[Discuss] Home NAS redux

[markw at mohawksoft.com (Mark Woodward)]

I have a D-Link DNS-321, its OK as a backup system. Its small and energy 
efficient, all that nice stuff, but with drive mirroring, it is SLOW as 
a dog, and a slow dog at that. 5~10 megabyte per second over 1gb 
ethernet is painful.

I'm considering software raid 5, 3x2TB disks to put me at 4TB of raid 
storage. Share with NFS and Samba, I'll even share virtual devices 
through iscsi. I'll use the DAAP server to share media.

The questions are these:
I sort of like having a web interface to the DLINK-321, are there any 
similar projects for Linux? FreeNAS is targeted toward freebsd and uses 
ZFS, I do not wish to use zfs for license issues.

When not in use, I'd like the system to spin down the hard disks and use 
less power. Is anyone familiar with doing this on PC based (non-laptop) 
hardware? I know you can use hdparm for the disk spindown, but does 
"Wake-On-Lan" really work?

I've used the Linux software raid in the past with mixed results. What 
is your take on the modern iteration of the code?