Would this custom NAS work?

[JaredB]

My moms old PC dies a little while ago, and I just tore it apart (litteraly, it was from Dell and the case was rivited together.).

It had an Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 ( http://ark.intel.com/products/27249), and I was thinking I could use this, plus some old RAM, and a new Motherboard, that I could use it as a custon NAS instead of buying a pre-made one.

 

I would use WD Red drives.

 

I would probably install windows on it, but if theres a way Ubuntu would work for a NAS, please let me know.

 

This is probably the mobo I would buy, it can support 4 drives :

http://www.ncix.com/products/?sku=67557&vpn=GA-G41MT-S2PT&manufacture=Others

 

Would this work, or do you think it would be too old. (The old PC was from 2007)

 

Any suggestions would be apreciated.

 

*Edit*

P.S. for the lolz I would also probably install the old video card back into it too

[Vitalius]

I would use FreeNAS 8.3.1 or 9.0 if you are willing to brave Beta. It is great.

That setup would work perfect.

My NAS is running FreeNAS 8.3.1 and has an AMD Phenom x4 with 2 cores disabled making it a dual core down clocked to 2.0GHz. You will never need more than that to run FreeNAS unless you have a very large number of HDD's or storage space (though those go together obviously). 

I have 8GB of RAM in it, simply because I prefer to use ZFS which requires 8GB of RAM minimum, but you can use UFS which has a 1GB RAM minimum. Speeds do not matter. Those are File Systems. Sort of how the OS organizes the data. 

Basically, ZFS has more features (a lot more) than UFS, but requires more RAM because of it. So yeah. Up to you.

[JaredB]

I would use FreeNAS 8.3.1 or 9.0 if you are willing to brave Beta. It is great.

Is that for Windows?

[sabot]

Is that for Windows?

Free nas is able to work with Windows, I am thinking of making my own nas. I plan to use free nas. This looks like a good build and I hope you build it.

[Vitalius]

Is that for Windows?

Free nas is able to work with Windows, I am thinking of making my own nas. I plan to use free nas. This looks like a good build and I hope you build it.

No.....

FreeNAS is a FreeBSD based Operating System. It works with Windows, Mac, and Linux in that it can set up shares for all of them by default. 

[sabot]

No.....

FreeNAS is a FreeBSD based Operating System. It works with Windows, Mac, and Linux in that it can set up shares for all of them by default. 

I thought he was asking can you back up your windows machine to it. Not that it runs inside of windows.

[Vitalius]

I thought he was asking can you back up your windows machine to it. Not that it runs inside of windows.

Usually if you ask if a piece of software is "for" an OS, you are asking if it runs on it. That is the way I interpreted it.

FreeNAS, by default, has shares for the 3 OS's that I mentioned. You can add plugins for whatever else you want. I have a media server plugin that lets me stream to my Direct TV receiver and my PS3 for example. 

You can set up backups, whatever. It all works.