Even as the capacity of physical disks soars, storage vendors continue to charge a small fortune for network filers. An open source alternative on the lower end is FreeNAS, which has support for CIFS, NFS, rsync, SSH, iSCSI, and FTP, as well as software RAID. It can handle several authentication methods (including local, Active Directory, NIS, and RADIUS) and sports a Web GUI, all while taking less than 32MB after installation. This means you can use it on USB keys and portable hard drives. It's also available in the form of a VMware appliance. FULL REPORT ...