Re: [gentoo-user] homemade nas setup

[Stroller <stroller@stellar.eclipse.co.uk>]

On 30 Jan 2009, at 00:06, Harry Putnam wrote:
> ...
> A few I can think of are space and noise.. but having never been
> around our run a nas setup... I'm not sure if that is really true.

Power consumption, too. I think some of the off-the-shelf mini-NAS use  
a low-power MIPS processor.

I like a "real Linux" server rather than an off-the-shelf mini-NAS  
because you can do so much more with it. I rip DVDs & download  
torrents on the headless server, as this saves me having to leave my  
workstation on overnight.

Unfortunately "all the other stuff" is a considerable reason I had to  
rule out Solaris, which I would like to have used for its ZFS file- 
system. I felt I probably wouldn't like the package manager, and I  
didn't seem to be able to find supported hot-swap controllers. There's  
just loads of stuff I know I'm more easily going to be able to find  
help with on Linux.

But mini-NAS does really well for many people. I found the problem  
with going it myself to be feature creep - I want room for plenty of  
drives and once you've got a server running 24/7 there's always  
something else you can "usefully" run on there. I ended up buying one  
of these <http://www.tstcom.com/product_details.asp?id=4> and a 3ware  
9500 RAID controller - this has turned out pretty expensive but I  
think worth it to me, as it should last me a long time. I am just  
about to build.

3ware's customer support, BTW, is second-to-none - if buying one of  
their controllers on eBay ask the vendor to check the serial, as many  
are still under 3ware's no-quibble 3-year warranty. My experience with  
their tech support has been excellent, and will make them first choice  
for hardware in the future.

Stroller.