Looking for a storage solution for my 4 drives

[paper_matthew]

I had a small media server that finally bit the dust. I'd like to consolidate and maybe just put my drives into an enclosure. I'd like some sort of disk failure protection if possible, is that raid 1? I don't know much about Raid configurations. Do they need to be the exact same drive and size?

I figured I'd hook the enclosure up to my desktop and share them off there.

I was looking at this enclosure but I'm open to other recommendations:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003YFHEAC?psc=1

 

[kubek]

Go for it if you can spend money on it. But in the case you have some old PC lying around I would install FreeNAS(http://www.freenas.org/) on it and you would have free and opensource NAS solution. Dont worry, it doesnt require any special knowloadge and software is similiar to the ones used by those proprietary.

Also make you sure your drives have same specificaitons (at least capacity) if you want to use them in RAID array. In your case you can use RAID 1 or RAID5. Please search for information about them on the internet or this forum, you will find plenty of info there.

 

[jsmithepa]

FreeNAS(http://www.freenas.org/) on it and you would have free and opensource NAS solution. Dont worry, it doesnt require any special knowloadge and software is similiar to the ones used by those proprietary.

You sure? I just visited the site and it talks about a class/certification blah-blah.

What decent PC must I have to run this NAS? Assume no more than 2 simultaneous users.

 

[kubek]

Yeah, they offer some certificates and stuff, but for basic usage you can find tons of tutorials online. You can get up and running in short time (depending on your HW). But FreeNAS is now more and more focused on more serious applications. If you dont store anything important on your HDDs and they are bunch of desktop grade 500GB ones, you would be better running something like Rockstor (http://rockstor.com/personal-cloud-btrfs-nas-server.html) or ownCloud (https://owncloud.com/) also some guys recommend openfiler (https://www.openfiler.com/) but I think it is not as actively developed as other options I mentioned and is not quite there when it comes to new technologies and simple user interface.

As for requirements:

USB key for OS - entire system will be loaded from USB and dont worry, it wont wear out because the system itself is configured to load everything to RAM and to do minimum writes, any USB will be fine if it has 8GB or more of storage (which are rather cheap).

CPU: any 64bit CPU will be fine

RAM: this is where ZFS tends to be hungry ... if you want to user FreeNAS and to fully utilize ZFS filesystem you need 4GB or 8GB of ram, if you want to use different software with other filesystem you can utilize anything from 512GB to 2GB (recommended for disk caching in linux or if the software you run is using BTRFS).

NIC: you need 1GBit port on your MB or buy PCI NIC so you are not slowed down