Saab - I'm not actually suggesting that you should use a P3 as a foundation for a terabyte NAS!
With such a slow bus performance would not be the best - but with one 3-4 intermittent clients as in a small home network, probably quite acceptable (I did a P1 which was unusably slow). Not sure how it would do for streaming video though...
Booting off a USB key (assuming the bios would let you) would give you 4x80gb which could be used as One Big Drive of 320GB which would be enough for most homes.
Actually, as for BIOS limits if you boot from flash, *BSD doesn't use BIOS calls so it doesn't care, so just don't configure the HDD in the BIOS.
Here's one satisfied user..
"I set up a 1.2TB raid 5 server, using a old P4 1.7Ghz, 256MB. I didn't like the the soft-raid, so I picked up a Highpoint RocketRaid 454 ATA host adapter. Made the array with the Highpoint, booted FreeNas from the Cd and recognized the adapter and the Raid array. After it mounted and formatted the array, it's been working without any problems for just about a month..."
My point is really that it works & works well and that if your needs are relatively modest it needn't cost you a dime. And if you're more ambitious, it's very possible to build a very fast and flexible high-end NAS server for less than a dedicated blackbox.
