Recently I wanted to set up a computer to act as a network storage server. I was looking around at the available open source software and I found a neat little package called FreeNAS. FreeNAS is based on FreeBSD which is basically another unix-type operating system. Being pretty familiar with Linux, I decided to try it. It turns out it is an extremely versatile and easy-to-use piece of software. Not only does it have an NAS server installed, but it also has a bunch of other server capabilities pre-installed. It also has an extremely intuitive web interface, so once it is set up, about ten minutes on a moderately fast computer, it no longer needs a monitor or keyboard installed. From the web interface you can do everything necessary to setup all the different services it has available.

At the moment, it has three different drives in it: a 300 GB Western Digital drive, a 160 GB Seagate drive, and a random 40 GB drive for a total capacity of 500 GB. (GB not GiB) :-(  These drives are installed in an old tower I had laying around. The tower has pretty modest specs for a server. It has an AMD Althlon processor, 600 and some odd megabytes of RAM, and an old 10/100T ethernet card. The graph below shows the traffic through the ethernet card and the CPU load when transferring a 700 MB file across the network and using the samba server to serve iTunes with its music files.

As you can see. It doesn't take very much power to run FreeNAS. Overall, it works very well for what I need.