[NTLUG:Discuss] Small NAS box ideas?

[Darin Smith]

I've been pondering the possibilities of creating an inexpensive Network
Attached Storage (NAS) box to sit in a closet at home.

Main goals:
Cheap
Reliable
Capability of supporting at least 4 drives, figuring on RAID-4 for
redundancy and efficiency of storage volume (though not as
performance-happy as mirroring--since it's destined to be networkable
filesystems, I see performance as less of an issue)
Compact
Also capable of running a small, minimal traffic Apache installation, so
I can free my desktop machine of that task and have it completely
firewalled off.  HTTP will be the only thing my external router will let
through to the NAS box.

So, I'm thinking of a PII or one of the slower/cheaper Athlons, on a
MicroATX board with an extra 2-controller IDE card in a PCI slot.  Since
"cheap" is a goal, and performance isn't as critical, I'm figuring on
inexpensive IDE drives and software RAID.

Does anyone have any opinions on AFS vs. CODA vs. NFS?

It will also run Samba, so my Win98 notebook (SLOOOOWWW Celeron 333) can
make use of the space too.

Being a closet dweller, video and sound aren't issues, and I think most
of the micro ATX mobo's out there have both onboard, as well as 100BT
ethernet.

I am considering splurging a little bit and getting one of those cool
LCD or Flourescent displays that fits in a drive bezel...where I could
display %free space, cpu temp, and put up witty little sayings...

Does anyone see any gross flaws in my plan here?

TIA,

Darin