So, I’ve joined the crowd and built a home NAS box on Solaris Nevada. At the moment, it’s a paltry 2.0 TB of storage – waiting for a disk to get back from warranty repair before I use the server fully – at which point it will be up to 2.75 TB. Really not bad for a spare drive + $1033.00 before shipping. (When I ordered mine, the SATA card was out of stock.) This should get me through the next year, and free up my MacPro from being a glorified television – or at least, allow me to shut it down from time to time (or, even, allow it to sleep!) and know that my files are available to my wife’s laptop.

Sadly, I’ve got an upgrade planned. Another $1,184.00, and I’ll have a real case (not some crappy Rosewill plastic nasty), the afore-mentioned SATA card, and 5 more 750 GB drives (5.5 TB total). But that’s going to have to wait… a while. Probably a year or more – at which point, 1TB drives will hopefully be $119.00 instead of $179.00. We’ll have to wait and see.