With the needs of the home network rapidly expanding i am finding there is more and more need for a shared storage solution. My house has several computers that me and my wife use and its very inconvenient to be tied to a certain computer that has your pictures/videos/documents on. Its nice to have a central storage location that all your computers connect to and regardless of which system you’re using, you have access to all your files.

In addition to this need of the high tech home, is also the issue of cost. A pre-made system as described above can easily cost in excess of $1200. Then the price can go up even more depending on how much storage you need and if you want it to be redundant or not.

Personally we take tons of pictures and videos of all our vacations, family events, or just days in the part. With how easy it is to capture everything on digital media and store it, we go a little nuts. But that being said, it takes up a lot space, and since these are our precious memories, we can’t risk them being lost to a hard drive crash.

So I’ve been researching different NAS (Network attached Storage) solutions, and 2 have become my front runners. The current one I'm testing out is FreeNAS offered at www.freenas.org. The next one will be OpenFiler.

With an old computer and a couple of newer hard drives and a gigabit network card you can build a redundant high capacity storage solution for almost nothing.

I’m still in the process of finding the best possible setup for FreeNAS and will post how-to’s on setting it up once done as well and performance test.

For now, you can click here and check out the overall system specs.