I run an 802.11g WiFi setup at home, and currently using a dual drive USB2.0 enclosure for the 250GB HDDs. I'm looking for something a little more serious, maybe running RAID 5 (nothing mission critical, just family pictures I dont' feel like losing). I don't need high throughput (so maybe RAID 5 is an overkill), and I'd like it to be in a different spot from my computer, therefore it'd be nice to have WiFi capabilities, or else I'd have to put it by the WiFi router which has 4 RJ45 connection.

Any suggestions?

 

Just did some digging & reading and looks like most everything out there that are specifically NAS all have their share of problems - Linksys, D-link, Coolmax, etc.

Looks like it's probably easiest to just buy an old PC and build one...

 

That was going to be my suggestion. You should be able to set it up quite easily and just share the drives. Map them to the computer you normally use, and they'll act nearly the same as if they were local (a bit slower is all).

 

in the basement i have an old pc (1Ghz), network card, winXP. running by itself windows seems very stable. this computer has a video card (its necessary) but no monitor, instead i use windows remote desktop to access the box. i have the box networked in to my pc upstairs. this box has 4 300g drives as raid 1 plus a old 80g system drive.

my raid 1 configuration with 2 pairs of 300g drives:
last year i had the experience of one drive going out. the HighPoint raid chip is on a Shuttle mo board. i bought a new drive but initially i could not re build the failed raid. this is because Shuttle did not provide the ability to flash the portion of the bios belonging to HighPoint. the HighPoint bios was dwn rev and had an error preventing the re build. anyway... a wise move would be get a drive host adapter card on the pci bus.

avoid old pata drives but if you get sata drives make sure the brand you get is compatable with the rest of the system.

conisder a pci-x bus based host card for sata2 drives

avoid silicon image host cards, highpoint are ok

if you buy hard drives get ones with a 5year warrenty, seagate comes to mind and the 300-500g drives look the best

hard drives use about 25watts each, they are ment to run a good deal above ambient but provide enought cooling to prevent them from going way hot. avoid the chinoval brad powersupply, spend some money here.

AT THIS TIME ONLY BUY SEAGATE.

 

Not sure if this is on topic, but I think its neat:

http://www.lifehacker.com/software/gmail/s...pace-141833.php

 

Also, http://gmail.pro/