I do all of my design and development on a 17" PowerBook G4. Using a notebook for my development is great because I can haul it with me wherever I go, but one big downside is the size of the hard drive. I only have 100 GB to work with and I have a lot of software and a lot of files that I work with on a regular basis. I'm always looking for files I can delete because I'm always filling up the last 6 GB of space I have available. I can offload some of these files to external disks, but then I'm concerned about a hard drive failing and then losing some of my data that I need access to. Of course, you can almost always recover data in the event of a hard drive crash, but it can take a long time to get the data back. Case in point, my father-in-law recently had a 500 GB external drive fail on him. I was able to recover all of his files but it literally took a week to scan each sector of the hard drive to extract the data. I can't wait that long to get access to my data. Thus, I was casting about for a solution that would hopefully not be too expensive.
I'd love to drop an XRAID into my office (like we have at the colocation facility) but I don't have an extra $10,000 just sitting around. I contemplated getting a DROBO, but that would cost me about $800 in total by the time I bought hard drives to go with it. In looking for a solution, I came across a mention of FreeNAS, which has turned out to be the perfect solution. I have an old Dell Dimension XPS D266 that's been sitting in my closet for the past 2 years doing nothing (used to run a small Call of Duty server for my friends on it). FreeNAS allows you to run a network storage device and includes a software RAID option if you don't have the hardware (I don't) to run a hardware RAID configuration. I didn't have the 500 GB hard drives sitting around but before I bought them, I wanted to make sure I could get it working on my old Dell. I downloaded the ISO file from the site and burned it to a CD. Since I do a lot of hardware fixes and upgrades for friends and family, I had a couple of extra 40 GB hard drives sitting around. I slapped those into the computer and started the install. I followed the documentation (very simple and straight forward) which walks you through step by step of how to configure the server. Within an hour of digging my computer out of the back of the closet, I had a fully functioning RAID configured network storage server. Now, I'm going to buy the 500 GB hard drives and toss those in and be in business. This should allow me to recover around 50 GB of my laptop hard drive back. Total cost for the two 500 GB hard drives and a new network card from Tiger Direct: $250.
[UPDATE]
I received my hard drives from Tiger Direct and did a new installation of FreeNAS on that Dell. The second time around was even faster: 25 minutes for hard drive installation and installing FreeNAS and setting it up as a RAID drive. I set it up with SFTP access so while I was in Rhode Island on a recent trip I still had access to all of my files. And I now have a whole lot of free space on my hard drive.