Home Storage Server

[GreyHat64]

I'm thinking of finally setting up a small storage server for backups, torrents, etc. I have an old Dell with a Pentium 4 630 that I'm thinking of using, but I'm also very open to building a server or buying a prebuilt if it fits my budget better. I'm trying to do this for as little money as possible, while not skimping on features or performance. I'm thinking of a RAID 1 array of two 1 TB or 2 TB drives on the motherboard, as a RAID card is overkill and out of the price range. Thoughts and suggestions?

[Greeni]

The first question is do you have SATA on that mainboard? because IDE HDD are realy expensive. Personly I would use the old PC with maybe freenas on it. The only things you need are the HDD and maybe 1 Gigabite NIC.

[GreyHat64]

The first question is do you have SATA on that mainboard? because IDE HDD are realy expensive. Personly I would use the old PC with maybe freenas on it. The only things you need are the HDD and maybe 1 Gigabite NIC.

It does have SATA ports, I believe SATA II.

[Greeni]

SATA II is fast enough for HDDs. So I'd recommend you to check freenas or debian as an operating system and try it. :)

 

would also recommend to try the operating systems with old hard drives before you buy the new hardware.