DIY NAS Box

[Penth]

Originally posted by: Knavish

Originally posted by: Penth

Windows Home Server is the easiest server/backup system I've used. One namespace for all your storage (which you can do with DFS but you have to manage disk space) It backs up all my PCs every night, tells me if they haven't been backed up or if there's a problem with any of them, and I get 40MB/s transfer rates and faster. Forget Linux, FreeNAS, RAID-5 and all that other crap. If you have the money to spend on the big hard drives and you've got the data you need protected, just buy WHS, pay for an extra drive and be done with it. You'll never look back.

Oh yeah, and the remote access through yourname.homeserver.com is pretty awesome too.

BAH! where's the fun in that? If you have the desire to learn / expand your knowledge about linux, this is the perfect opportunity!

I've learned linux well enough for my needs. Installing FreeNAS is so easy you'd learn more setting up a WHS and learning to setup DFS. I guess if it's just for the person doing it they won't mind when FreeNAS bottlenecks their speeds and their system dies. If other people are going to be storing and accessing their files on this machine just get something that works - WHS. Play with FreeNAS on a VM.

 

[Stoneburner]

This troubles me. I wanted to setup a raid 1+0 or raid 0+1 for my WHS box. This is going to serving large media files so I wanted speed and redundancy. Will WHS built in raid like features provide this?

Moreover, I basically can't have raid set up through the chipset before installing WHS. So, what happens with my 4 x 1tb drives? It's going to be seen as 4tb but WHS will automatically allocate space on separate drives?

 

[WaitingForNehalem]

Check out Openfiler, it's free.

 

[faxon]

Originally posted by: themisfit610
Windows Home Server is essentially made for you...

It will do automated backups, easy drive redundancy (software RAID), and online capacity expansion. It's stupid easy.

Buy one of the home servers from HP that have 4 empty SATA bays. It's WAY too easy.

If that's a bit pricey, just get a really basic Atom board (or salvage an old PC), add a SATA controller, and load up FreeNAS, along with a bunch of SATA drives. FreeNAS is easy too (try it in VMWare first), and has a nice web UI.

~MiSfit

this pretty much sums it up for what i would do. im probably going to build my own. i want an 8 drive (2 4 drive RAID5s) server, which uses basically no power when idle if possible. a dual core atom would be enough processing power for what i want to do, but unfortunately the only atom 330 boards out are all mini ITX boards with 1 PCI slot, and i would want a PCI-e raid controller with a DRAM cache on it to run a stable storage server on. chances are i will end up with some super sweet mobo (10 sata ports+ job) with a super cheap dual core underclocked such that it will run at the lowest voltage the processor is specced to run