Hello all. I went to a State auction 2 weeks ago and came home with a pallet for $50. At first I was disappointed. ISA cards, 286's, 386's, 13"CGA monitors. In this mess I found a box that was sealed from the factory. It was 10 Western Digital Caviar SE WD2500JB 250GB 7200 RPM IDE drives. Well needless to say it was like a happy pill.
Here is the question.
I want to make a NAS for my LAN. I have a 10 bay tower and a P-III 500hmz board and 1gb of RAM\PC100. It currently has a 30GB hard drive and two CDs (CD rom & CD-RW). I have 4 open PCI slot and I have 4 PCI IDE 2 channel I\O cards. The current plan is to install nine of these drive in the tower. 1 on the Primary channel and 8 on the addon IDE cards. I will clean install W2k and share the drives on the LAN for backup and storage.
The LAN is a 100/10 with a Linksys WRT54G router. All computers and servers have software firewalls, AV, and 4 AS programs. Well protected. Can anyone can see why I should not use these drives all in one computer. If I mess up I don't mind reworking it but it will be a lot of effort to install these drives and then find out I have to remove them to configure it better.
All ideas are welcome.

Great Idea.. Take a look at this article and have fun.. the suggestion from me would be raid 5. The cards can be found on ebay, relatively inexpensively.

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/content/view/27840/77/

Found more http://www.netvoda.com/2006/01/build_your_own_.html

Thanks for the link. I knew about FreeNAS but frankly had forgotten about it. I have a LS-120 with a floppy cable connection so I wont even need a CD. Boot from the LS-120 floppy and I assume it will run in a RAM drive, it would free up channel two of the onboard controllers. I would have four drives without adding on a controller.
It would have been neat if FreeNAS came with a password\user name and firewall component.
Do you think they is a way to compile in a password module and free firewall program made for Linux? I know nothing about such things, but am willing to learn.

Not sure, but samba can be setup for username and password.

firewall I dont know ask Groovicus, he might.