> > Been thinking about either purchasing one of these or building my own. Personally, given the two options, I would go with DIY. Reasoning is the flexibility of hardware purchase which would allow for better expansion options. When I did mine, sometime ago, I had a mobo w/ 4 sata slots. At the time the board still had an IDE connection. The SATAs were used for the actual data storage, LVM in my case, and the IDE for the OS. Segregating the two is advisable IMHO. Fast forward to this century. A mobo with as many SATA slots as you can find plus an on-board USB slot would be fun. You can use a thumb-drive for the OS. I don't think it would take a lot of R/W hits since most of the OS would be loaded to RAM. This leaves slots open for when you are ready to expand from your 2x4Gb start. Given that NAS is generally a configuration of the server services and users access, obvious I know so apologies, at it's basic function and most "closed" sourced NASes use ASH as I recall; you only miss out on refinement in a purchased option. -- Fred