Build my own NAS server or buy a NAS Drive ?

[badass]

No worries for the thread de-rail, I've been on freecycle and seems to be no end of kit going at the moment, I just missed out on a Q6600 with 4 gig of ram and a motherboard

Watch out for that. If it's just for storage, power efficiency is key.
Well it's the difference between costing £30 per month in electricity and about £2 per month.

[spoon_]

No worries for the thread de-rail, I've been on freecycle and seems to be no end of kit going at the moment, I just missed out on a Q6600 with 4 gig of ram and a motherboard

I'm glad you did, leccy bill would have eaten you alive spitting the bones out asking for more...

[Behemoth]

lol yes that was something that did cross my mind.

I've just been reminded I have a Socket A box sat out in the garage doing naff all, so thinking of getting a decent PSU and new case for that and putting in a 4 port sata card, good idea/bad idea ?

[oolon]

I am thinking of building a NAS too, which I can also run VMs on etc. I was quite tempted by the HP microserver however I decided to wait to get my own miniserver (as I really wanted more PCIE slots) and it seems that intel is targetting this section of the market, with some low power Xeon chips and Micro-ATX motherboards, asus, gigabyte, supermicro and tyan are all making matx boards for them (some major buy in there!) I like the look of the tyan S5510 myself, 3 gigabit nics, IPMI2 2 x8 PCIE (opened ended) 2 x4 PCIE (8 mechanical) combine that with a 45W 4 core E3-1260 and up to 32 GB of ECC memory. Case wise PC-V354 looks nice being m-atx and fitting 7x3.5" drives and 4x2"

[DanceswithUnix]

lol yes that was something that did cross my mind.

I've just been reminded I have a Socket A box sat out in the garage doing naff all, so thinking of getting a decent PSU and new case for that and putting in a 4 port sata card, good idea/bad idea ?

My socket A boxes drank power like crazy even when idle, and turned it into lots of heat with noisy fans.

Any modern fileserver box I would want to be capable of decent gigabit ethernet performance, and for all the heat and fan noise Socket A just wouldn't be up to that task.

Socket AM3 chips start at £24 for single core:

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/168973

which is rated at 45W at load, should sip just a few watts when idle.

[Behemoth]

would be great if I could find a mobo just as cheap !