Nominally, to run ForensiX, you will need a PC running a Unix or Linux variant and about 150M bytes of disk space. You will also need enough disk space to hold any images you make and the associated files generated by ForensiX. As a rule of thumb, you will need about 25% more disk space free than the size of the disk you are imaging in order to store all of the necessary information.
To build a ForensiX compatable system, you will beed to run RedHat 6.0 or anoother upward compatable Linux system. ForensiX will support all devices that Linux supports on the system, so get hardware that is Linux compatable and it will be ForensiX compatable.
For laptop configurations, we currently use an IBM 600 computer and mount external disks for imaging using the PCMCIA ports. Check IBM and Linux resources for details on compatability.
For Desktop computers, we currently run on off-the-shelf desktop systems.
External interfaces that we believe to be worth getting include SCSI and IDE interfaces, a LAN card, serial and parallel port converters of various sorts, external disk interfaces for expanded memory, a CD-rewritable disk or external SCSI tape drive for backing up images, and a set of connectors for different sorts of disks and other media. In your kit, you might also want to have a wide range of mountable disk drives to handle the media you find on site.
This is the configuration I use in two sample systems I have operating in my offices:
My desktop system includes 350mhz K6/2 processor with 256K of RAM, a 1280x1024 display, a 3c509C Ethernet card, 40 Gig of internal IDE disk, a 5-disk RAID array of SCSI disks, and various connectors and hardware interface components.
My laptop ForensiX system includes an IBM Thinkpad 600E (standard configuration), an EtheRx PCMCIA ethernet card, a Panasonic PCMCIA SCSI disk interface, Flash cards, an external PC-card disk (20gig is not too expensive) and other PCMCIA cards as appropriate. When necessary, I image from one device to the other using the external disk as the location for ForensiX. I then transfer data to my desktop system or to other compatable media via Ethernet.