Hi all, having recently discovered the joy of newsgroups I find myself with the annoying predicament off running out of storage space... I have several redundant Hard-drives lying around between 80 to 250 GB, and also an old complete celeron (read ancient!!!) WIN98 system.

I had the idea of combining these into one system to use purely as a storage system and allow access from my laptop, and main desktop, and possibly if it all goes to plan! the other two computers in my household.

Being fairly new to the whole Networking thing (Have enrolled on a Cisco Networking course, but that doesn't start until Feb!!) I need some advice on building this system from the ground up... Which operating system to use, which FTP program etc... I've read through some of the posts here and I'm a little confused!!

I'm going for ease of use and setup to start with, so please bear this in mind!!!

Also will I need any other hardware to allow this system to be seen in my mini LAN? other than a basic network card.
I'm sorry for all the very basic newbie style questions, but I just need pointing in the right direction, and hopefully things will take off from there!
Many thanks in advance for reading and for any advice that you can offer!

I'm at your mercy!!!