Networked - Drive Farm

Hello. I made myself a promise, to upgrade my computing system at home, after completing EGTGE. Now, I'm not done yet, but completion is not that far away, so I'm starting to do research. There are many parts to the 'quest for better computing', and one of them is setting up a disk farm in a separate room in my house. I'd like to reduce the storage in my local machine and centralize data in a remote disk farm. To that end, I'm investigating various possibilities.

I'm writing this post in the hope that some of you have also looked into this and may have some good leads.

My needs are as follows:
1. 500GB - 1TB+ storage.
2. Individual disks do not need to be very high speed as this is a data dump. (Will probably use SATA-150).
3. Networked via Fast Ethernet, or 1Gb Ethernet (preferred).
4. No redundancy required. This data will be backed up instead.


I've investigated the following:
- Network appliances (light-weight connectors for USB drives and other). - Thus far, none of these has had the capacity or bandwidth I need, but cost seems OK.

- Professional servers - These would do the job, but the price is prohibitive.

I'm considering doing:
1. Build a box from off-the shelf parts, including a MOBO w/ 1Gb ethernet and onboard SATA-150 for up to four drives.
2. Drop four large SATA -150drives into the box.
3. Drop in 256-512 MB of memory and a slow CPU.
4. Run a linux disk server.
5. Hooks the whole thing up to a 1000 watt UPS and connect it to the home network in a back room.

What can I use? - Pretty much any thoughtful suggestions you can provide.


Thanks in advance to anyone who can assist me in this project. I'll probably list specs in a .plan when I get my whole system set up, for those of you who are considering doing something similar.

Hall Of Worlds - For Gamers
EdM|EGTGE