FreeNAS

Over the past few weeks I have been looking into NAS solutions for my home network. The sort of solution I was looking for is one that could have 2 or more TBs of storage, RAID support, FTP and Print Server support. I saw the D-Link 323 and this supported all of these and had goodd reviews across the web. However, this came at a hefty price and didn’t include any HDDs.

So then I came across FreeNAS. Based on FreeBSD it is a lightweight OS that can run on a system with as little as 128MB of RAM and 32MB of HDD space for the configuration file. The OS can be installed on a CD, USB Stick, Floppy, CompactFlash or any other storage medium as well as the HDDs that you will be storing your data on. However, I recommend keeping the HDDs for data only and put the OS on a seperate medium.

FreeNAS has many features that can be configured through a web interface. It includes support for Samba/CIFS, NFS, FTP, SSH, Web server, BitTorrent, software RAID, user/group control, iTunes/DAAP, uPnP as well as many, many more.

So why not check it out and turn that old machine into a powerful NAS device.

www.freenas.org/

Matt