On 2012-12-04 10:43, David Suna wrote:I have a bunch of old machines lying around which are currently just collecting dust. I would like to collect the disks from all of them, put them together into a single server to act as a file server / NAS on our home network. There would probably be a combination of IDE and SATA drives.Make sure the TCO of running an old machine + lots of old HD's, is not more then buying a cheep green M.B. + 1or2 green HD. That said, ... What would you recommend as the best way to achieve this (with minimal cash outlay). The home network is a mixed Windows and Linux environment so I assume I would run Linux on the new server and provide access to the disks via SAMBA.Yep, you can RAID(1,5,10,6) the HD's as appropriate (i.e. see: selecting a RAID sys. on any wiki) and put LVM2 on top of that for use with SAMBA on a minimal stable Linux distro. If you need more, fancy file system btfs/zfs or iSCSI, FTP, NFS, it may be faster/better to go with a dedicated distro, checkout: OpenIndiana, FreeNas, Nexentastor, Openfiler. For now the main function of the server would be to serve as a place to do backups. I have never done anything with RAID so I don't know if that is something that I should take into consideration (especially as the disks are of varying sizes).Yes, you should select the best RAID sys for the H.D's size and condition, S.M.A.R.T is your friend. Remember RAID is not a backup! For a learning experience checkout: OpenIndiana, FreeNas, Nexentastor, Openfiler ,see there implantation-points and D.I.Y. Good Luck! |
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