i'm going to explain my project to hear your idea. a computer always on with a small hard drive with linux and 3 hard drives in raid 5 that will be shared in network with samba and nfs. this pc will also serve as nat, qos and some other services to share adsl instead of integrated pppoe in my router (that i will configure as "bridge"). in my network i will have my mobile phone with wifi, the netbook I'm going to buy the next week, my desk computer and maybe a device to watch films on television. also my sister's pc so she can use the storage to save her data. my "normal" pc will stay on only when i use it and it will use data from its own hard drive and from the other computer with the archive. do you think this will be a great solution if i want to have lots of data without risk of losing it anytime? now i have 160+500gb with about 100mb free, 1tb won't last but some months and i think this is the right time to move to a safe solution that will last in time. I already own the storage pc so my expense will be 3 hard drives and a gbit network card (so i won't be limited to 10mb/s). what do you think? is there any better solution?
There are some simpler solutions, I know a lot of the NAS boxen you can buy suppport those features, but if you've already got most of the parts then I see no reason not too. What's wrong with your router for most of the network admin? I see no reason to move those to a pc because (in general) they'll happen better in a router and that'll free up resources on the server. I can recommend the WD Green drives, we have 3 WD10EADS in the server at my family's house and they've never faultered. What are you doing for an OS? If the server has some meat to it I'd suggest Ubuntu, but I've used Puppy, Damn Small Linux, Tiny Core (takes some work), Crunchbang and Ubuntu Server (no GUI mind!) with success in the past. All could be easily made into a simple home server, as could any distro really.
a real NAS is expensive, i need almost 3 bays and i don't think a nas is as powerful as a computer. my router is nice but i think that my computer's cpu is a bit faster. not a great difference but why not? this is the storage computer: celeron 1100, 640mb sdram, gbit ethernet, usb2.0 ports, sata ports. faster than any cheap NAS probably.. as OS i'm gonna use Debian. I know how to configure it and it always worked as I wanted.. here the hard drives available in the shop i'm going to buy from: 76,80€ Maxtor 1TB SATA-II 7200rpm 32MB 78,00€ Samsung 1TB F1 7200rpm SATA II 32MB 78,00€ Western Digital 1TB SATAII 32MB 78,00€ Seagate 1TB SATA-II 7200rpm 32MB 114,00€ Seagate 1,5TB SATA-II 7200rpm 32MB 189,00€ Western Digital 2TB SATAII 32MB i think i'll buy the 1,5TB one because of the €/gb ratio. what about RAID 5? is it safe or should i look for another solution like daily copy with rsync from one drive to another?
RAID 5 is safe (on hard drives under 2TB, anyway - beyond that and the risk of unrecoverable errors jumps too high for safety), but unless you're hooking them up to a discrete RAID controller, it will be very, very slow. RAID 5/6 on onboard RAID is an absolute no-no. On a dedicated card, the card's processor would be in charge of all the mathematical XOR operations necessary to make RAID 5 work, and they're usually optimized for that kind of task. On onboard, though, your system's CPU is in charge of those calculations. You can see the kind of massive bottleneck that would produce. RAID 0/1/10 is okay on onboard, though - that's just splitting data into two channels, not messing with the data itself, so it doesn't tax your CPU nearly as much. - Diosjenin -
i don't have (and i don't want to use) onboard/dedicated raid, i'll use linux software raid so i am not hardware dependent. so i can attach anytime my hard drives to any linux system and read my data.
Yeah, you'll be fine with software raid on that server, and you're sorted with Debian too. RAID 5 is definately safe, so no worries there either. Whilst I'd never count out a dedicated NAS (they're pretty perfect for what they do) you will certainly have a much better system there. I wasn't really suggesting one in the first place, I would do exactly what you are doing, I just thought I'd mention them.
