Joe over at High On Solder, a site focused on electronic and photography projects, recently wrote up his experience setting up a FreeNAS server to serve as a local backup solution for his personal data. As the name might indicate, FreeNAS is an open-source storage platform aiming to make sharing easy between Windows, Apple, and UNIX-based systems.
Instead of going through the available documentation from FreeNAS, Joe opted to follow a brief tutorial over at Engadget. This was probably a pretty good idea, since often freeware documentation can make the unfortunate assumption that the reader has a fairly strong background in whatever technical area that the average user just might not possess.
Joe ran into a couple of issues, most notably regarding permissions and RSYNC stuff, but overall he seems pretty pleased with FreeNAS in general.
Now that I have my permissions and RSYNC issues resolved, I am very pleased with my FreeNAS server. With the fan speeds set low it is very quiet and over a week of use it had an average power usage of 47 Watts. File transfer speeds are also pretty good over my newly installed Gigabit network. FreeNAS is a versatile platform and I look forward to learning more about it in the future.
For more information on Joe's FreeNAS experience and a lot of other interesting electronics-related projects, check out Joe's blog at High On Solder.
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