Diy Nas

[Steve]

If reviewing products does one thing to me and one thing only, it is to give me ideas.

For example, reviewing the Thecus N4100 I have discovered the glory of NAS. Still, a fully fledged NAS system is a bit costly for me, so had this crazy idea of bodging together my own.

Here's what I took:

K6 200MHz, 160MB RAM Server running Clarkconnect 3
An Icy Box
A 200GB Maxtor HDD

Plugging a 200GB IDE drive into a machine old enough to run a K6 200MHz would, as you can imagine, normally cause a few issues along the lines of "where did the other 160GB go?" Combine that with a desire to occasionally take the drive elsewhere, and I decided to keep the 200GB Maxtor in the Icy Box and hook it up to my trusty gateway through USB.

After a bit of module loading, fdisking, mkfsing, fscking and mounting I had myself a 200GB USB drive mounted on my gateway. Into the web config I went and setup file sharing and BANG I had myself a hefty amount of storage accessible over the network.

Now all I have to do is pop a USB2.0 card to replace the arcaic onboard USB1.1 and I have myself transfer rates that will make it a feasible backup location.

Woo and yay!