File server question

[specbfast]

Don't know if this is the best forum for this question, but I will put it out there and see if you guys can help me out on this:

My work wants me to set up a file server for thier 8 user XP p2p network.

I want to use my current home system to make the file server - but swap out the graphics and sound cards and put in a cheep graphics card cuz they will pay me for it and I can use the money to upgrade my home rig.

I GOOG file servers and came up with many kinds - using a windows os, NAS, linux etc.

What do you think will be the best one - easiest and cheapest?

[Erik]

What kind of files? How many? How much total data, and how large do you think it will be in 2 years? What are the specs of the PC?

What kind of security do you need? What is your backup plan? Any other servers on the network currently?

How familiar are you (or whoever will be managing it) with Linux?

[yawningdog]

Linux with Samba is known to out-benchmark windows in disk performance and costs nothing. I've never seen a dedicated file server that isn't using a RAID array, so you probably want one.

[Ghost_Hacker]

If you want something free (outside hardware cost) I recommend Linux, if you can afford to spend a little and only want a place to hold data then NAS is another good way to go for a small company. If you want to run applications on the server (like a 3rd party database program) then Windows 2000/2003 is the way to go (you can do the same with Linux but Linux installs/configurations of 3rd party programs are not for people who may have other duties outside running a network unless you are a geek :D).

Hope this helps :)

[specbfast]

I got an old PC with four IDE drives (120GB), and I am thinking of a RAID 0+1 array to insure that the data can be recoevered if one of the drives dies. 240GB should be enough for a while.

We have a p2p XP netowrk with 8 computers.

I was thinking Linix, but also Freenas (freenas.org).