I'm going to be building a small (i.e., cheap) home file server.  The 
primary use is for backup copies of a few Windows file systems, via a 
switched 100BaseT network.  I have a 60G, 7200 rpm, ATA/133 drive lying 
around; I'm contemplating buying another and setting up a RAID 
environment.  But I've never built such a system before.

So -- should I use two drives, each on one of the two IDE channels on 
the motherboard?  The CD drive would be very lightly used, except for 
NetBSD installations and upgrades.  Buy an outboard IDE controller?
(SCSI, apart from being unneeded, is well beyond my budget for this 
project.)  Would I be better off with a small system disk, plus two 
RAID drives for data?

Which RAID should I use?  Is RAID1 sufficient, or should I use 4 or 5?  
(The goal is reliability, not speed.)

How much CPU do I need?  Would a 233 Mhz Pentium or a 350 Mhz P II 
suffice?  (I'll almost certainly use one of the Intel NIC cards.)  And 
any suggestions on motherboards?


		--Steve Bellovin, http://www.research.att.com/~smb (me)
		http://www.wilyhacker.com ("Firewalls" book)