[OFB Cafe] Building a NAS

[Timothy Butler]

Hi everyone,
	After a failed attempt last year to move to a NAS for my Time Machine backups and Aperture photo storage (the Netgear ReadyNAS I purchased was much louder than it was suppose to be), I have decided to try the build-your-own approach. OnSale/MacMall had a HP ProLiant N40L on sale for $99 briefly today and I grabbed one. Assuming they don't cancel my order or something...

	This, to me, looks like a lot better hardware than much more expensive Synology and QNAP NASes I have been looking at. 

	In any case, I need a server OS for it. I'm considering FreeNAS and Ubuntu, but am open to other ideas as well. Has anyone on here built a NAS for your Macs? Did you find one of those options -- or something else -- worked best? Ideally, I'd like web based management of the server, AFP, iSCSI and UPnP/DLNA, but I can live without the last one. I'd also prefer a setup where I can do a RAID-like setup without having identically sized disks (i.e. like Drobo, Synology and Netgear have on their NASes). I can, again, live without this, but it would be nice.

	Thoughts?

	Thanks,
		Tim