Aka. Network-attached storage. He obviously wants to spend as little as possible money on it but still get a working system etc. But since I don't know anything about these things I was hoping that someone here could help me? I specifically would like to know what are the ~minimium hardware requirements so it runs smoothly and if it benefits at all to have the hd's on raid? Is it hard to setup on software side? The idea is to use Ubuntu. Anything else I should know ?

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Uh, not really exp. in this area, but he could go with some synology device:
http://www.synology.com/products/index.php?lang=enu
I have this one:
http://www.synology.com/products/spec.php?product_name=DS411slim&lang=enu#p_submenu
It really depends how much money and time he wands to spent with, maybe there is cheap a easy solution, but i don't know any. That Home NAS from synology costs cca. 300e + HDDs.. HDDs could be problem, the price is quite high now, but he could go with one, then buy later another.
They have that soft called Diskstation Manager 3.0 which is nice for controlling most of the things, blabla setting up the saring options, bittorent client, etc... (but i still ended up ssh-ing into it )

minimum requirements to handle 4 HDDs in RAID plus nfs and samba? I'd say a medium Pentium III

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"Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live."
- Martin Golding

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/nas/nas-charts/view

My friend had read an article that said that better cpu increases the data transfer rate surprisingly lot Dunno, last time I we talked about it he was going for some 1100€ NAS so meh. Sorry for wasting your time I guess.

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