FreeNAS

I have been tossing around some ideas lately regarding Storage.

Having recently reduced the amount of IT equipment in our house myself and my wife are now down to using only laptops (she has 1 while I currently have 3) and we need a good backup/storage solution.  I have a dislike of simple external drives just because they always need to be with you.  So I have been looking at NAS solutions.  The price of these devices have fallen to the point that you can easy have a Terabyte of storage for less than £200.

Then I came across this article about FreeNAS a FreeBSD based OS that is designed to turn old computers into NAS storage devices. It supports all types of hardrive and can even run from a USB key.  So with the addition of a big drive I could tuck one of my old machines in the shed or a cupboard with a wireless card and create my NAS drive.