ok chaps and chapesses,

my home system is now becoming a bit unwieldy with 20 odd hard drives varying in size from 80GB to 1.5TB over 4 machines i have in various location around the house. i bought a Lian Li Cube case which is massive and have 11 drives in that.

I would like to set up some sort of rack mounted system using old server stuff. i have no interest in gaming just shifting information like movies and music round the various machines. the 4 computer i have hardwired on a gigabit network and the two laptops and blackberry can access via wireless. i was talking to someone yesterday who said old Linux stuff can be picked up of fleabay for a song.

so what are my options. opteron boards seem to work and i see scoobylou has a dell win2k server for sale. would that suit my need?

i know nothing about all this stuff (setting up servers etc.)

TIA

 

Are you looking for 1 central system which will hold all of your data? How much disk space are you talking about?

What's your budget?

 

Budget probably is the key.

If you've nice, deep pockets, Supermicro have some lovely kit:

Super Micro Computer, Inc. - Products | Supermicro Storage Chassis Solutions

The SC846A takes 24 3.5" HDs in 4U - 24TB enough space for you? You'll just need somewhere cool to put it (oh, and it's probably a bit noisy!).

 

12-15 TB at the moment. Yes i would like one central system. and yes as cheap as possible. don't mind old second hand gear as long as it can feed the data to the various PCs, music systems and various home entertainment systems

 

12 -15 TB! Good grief - what have you've got stored!

 

your leccy bill must be mahooosive

i,d look at all the power consumptiom -- and really take that into consideration

 

The cheapest 2Tb drives are about £150. For 16Tb you'd need 8 at a cost of £1200 and that wouldn't include any redundancy.

Do you have £1200 for this project or are you planning/hoping to re-use the existing disks?

 

can i not reuse the bigger 1.5, 1 and 0.5TB drives? the 80s, 160s and 300GB drive i would phase out. they are starting to fail on me anyway. i can caddy them up and take what i want off them anyway. not that fussed on redundancy. no business critical data here so JBOD is fine. think data server on the cheap.

Or am i wasting my time?

 

If you are going rack mount, do you have the depth available to house one?

I like the Supermicro 800 something series rack mount that has 24 hot swap bays in

Are all you drives the same type of interface? Sata?

 

yes all the drives are SATA

 

sinky - take a look at Free NAS or Open filer - in my opinion Free NAS is the better of the two products.

I have one old PC - doenst need to be a huge spec machine, P3 with 512 will do well. Up to you weather you want to install a raid card or use software raid or run as JBOD as you suggest. It will work with either SATA or IDE drives. The NAS software can be installed and booted from a USB stick, or flash card or a hard disk, all managed through a web interface.

If you are looking for a a decent media manager, have a look at Jinzora.

If you want to go down the true NAS route I would opt for something from QNAP - they are expensive but vey good.

 

If this is for a massive film collection then you are wasting time and money, just download them again when you want to watch them.

 

I'm experimenting with FreeNas (on fair modern but cheap hardware) with 3 x 500gb HDD's. It seems pretty good so far. I went for this as I wanted Wake-On-Lan so the system isn't running 24/7.

I actually get faster file transfers with that on a gigabit network, then with the Win2k server software I was.....evalulating.

 

but i don't want to wait 2 minutes to download an 800MB porno movie