software RAID, and it uses a standard FreeBSD system underneath. As such, you have much more freedom in building a RAID array or moving drives from one system to another (a new FreeNAS system will be able to access the content of RAID drives from a different installation and controller).

The downside is that FreeNAS is still beta, and although it works (for me anyway) it's very much a work in progress right now. Some might feel uncomfortable having their valuable data handled by such beta software.