DIY Network Storage Drive

Hi everyone,
I am looking for some help building a network storage drive to serve as a backup archive for two computers on a small ship board network. I know these drives can be purchased commercially but all the ones I have seen are much bigger larger, several Tera Bytes, than what I need, 500 gigs max. Any help or a nudge in the right direction as far as hardware and software that I could piece together myself or buy for less than $700.00 to $1000.00 would be a great help.

Thanks
Nate

For $390 you could buy a **broken link removed**, a well respected storage solution. you could also download a copy of FreeNAS on a beige box PC and stuff it to taste with a 500GB drive.

If you don't need much performance, mirror two 1TB drives. $60 bucks a piece at tigerdirect. Most motherboards support two or three sata drives, use software raid in linux... cheap. Be sure you make backups, because raid/mirroring is not a backup solution.

I'd take a Synology NAS (Gigabit Ethernet) over a Drobo (Firewire / USB) anyday. I use a DS110j and it's a fantastic little NAS.