I have several computers on my network. My main desktop, HTPC, laptop, roommates laptop, and we both have work laptops which are connected from time to time. I wasn't really satisfied with setting up a home network within Windows for transfering files. It just wasn't smooth or fast. I decided to set up a machine to just sit on the network and host files. It's main job is to host media so it can be watched from any computer. Since it's on 24-7 power consumption was a bit of a concern too.
I started doing some research and settled on building a NAS machine running FreeNAS. FreeNAS is super simple and you can boot it from a USB stick. You interface with the machine purely through your browser. It's pretty sweet. I picked up an Intel Atom D510MO board with two 1TB drives. I just got it up and running and it seems to be flawless. I'm really impressed. Currently set-up in RAID 1 for redundancy and i'm not terribly concerned about the write time.
The machine is basically silent. There isn't a single fan on the mainboard...not even for the processor. Actually the only fan in the case is for the power supply which is almost silent. The only thing i can hear are the drives which are reasonable.
This was my first time using a linux based system so i'm pretty proud of myself right now. It was pretty simple though. Getting to the point...anyone else running a NAS device? What is it / how do you like it? Right now i'm getting 12mb/s transferring a 128gb file over the network. The new machine is faster but i think my router and main machine are only 100mb/s LAN.
Oh yeah, the whole thing was under $300 including everything. Atom, ram, case, drives...