HOW TO - Terabyte file server for $500

Personal Tech Pipeline:

A short while ago, I received a challenge from a reader who didn’t believe me when I said in print that it was possible to put together a brand-new terabyte (1,000 Gbytes) file server for around $500. Well, you can, and I did. The example system I put together now resides on the far side of my office, offering up a thousand gigabytes–that’s a lot of disk space!–as network storage on my office LAN.

The heart of my terabyte server is a modest array of high-capacity drives. In assembling that system, I realized that because large, single hard drives are more or less standard in many new PCs, most users have never had to deal with the details of drive installation, initialization, and configuration, either for adding multiple drives to a system or for swapping drives. Both these processes raise questions as to the safest and best way to set things up as well as to avoid data loss, especially if you’re moving a current PC’s setup and files to a new drive.