I use my old PC as a NAS box - has a tiny O/S on it called FreeNAS - http://www.freenas.org I think is the website.

works really well, uses CIFS / Samba for Windoze and AFP for my Macbook, so anything can talk to it.

Total cost of Ã,£0 is always nice  

^^ yep Im going back to doing that

tho I use NasLite .... cant remember why I chose it over FreeNas.... I think there was an extra feature I wanted that only NasLite had.... plus it was only Ã,£8 iirc

(first software Ive paid for in a good 10 years!)

dont have the space for a full sized pc to run a NAS

stick it in the loft etc...

mines going in the celler :-)

(so I don;t have to listen to the fans/hds running !)