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This is an awesome website for everything related to networking PC's. It features seven categories (Wireless, NAS, LANs and Routers, Multimedia, VoIP, Security and Everything Else). In each category, it features at least 5 information types (Reviews, News, HowTo's , Tutorials and Features). Additionally, it includes benchmark information for Wireless, NAS and LANs and Routers. This is an amazing resource.

New Server?

I have several PC's on the network here at home, but we really don't have the space for them. It's also not very energy efficient. I am considering getting a NAS system. NAS stands for Network Attached Storage. This works very much as a dedicated storage server.

The one that I'm most interested in is the LaCie Ethernet Disk mini, which is available from Newegg for $181.99. For less than $200, this is quite a piece of technology. It includes an SMB (Server Message Block) server, an iTunes server, an AFP server (great for Amy's Powerbook), an FTP Server and others. It contains an 500GB hard drive, which is sufficient to back up our notebooks and other PC's and contain a share iTunes library available to any PC on our network. This will contain every CD and our favorite DVD's. The great thing about this particular NAS device is that it is expandable. It has a USB2 port to which you can attach external USB drives (of which I have several) that will enable us to have a terabyte of data.

FreeNAS: The Free NAS Server

FreeNAS is a free NAS (Network-Attached Storage) server, supporting: CIFS (samba), FTP, NFS protocols, Software RAID (0,1,5) with a Full WEB configuration interface. FreeNAS takes less than 16MB once installed on Compact Flash, hard drive or USB key.

This looks like NASLITE which I discussed a long time ago and ran for about a year. This one's free (obviously) and offers many more options. It looks like it's worth checking out.

NAS on the cheap

I first mentioned this product about a month ago. Yesterday, I spent about 5 minutes getting this Linux server up and running. NASLite-SMB is really a simple server OS. I booted it on a Dell Optiplex GL+ (133Mhz Pentium/64MB/1.2GB), with a Hawking Technology Ethernet card in it. I then configured the workgroup, IP address and formatted the hard drive. I then rebooted and was able to connect to it from my PC without issue.

NASlite File Servers...

NASLite is a single floppy disk based Network Attached Storage (NAS) Server Operating System designed to transform a basic computer into a dedicated file server. NASLite is intended primarily for use in a small business or home office network. By design, NASLite is a community file server and does not support features such as user management , the ability to join domains or disk quotas. However, it is very easy to set-up and use.

Here's a review from Michael Horowitz.