How to build a NAS?

I have quite a bit of photos I'd like to organize and get away from sparse DVDs and move to a NAS solution. Ideally, this would let me have some level of redundancy and more easily find what I'm looking for.

That being said, hard drives are relatively cheap. My next question is, I would like to run ZFS on the drives with the ability to add / remove drives for additional redundancy, or change the configuration of the drives possibly. Is there a NAS box that lets you run your OS of choice (FreeNAS) so all I'd need to do is get the hard drives, the NAS box, and modify the firmware / OS with FreeNAS?

Walter

Perhaps this isn't an answer to your question directly, but my own experience has been that typical NAS hardware costs about the same as a regular PC. The only reason you might get NAS vs a PC is its lower physical profile.

We evaluated the NAS vs PC question quite a bit and eventually ended up with PC, because it has significantly more flexibility for us. We could install any OS we wanted and in this case, getting the box(es) on our Windows Domain was much easier than with a NAS. The PC was also better-performing than ALL the different NAS hardware we tested. We can also add as many drives as we want, and even had eSATA capability.

With PC's able to be built to very low-power profiles, it would be easy to build a dual-core, multi-drive PC-NAS that consumes less than 60 watts or so under disk-intense conditions.

Just some thoughts.

Additional point: File serving and backup should be two different functions. My recommendation would be to have one or more external hard drives connected through eSATA or USB 2.0 for backup purposes, and create a process on the fileserver to automatically backup / sync the backup drive with your data folders.

The fileserver acts as a fast repository to serve / host files from. If the fileserver goes down, you still have easy access to your data by connecting it to any working box with USB or eSATA. The external drive is also useful when you go on trips - making it easy to take your data with you.

I would recommend this over any RAID configurations for most scenarios, because when RAID fails it is often difficult to recover or rebuild. Given the plummeting costs of storage, RAID is just not worth the hassle anymore.

As stated in the other two anwsers, hardware really isn't a problem anymore. Take any machine that supports the hard drive(s) you want to use and use it;PC, NAS, whatever. What you want to do is spend you time looking at is the OS/filesystem. Check out: http://www.unixconsult.org/zfs_vs_lvm.html

I recently created my own NAS and spent A LOT of time making sure mine will be able to expand in the future, and also with reliable while expainding. I ened up using Linux(Fedora 10) LVM + RAID in RAID 5. This way I can easily grow my RAID if I want to buy more hard drives. Any version of linux is fine, I just used Fedora because I have used it for a few years. I think my "NAS" cost me around $1000:
$200 for the PC
$450 for the Hard drives (4*1TB)
$150 for a 8-port SATA card (it did hardware RAID, this was unneeded) - a cheaper one would have worked fine.

I DO NOT suggest hardware RAID!! I worked in Server/PC repair and I have seen 4 hardware RAIDs fail, luckily 2 of them were just mirrored and the data was recovered. One other one we were able to get the same RAID card and get it to rebuild. The last one was onboard RAID and the motherboard was no longer manufacture and they lost everything. People say hardware RAID is "faster", my software RAID is faster then my network can handle (I did a benchmark, cannot remember the exect speeds). Software RAID is easiler to recover from if something does go horribly wrong. I also installed a nice web interface for mine so I could download to/manage my NAS from anywhere. :)
Any ways that is my 'little' rant on RAID/NAS.