I use a Buffalo Terastation, 1 terabyte, with 4 250 gig hard drives in a RAID-5 config (for an effective 700 gig or so after parity disk and formatting losses. It's network attached and standalone, has a very small physical footprint and is whisper quiet. I've got all my music and videos on it, and then my mythtv box/jukebox mounts it via SMB and serves up the content (plays music/videos locally or streams music to remote boxes).

It serves up via samba/CIFS and appletalk, and has FTP access. I HIGHLY recommend using the FTP access to get your files onto the box, the CIFS write access is abominably slow (even factoring in the inherent slow writes on RAID 5). The box and tech notes claim that it does NFS but that's a bald faced lie, it doesn't do NFS at all. It also has 4 USB ports to hang additional storage off of or to act as a print server for a USB attached printer.

It's not the best of breed, it's got issues... however I got it for around $700 after rebates at Frys, which beats having to pay around $600 for all the parts to build one out of a small linux box and then administer it.

Of course, for work I just built a 2 terabyte NAS box out of an old PC with Ubuntu (server) installed. It's got 6 400 gig hard drives set up as RAID 0 and serves the ~2 terabytes of storage via NFS. We use it as sort of a "sneakernet on 'roids" type of deal for backing up or transferring huge database partitions.

I'm hoping to stumble across a mini enclosure (like the shuttles) with more than 2 drive bays and enough PSU to juice at least 4 IDE drives. I have several outstanding requests from people to build standalone jukeboxes, mythtv servers and NAS boxes but all the ones I've seen only have 2 bays and I don't want to use a full sized case. 6 drive bays would be ideal, that'd let me have a separate boot drive, 4 RAID 5 drives and a pool spare.

-- Gary F.