Can the HN community work to build out a nice homebrew NAS
There are projects like FreeNas, Nexenta, and a handful of other OSS NAS software/hardware. Of course, there are the off the shelf products like Drobo which I personally do not feel fits the bill at all.
I was hoping that as a collaborative effort, the HN community could come up with a spec sheet of hardware and software that could be put together to make a really nice NAS for the slightly above average home network hacker.
Off the top of my head, I would love to see it meet these criteria, though would also love to hear the pros and cons of these ideas. Not to mention the valuable input everyone in this community can provide.
* What OS would it run? * What motherboard would be ideal? * Can it be kept it fanless? * Would it be good to also try to shove in a full blown router and firewall, replacing two devices at once? * Serial ATA specs. * Minimum CPU that can be used. * ZFS? I certainly desire for it to be ZFS. * What software would be best to control it, rather than writing our own, which would slow things down. Ideally this would amount to putting parts together, not reinventing the wheel. * This is home to Small/Med Business, do not even try to hit the enterprise. * How many drives * What is the best box/case for something like this? * How low of a power consumer can we keep it?
And whatever else people can add. I really would love to see this be a ZFS based system, with the ability to support Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux out of the box without any fiddling. All over GB Ethernet. If it can act as a portable home directory destination for other OS's, support sparse images/bundles, Time Machine backups from Apple's kit, etc. And all that, with the ability to pop in a new drive at any time and absorb that storage. Not to mention knowing your data is safe by choosing the right ZFS RAID methodology.
To date, I have not seen this done without hitting costs that are far too much to put into home use. The second you go enterprise, it is a noisy rack mount or a Drobo, both of which I am not a huge fan of.
If dialogue can be opened on this to get specs together, I think I can drum up the funds to make a first generation prototype, and find the time to write up the instructions on how to make it all come Together.
What do you think?