I use FreeNas and have been running it for last 2 years.

My main 'drive' is a CF-card with 512MB so that it sucks less power and boots faster. YOu got to get a IDE-CF adapter for it and I got mine in Singapore for SG29. Alternative use a smallish harddisk should be fine.

MOBO: Gigabyte EP45T-UD3LR Ultra Durable
Got built in 6 SATA ports and best thing is onboard RAID manager from Intel. Only thing that sucks is no onboard graphics card. you'll have to go get yr own basic graphics card. Alternate is to buy a SATA RAID card which is relatively hard to find and costly. You want your home built NAS unit to be cheap and reliable ma.

FreeNAS like most other commercial NAS will allow bitTorrent, Apple music share, workgroup file sharing between PCs, web based admin and config, firewall, etc, etc, etc. you can read on their website. FreeNAS uses Transmission to manage torrents and there is even a Windows based client for Transmission which I use called Transmission remote.

The trick to home made NAS is building a reliable rig that can run 24x7. PSU that can tahan long, protection against dust and heat which is the main killer. I do commercial photography work and store my work on the NAS and have 3x1.5TB on RAID + 1x2TB non RAID where I download my music, videos, books, etc.

This post has been edited by cysun: Nov 5 2011, 09:19 AM

Absolutely right Ozak. I figured with the components I have, the biggest worry for me is the actual harddisks themselves. I run RAID on stripped across the 3 units of 1.5TB Green drives which run at a lower RPM and is designed to work 24x7. Having said that, no RAID setup is fool proof and best practice is to perform backups regularly, no running away from that. With my rig I can segmentize critical data and not-so-critical download data. That's why I keep my movies and music on my non-RAID standalone SATA disk, but all on the same rig. If you go the all-in-one box like Buffalo or D-link, you're limited in that sense.

Different folks, different strokes i guess.