Anyone here ever set up a so called "cloud" with a server located at home? I'm interested in setting up a NAS in the near future for my girlfriend and myself and I would love to have it be cloud-esk and be accessible from anywhere where I have internet access (or better yet be able to steam to my phone), but I know very little about setting up a home server. I've never built a server so I'm expecting their to be a learning curve along with a lot of research before I get things right, but I was just curious if anyone has ever set anything like this up before. What I envision is a server I can access over my home network (something with an attractive GUI/layout would be nice), as well as be able to login to from work, friends houses, while traveling, etc. So I suppose a second question is, is a cloud even what I'm really looking for? Thanks in advance!
beautiful, thank you gentleman! Also, I am hoping to set my drives up in a RAID configuration but I have no experience with RAID. From what I have read and the amount of data that will be stored (right of the bat it will be around 1.8TB and that number will grow quite a lot) it seems like I should go with RAID 5. Does that sounds like a good decision? and lastly, my assumption is I should get a dedicated RAID card. Any recommendations? I'm thinking I'll probably go with maybe 6-8 1TB drives (from what I've read, a higher quantity of smaller drives is better than fewer big drives?). Any advice on those?
I'm running a DS211j with RAID 1 and it's accessible from anywhere with an internet connection. I absolutely love it. If you're after a RAID 5, then maybe the DS411j would be better if you want a dedicated solution, otherwise it would be best to make a custom build.
Well, first you must decide what do you really want. A pre-made solution like the NAS above, which is nice, but with more hard drive positions the price usually goes up very quickly. Even at 2 drive setup, you can usually get a lowend computer setup for similar price - with much higher performance. For 4 and more drive solutions, custom build is usually cheaper. Other side of the coin is the fact that if the functionality the NAS provides is enough for you, then you can save yourself some time by not wasting your time with hardware and software. Unless you need 100% protection on your NAS for the case of power interruption (aka battery backup for the RAID card), you don't really need a hardware RAID solution. Some other software solutions : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network-attached_storage#Open_source_implementations
well I've read that typically hardware RAID cards allow for faster CPU speeds because your not using all your CPUs bandwidth to process read and write commands. I would definitely rather have a custom build because I enjoy the learning experience as well as the putting together my own builds. Even if a purchased solution was cheaper I would still almost certainly go with a custom build rig. A RAID system with some redundancy is important to me because of the amount of data that will be stored on my unit which is why I was thinking RAID 5. Hot-swappable HDDs would be fantastic also just for the convenience factor but is certainly not a much. If I could copy the functionality of the DS411j in a custom build with more drives it sounds like it would be just what I want. Is this something that nobody has done? I thought for sure lost of people would have something similar to this, I can't be the only one who wants a private cloud
Well, real hardware RAID cards (read 400€ and higher) lower the CPU usage because from the system perspective the whole RAID array is just one drive and all RAID processing is done by the RAID card hardware. With software RAID or software RAID-like cards (Intel RAID on motherboads, Adaptec HostRaid and similar cards) do the RAID processing on the CPU, but this is not a big load, it's usually the I/O which limits your speed (from the system perspective, you calculate the RAID stuff and then write the relavant part of it to each disk separately). Real hardware RAID is better in a bit lower CPU usage, usually a bit higher performance (but not by much unless we talk about extreme speeds) and mainly the possibility of the battery backup which adds extra layer of protection for the RAID array in case of power failure. Hot swapping is a feature of the case, all AHCI SATA controllers must support that feature. And the last part about why no one did this - well people did, sort of. It is what i linked above - FreeNAS, or manually configured Linux distribution, or a Windows installation - when you got a standard PC, then people usually don't limit themself to NAS functionality. PS: I think you should stop using the term "private cloud" and you should start using the terms like "server" or "NAS".
fair enough, mostly I was calling it that because my primary desires are to 1) store all my data on a home server ans 2) be able to fully access that server and steam data from it from anywhere (I figured that's pretty much what a cloud is. The last thing that might be worth noting is I would like to be able to torrent directly to it if possible. Oh, and I hadn't had a chance to check out the FreeNAS link because it was blocked at work, but now I'm hope so I'll give it a read!
Virtualbox/Virtual PC/Vmware is your friend, try the different NAS software solutions and choose the one which suits you best.
I use windows home server. Dead simple to set up, and it automagically backs up all the windows boxen in the house every night around midnight.
THAT is beautiful haha. I can't steam the video yet because I'm still at work, but if the title accurately reflects the content than this is probably exactly what I'm looking for. I'm going to have to watch it later and see what the verdict is!
