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.
