plugout.net

Looking to actual pricing & performance of the NAS drives on the market I asked myselfe why not assembling an selfmade NAS ???

My considerations are
Atom mainboard (low power consumption)
Fancy housing
2 drive slots
Linux based OS

Some thing like this.
The performance will outperform any of these Philips or Lacie (low end) drives.

What could be a roadblock to do it ?

yes indeed, I considered it myself. There is two things and that is energy consumption and dimensions. An atom still consume more then these lacie or Philips devices.
50 watt doesn't seems much but considering 8600 hour in a year is 430 kWh or more then 100 euro's per year in electricity costs. Of course savings can be made by letting the system sleep at night or when not in use.

wow, that's a lot. Never thought if could be so much.

the spd8020 only uses 7 watt when disk is not spinning and around 15 when it is spinning

It's still faster than a cloud and this power consumption is unbeatable by a home server.

still a pity that Philips didn't spend 50 cents more for a decent amount of memory ;)

There is of course the FreeNAS project. Which is essentially what you are asking for. A highly customizable and very powerful open source NAS 'distribution'. Beware though: the required specs for version 8 are enormous (ZFS filesystem). Version 7 is somewhat lighter. There has been a fork in the project. Version 8 is a sort of commercially adapted version (slowly moving to closed source / private development). Version 7 (0.7) has branched away from the trend of high-end hardware in freeNAS development towards more 'realistic' hardware requirements. Well.. a bit too simple, but the key here is: there are two versions. Freenas 7 and 8 and Freenas 7 has a re-development elsewhere (forgot the name). I have a NAS running on a dualcore atom with 2Gb ram using freenas 7. Works perfect.

Other 'NAS operating systems' are NASlite for instance (commercial product with a freeware 'light' version)