Best OS for Turning old computer into a NAS

[danfoshizzle]

What would be the best os for turning an older p4 into A fileserver/nas?

It will have a gig of ram and the pocessor is 2.8ghz, someone is giving me their old pc on thursday, freeNAS looked good to me but have been told by a friend its not that good when you want it to do other stuff

any help appreciated cheers guys

[hawsey]

By other stuff do you mean using it as a normal PC?
I really wanted a NAS box but have settled at the moment for my nettop running openelec(xbmc) with two 1tb drives attached.
Everything streames fine to jogglers and my Samsung NC10 when the Revo is booted in to openelec xbmc which is a live Linux boot.
Old sky boxes and bt vision boxes which are cheeep cheep are a good source of hdds if you need any
Good luck with your project Dan....

[danfoshizzle]

Already have about 1.5tb of hard drives saved up for it lol, stolen from various boxes sky,virgin and bt lol needs to be more of an os base I think as I plan to store all my music on this and use logitech media server to serve up all my jogglers musical needs, The main reason I started the project is because my 1tb hard has smart failure and cannot be used for anything other than storage, even then windows moans its little pants off lol

[gegs]

There are instructions on setting up LMS on a FreeNAS box at http://www.avforums.co.za/index.php?topic=13622.0.

What "other stuff" is FreeNAS not good at? I've never tried it but I'm intrigued, especially since I can't install LMS on my Iomega NAS (insufficient research before purchase - never again!). One good thing about FreeNAS is that you can run it from a Live CD and try it out before installing anything. It'll even run permanently from the Live CD and save its config files to a USB stick.

You could also load up a minimal linux distro and install LMS (as a Squeeze server) and something like Serviio http://www.serviio.org/ for other media types.

[pete]

I utilize Linux, BSD (FreeNas), W2003, W2011 and embedded W2003. Each one has its advantages. So I can't tell you which one is the best. Peers like the W2011/2008 OS to W7 machines because of the quick throughput with MS's new network stack. That said I noticed a major difference when transferring MKV HD movies which were 8-16 Gb in size. I have no issues streaming music, movies or pictures at Gb speeds with any of the above OS's that I notice. Most recently building a mini-NAS box that will be populated to around 16Tb with 8 2 TB drives. I put an Asus E35, 8Gb and an IBM M1015 in it. I updated the firmware on the M1015 to an LSL firmware. Its a nice SATA3 card.

[danfoshizzle]

Looks like a beast! still have not got around to building this yet, but will be happening in the next few weeks.

[hawsey]

Got to hand it to this Guy , home made 16 tb NAS , looks better than bought ones , love it .

http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/07/home ... ild-quali/

[danfoshizzle]

Looks cool, mine is just an old pc case, gonna hide in the cellar lol

[BuZz]

16tb nas looks good. throughput seems a little low though, especially write speed, but good enough for a nas (he may have benchmarked it wrong I guess though).

my fileserver/backup server - http://www.exotica.org.uk/wiki/File:Aerocool_server.jpg (info http://www.exotica.org.uk/wiki/ExoticA:Hosting) - also handles audio streaming for http://www.modland.com and the modland xbmc plugin