Was wondering how easy it would be to setup a NAS as current i have an icybox setup with 1.5TB storage, trying to make transfers and accessing the data is incredibly slow, main bottleneck is my 100mb/s Ethernet(although it says certified to cat5e gigabit... liars!), going to be swapping to cat6a(10gigabit, router etc use 1gb though) so that bottleneck will be gone, the next is simply the USB interface the icybox uses means that im stuck at a maximum 60MB/s, thats without taking into account any of the icybox hardware performance.
Since i have a fairly small pc which contains:
e8400
9800GT
4gb ddr2 ram
asus p5n-d (1gb ethernet, 4 sata ports)
I was basically thinking of shoving it on the network and filling it with the rest of my drives, that way i would be closer to maxing out the HDD reads/writes, cant see gigabit being and issue as a drive should only hit like 100MB/s anyways but regardless its nice to use the extra bandwidth.
Would the above system be OK for a NAS? If not i was thinking about the AMD A series or something, if i did get a new system it would be compact and fairly quiet and for media use(streaming network media to a TV when we finally get into the LCD market!).
And the main query(providing the above is OK), how do i go about setting this up? People seem to mention using Windows Home Server, i cant get access to that (dont want to be paying...) however i have access to alot of Windows Server, e.g. Windows Server 2003/8. Not sure if those are suitable though? Id assume they're for more useful things i.e a full blown server . What are the alternatives to just putting windows 7 on it and sharing the PC? As ideally i want to minimise power as much as possible, the system will be storage and accessing of VIDEOS and other content (game installation backups) so it doesnt need to be accessible 24/7, i would hope there was a system where it could power down the system and then power it up on request or am i hoping for to much?.
Any suggestions/guides to setting something like this up would be greatly appreciated as this 5MB/s transfers are doing my nut in!.