small home server hardware recommendations?

[jshine]

I was wondering if anyone had any recommendations for a place to buy a small server for home use (apache, MySQL -- mostly storing & serving photos from our digital camera, etc.). The traffic will be very light, but I'd like RAID (lvl 1, probably) to protect our photo album from disk crashes.

I don't mind ordering parts from newegg & assembling them, but there are so many options for RAID cards (with such a huge price range) that it's a bit confusing for someone whose never dealt with RAID before. If there's a place where I could order an assembled system, then that would be even better. I'd ideally like to keep it under $1000 (if possible), and as simple as possible (i.e., RAID natively supported by a 2.6 kernel w/o 3rd party drivers, etc.).

Any recommendations will be appreciated!

Thanks,
Jon

[Roxoff]

My advice is: build your own from old parts; you dont need an ultra fast processor, you dont need a sound card or a real fast video card. What you need for a server are:

- Rucks of disk space, which is cheap nowadays.
- A fast-ish network connection for the files it'll serve (100Mb network card is fine - you can get these for <&#163;10[$15])
- A reliable operating system; Linux is good - I'd never recommend Windows server...

Raid is just a plain PITA - burn your photo collection onto blank DVD-R's, and put them somewhere safe, and forget Raid. Use the disk space for what it was intended, you only need to keep the 'working copy' of your photo collection on the server so everyone can see it.