[mdlug] open source home storage

[Joe Doehler]

Hi:

I implemented a solution I am very happy with: an old 233MHz desktop, 
running Samba. That's fast enough to fill my 100Mb/s network when 
storing/retrieving large files (mostly photos). Two 1TB ATA drives 
are configured as software mirrors, are dedicated to storage, and use 
an encrypted filesystem. It works well as a file and music server for 
2 PC's, 3 laptops and my PS3. Listening to music or watching slide 
shows in my living room with an HDTV as a monitor for my PS3 is a 
dream come true. It's too slow when asked to be a video server 
(during which it needs to transcode), but otherwise it does 
everything I want it to do. It's cheap and very trusty: my record is 
a continuous uptime of over 400 days, truncated by a power failure. 
For home use, I think that a simple Samba box is ideal.

I have a friend who bought an NAS-in-a-box with mirrored drives; one 
of the hard drives failed after a few months, and it refused to 
deliver files from the surviving drive, preventing a backup: it 
needed both drives to function! It kept returning error messages 
stating that one drive needed replacement, but it was impossible to 
tell which physical drive that was, and the procedure for rebuilding 
the array was lacking: there was nothing to indicate which drive 
would act as the source during the rebuilding process. The filesystem 
was proprietary, so taking the hard drives out and attaching them to 
a spare Linux box of mine was useless. I used "dd" to make images, 
but that darn NAS box refused to work with identical drives. It's as 
if the drives in that alleged mirror do not have the same data; there 
may be an imbedded label somewhere... Yuck! It ended up in the trash...

Joe.

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At 04:34 PM 10/8/2009, you wrote:
>I am open to about anyting, I am looking for ideas. not to worried about
>electric costs as i also have a esxi server also. I have video, pics and
>other stuff. I have 2 mac book pro's and 1 windows pc.
...