NAS as fast as a local hdd

Heya,

You technically will be limited by your network. 10/100 will obviously never move as quickly as your SATA can do. Gigabit networking would be your goal to start (10/100/1000). To go faster, you'd have to basically use eSATA, but then you're not looking at NAS. You're then looking at an external SATA drive plugged into your computer. For it to be completely separate from your computer and accessible, the Network is going to be your ultimate limiting factor for speed. So your device that serves the harddrive's storage to the network needs gigabit, the router needs to be gigabit, and the computers accessing it needs to be gigabit. It still will not be the performance of a local drive. But it's hella faster than old 10/100 lan.

You don't need SATA, RAID, etc. Nothing. And an old clunky P4 will be more than enough CPU muscle to move files and the like. Again, all the matters is that you have a controller that can handle the types of drives you're using and gigabit or better networking on every device that is invovled.

Cheers,