Do you generally think it best to make your own file server, or just buy one ready done? I'm wondering between the following
1) Sheeva plug off ebay, and add a usb hard drive. £100 or so.
2) The Ryan Alubox, which is around £85. I am having trouble seeing why the sheevaplug is better than this.
http://www.specialtech.co.uk/spshop/customer/home.php?cat=842
3) Or, we could buy the £140 Acer with FreeNAS or Clark Connect and add a usb double enclosure to it for another £40.
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/167153
4) Or the Netgear dual enclosure which right now is coming with a FREE 500G drive, and it does RAID automagically if you put in a second drive, and that is around £150
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/149510
On the whole I'm inclining to the £140 Acer + usb enclosure, but I've never done this stuff before so would be really interested to hear the opinions of people who have.
We do have one or two old machines lying around which we could fill up with drives, but I'm veering away from that as they are big, quite old, noisy, rather power hungry, and I am not certain of durability if running 24/7.
Probably you guys have been through this and have favored solutions. Its a smallish charity with three or four computers which at the moment are only networked for printing. But we do need a simple internal web server, and we do need some central file storage, and we will have a couple of spare new 160G drives from another purchase.
Peter