HowtoForge has detailed instructions for setting up a fileserver by focusing on the relevant parts of SME Server.
Category: How-To
Building your own Nas
WhatPC? brings a complete NAS building guide involving Mini-ITX motherboards, Promise hardware RAID, and NASLite commercial NAS operating system.
DIY RAID 5 NAS Server Worklog
This blog contains full instructions, including links and pictures of all hardware needed, to build a 1+ TB NAS. Windows XP is used as the software, while a Highpoint RocketRAID hardware RAID card takes care of the drives.
I did some research into building a network attached storage (NAS) server, and bought the appropriate hardware online. I’ll cover the steps I took to build a homebrew NAS server capable of offering 1Tb of redundant RAID 5 storage.
Network-Attached Storage With FreeNAS
Howto Forge has a great howto for installing and configuring FreeNAS 0.68.
This tutorial shows how you can set up a network-attached storage server with FreeNAS. FreeNAS is based on the FreeBSD operating system and supports CIFS (samba), FTP, NFS, RSYNC, SSH, local user authentication, and software RAID (0, 1, 5). It comes with a powerful web interface and uses very little space on the hard drive – about 32MB.
Build a Cheap and Fast RAID 5 NAS
SmallNetBuilder’s guide to building your own NAS device. In it they use a standard PC with an LSI Logic MegaRAID hardware-based RAID card. Included are step-by-step screenshots on setting up the RAID device using the MegaRAID’s bios, and benchmark of the machine while running Ubuntu Linux and FreeNAS.
DIY NAS Smackdown
SmallNetBuilder has benchmarks of file access to Ubuntu Linux and Clarkconnect over Samba. Included are instructions for setting up the software on both systems, and a guide to the hardware used in the project.
How We Test: Networked Storage Devices
Tom’s Hardware’s SmallNetBuilder describes their methodes for benchmarking NAS devices with IOzone.