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Never underestimate the power and flexibility of a pile of recycled computer hardware with a ton of hard disks sitting on your network.
Even an old PII (or K6-II) with a couple IDE cards and a bunch of hard disks can serve data plenty fast.
In my case I'm planning to spend a little more cash however, and set up a full-on Linux fileserver. Opteron processor, 2GB RAM, 2 4-port SATA cards, 8 250GB SATA hard drives in a software RAID-5 array (1.7TB) on gigabit networking. Comes out to just under $1800 (but I already have some of the hardware).
My current Linux filer is a T-bred 1700+ with 1GB PC133 and 4 160GB PATA disks in a software RAID-5 (430GB). Feels quite small now in a world of 500GB IDE drives...it's been 100% full now for almost a year...just working on that $1800....
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