DIY NAS?

I picked up a 300 GB hard disk for a very reasonable price. I bought it without really thinking about how I’d use it. Since purchasing my laptop, I’ve not used my old Shuttle PC for much – it and Carina’s old desktop have been made “family PCs” mostly for the kids’ use.

I’m not keen on adding any more PCs (or noise, or heat) into our house at this time, so how best to make use of this drive? A NAS would be useful, so that the kids can use it to store their data, allowing them to use either PC (all too often one of them is playing The Sims just when the other decides now is the perfect time to finish that story she started writing five weeks ago…). It would make a nice backup location for Carina’s and my laptop, too.

I’m eyeing the Linksys NSLU2. It looks like a reasonable, low-cost, stand-alone solution. Even better is the fact that I could run Debian on it!

Any other options I might be overlooking?