So I'm trying to come up with a way to make a server without laying out a lot more cash than I need. I have an old AMD 800MHz processor at home in an ATX board that hasn't been fired up in a while. I'm considering slapping it into a rack mount chassis with a cheapo video card, a gigabyte ethernet card, and my controller cards for my movie storage. I have a DS-1220 that currently contains 12 drives between 250GB and 500GB. Plan on swapping them for 1TB drives. I store mostly full length DVD quality rips and plan on beginning the HD stuff once I get home. Anyone see any problems I might run into? It currently runs off of my main computer that is about 4 years old. I don't think I've upgraded the chip since returning from my last Iraqi vacation. I don't plan to do a RAID and the 800 runs XP just fine. I really don't foresee it doing too much in the way of complicated programs - just basically manage the hard drives.

yeah, welcome to the club. Windows Home Server is a pretty good deal, but it's not very efficient in it's space replication. I've also looked at a few of the Linux based NAS distributions - also not much impressed.

Conceptually, I really like the Drobo , but it doesn't have enough slots and USB2 sucks - firewire or eSATA would be even better.

I'm clearly not at the same tech level you are but I built a 'server' for my home using an old p4 with xp pro. The computer is my old desktop that got shelved after I bought a laptop a year ago. It's very skin and bones with only 384 MB ram and a 160 gb HD, but does the job - I have a share setup on one of the folders and have a printer shared on it as well. The printer was the reason behind setting it up in the first place. I have 2 laptops plus my laptop from work and have the shared folder visible on all 3 as a network drive. I use the network drive to backup documents on the 2 laptops (which backup their documents to the network drive once a week) and have a DVD-RW on the server for weekly backups for a bit of double redundancy. Finally I have Media Player 11 and have it setup as a media server for my PS3. All in all it's a pretty slick setup for someone who isn't all that technically inclined.

I've done something similar with an old laptop that I have and a NAS. It's not the most seamless of setups, but it's working well enough - especially since I've got my Mac hooked up as well.

The downside is that it really can't scale, unless I add another NAS, build a real server or attach storage.