I know there have been multiple threads regarding backup and NAS solutions, but I am torn as to what direction I should be heading.

I need to build/determine the most reliable and easy-to-maintain NAS solution at my parents place. Currently they have an old (Athlon XP 1800) computer running two RAID1 drives on a cheap PCI SATA controller on our wired gigabit network. It's a fake raid (proprietary controller) on XP with some network shares. I configured their computer (workstation) so they save all their documents and pictures to this drive. I also have an external USB2 hard drive attached to that machine that I use for sporadic backups.

The setup today is running fine, however I am afraid of the effort required to maintain this with my being away. Given the file server is an XP machine every so often it has to be rebooted, for auto-updates, or whatever. Also, the fan on the motherboard is starting to die out provided the machine is old.

I see going down the path of one or two options

1) DLink DS-323 NAS device - where I would take the drives, reformat them, and use the DLink device to do its thing. I know RAID1 is not a backup, so what I would do is attach the external USB to one of the workstations (computers run 24x7 in our house) and do a backup of the shared location.

2) Retain the home grown NAS and install FreeNAS - or other Linux based software, repair the broken fan or put in another motherboard in the computer, attach the external RAID1 directly to the file server and set up rsync and backups. This would provide a more robust and faster solution, plus given it’s a Linux based kernel I presume it would be stable and not require intervention like XP (i.e. auto-updates)

The following are the requirements:
1) Easy to maintain - as I am not available and my parents are not computer I would like to limit the amount of interaction that may be required with the set up.
2) Redundancy - to keep the data available in event a single disk fails
3) Data Safety / Backup - this I will accomplish with the 3rd disk doing the backups.
4) Ease of replacement - in a case on disk dies, I would like a simple interface so I can guide them how to rebuild the array.
5) Scalability - in case we add more drives or need to increase the size of the shared platform.

Most of the data will be pictures, videos, and Word documents.

Any suggestions are appreciated.

Thanks!