[ILUG] Re: [OT] selecting home file server hardware (Darragh Bailey)

[Colm Buckley]

On Sat, Apr 3, 2010 at 8:43 AM, Niall O Broin <niall.obroin at gmail.com>wrote:


> I think this process can be summed up like this - buy a device like the
> above, and it'll be small, neat, quiet, easy to get going, low power and
> will do a lot, but maybe not everything you'd like it to do. Build your own,
> and it's going to take more time to get going, be less plug and play simple,
> but more likely to do everything you want, eventually, at a price in terms
> of your time, noise, and power consumption.
>

I kind of have one of each.  My multi-purpose server-with-lots-of-storage is
based on a "Bare Bones Server 2" from TranquilPC (
http://www.tranquilpc-shop.co.uk/acatalog/BAREBONE_SERVER_Series_2.html)
running Ubuntu Server.  It has five 1TB drives stuffed into it, in a RAID6
configuration (using MD giving about 2.8T of usable space - it can also do
hardware RAID on four of the 5 drives if you want it to); it boots from a
4GB IDE flash drive.  The drives are Western Digital WD10EACS, which are
both very quiet and pretty low-power.  This was not a terrifically cheap
system, but I am very pleased with it; it's extremely quiet and consumes
only a trickle of power (which is important as it's on 24/7).  The CPU is a
dual-core Atom 330 (with HT); not a speed demon but it's easily handling
everything I throw at it.  The only real downside of this box is that it has
only a single Ethernet port; I really would have preferred two (one to talk
to the DSL modem, one for my internal network), but I used a USB Ethernet
for the DSL side and it works fine.

I also have a LaCie 5Big NAS which I use for backups; also with 5 1TB
drives.  This is the "appliance" model; it only does NAS (CIFS+AFP) with the
usual bells and whistles like media sharing, HTTP access and so forth, none
of which I use.  It's also very silent and was comparatively inexpensive.
 It's not hugely fast, but does reliably serve out the filesystems I've put
on it.  It's entirely unhackable as far as I can tell (although I suspect
it's just another PC under the hood), but is also quiet, power-frugal and
generally well-behaved.  The administration interface is a slightly fiddly
HTTP system; I would have liked an SSH command-line or something as an
option but it's not offered.  The web interface plays lots of Javascript
tricks which actually end up making it unusable in Chrome (Firefox works
fine).  Firmware updates come out a couple of times a year. It's wakeable
using wake-on-LAN, but to shut it down you need to log into the web
interface.  It's also visually quite a striking box; gray metallic cube with
a large round blue light in the front face.

Anyway; they're both fine boxes for what they do; I like the flexibility of
having a "full" Linux on the BBS server (it also acts as my dhcp/radvd/DNS
server, firewall, router etc.) and the simplicity of the LaCie appliance.
 If I was to only have one, it'd be the full Linux box for sure; nothing
beats the flexibility of having the full power of a mainstream Linux distro
on a home server without needing any special hackery.

Colm


-- 
Colm Buckley / colm at tuatha.org / +353 87 2469146