[sclug] NAS

[John Stumbles]

On 03/11/11 13:46, Neil Haughton wrote:
> Has anyone built themselves a low-power NAS?
>
> I need to make my burgeoning collection of photos and music files (and
> other things) more resilient than at present (currently it is all on a
> single SATA drive).  I have looked at commercial NAS offerings but frankly
> ?150 upwards is a little steep for me, so I want to see if I can build one
> for somewhat less. Just two mirrored drives would do me, FreeNAS probably
> as the OS (unless there are other Linuxy recommendations), and an Ethernet
> port so it can plug into my router. Must be able to reuse my current SATA
> drive, and must be able to stay on for long periods without burning up my
> paltry salary so a low power processor essential.

I'm starting to firkle around with an HP Proliant server box which can 
be had for ?250 with ?100 cashback i.e. ?150. Not sure hwat poer it 
takes. Has 4 * SATA dive bays plus you can fit a SATA shiny disc 
toaster. One vendor (serversplus IIRC) is offering it with a FreeNAS 
thumbstick so you've got a more-or-less turnkey NAS server.

Me, I'm thinking of FreeBSD (partly because it offers ZFS out of the box 
which AIUI handles file or block deduplication and snapshotting) and 
actually installed it on the machine but haven't had time to play with 
it properly. May just go back to Debian if the learning curve is too 
headbanging.

-- 
John Stumbles                                       http://yaph.org.uk
:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-: