My Home NAS Box (Revision 2)

My NAS dreams are still there but my direction has slightly changed since last time I wrote here.

In the end decided to buy another 2x Samsung 500GB hard drives so that all the hard drive trays with rubber grommets were full. This was then going to form the basis of a 4x 500GB software RAID5 array with a usable capacity close to 1.5TB under OpenSUSE 10.3.

I did get this going. It was looking good. Had Samba server running with local authenication, SSH daemon running securely on a non-standard port and limited users, NoMachine (www.nomachine.com) FreeNX configured so that I could connect with a GUI from the internet....But there were a few things that I wanted to do that were annoying me:
* I couldn't get my 22" Asus widescreen monitor to display correctly. No matter how hard I tried, I kept getting a large black band down the left had side of the screen.
* Samba sharing to my Mac OS 10.5 laptops was very very slow. Tried changing the settings on Samba to no avail.
* I had a FusionHDTV / Dvico Dual 4 TV tuner card lying around that I was interested in getting up and running. I did find some links to maybe get it working (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DViCO_Dual_Digital_4) but a new large screen TV purchase meant that I wanted something a bit prettier and that 'just worked'.

So....rightly or wrongly, decided to ditch OpenSUSE and bite the bullet on Windows Vista Home Premium. I do love the look of Vista Media Center (included in Home Premium) and thats all I thought I would need. Should have looked into the differences between versions a bit more; Ultimate would have been more my cup of tea with the ability to Remote Desktop to the machine and CompletePC backup things that would have come in really useful. Anyway, the graphics card working at 1680x1050 straight out of the box, TV tuner works with the drivers (with a bit of stuffing around) and now I'm using the onboard ICH9 software RAID to RAID5 three of the four 500GB disks.... I don't feel as hard-core but at least it all works.

The current is as follows:
* HDD1 - 25GB Windows/Main, the rest for Temp TV tuner recordings
* RAID array - 1TB usable with a public (RO everyone), private (RW only me), uploads (RW everyone) directories shared via SMB.

We'll see how we go second time round!