[chichow]

So I am considering buying a NAS, but wanted to maybe roll my own.

I really like OS X. Is there a suitable Powermac that acts as a NAS?

Some other data points:

I used have a DP 1.25Ghz MDD. I ended up moving most of my drives to external cases, since the fan would run extremely loudly when I had 4 internal drives.

So is there a PowerMac that is good on

1) energy usage
2) noise
3) gigabit ethernet
4) can take external SATA drives?

[tooki]

Other than maybe #1, the Mac Pro is pretty good. (They have a pretty high initial power draw and just by the heat produced you can tell they use a lot more energy than other macs.)

Note that no Macs have built-in eSATA ports. Those must be provided via a third-party solution. On the Mac Pro, you can either use a passthrough card to snag the optical bay SATA connectors and route them externally (but these are at your own peril -- they're very difficult to get to and may not work in other OSes, or possibly even new versions of OS X), or you can use a PCIe eSATA host controller.

On the MacBook Pro, you can use an ExpressCard/34 eSATA controller card. These seem to have driver issues, though.

Finally, the hacker-est option is to get a Mac mini, hack a hole in its case, and use the SATA connector from the internal HD for a large external. But you'll only get one SATA port, because that's all the mini has. You could, for example, put the boot OS on FireWire or USB and use SATA for a large storage HD.

[chichow]

thanks for mentioning the mac mini option.

i had not thought about that hack

[mduell]

Unless you want to make an ongoing tinkering project out of this, I'd go with an appliance. You can get decent one in the same price range as a Mac mini and a really nice one in the same price range as a Mac Pro.

What's your budget and desired storage capacity?

[seanc]

I wouldn't consider a PowerMac a good solution unless you already have one lying around. I'd consider a dirt cheap older PC with SATA a brilliant option, much easier to expand and a huge range of OSes.

FreeNas is a good OS to try, we had a discussion about it here

[chichow]

yeah, i really luv OS X.

I am a former Solaris guys, so I like OS X for the *nix when I want it.

but yeah, I guess it will be sylology and promise technolgies NAS.

Alas.

Thanks though.

I'll pick up 4 1TB WD drives and make a 3TB RAID 5 with a 4 drive NAS

[mduell]

Synology, QNAP, Thecus, and Netgear are the four players in the 4-5 bay prosumer NAS market.
I like the Netgear, but it's on the expensive side.