Greetings people After some advice before I go about spending any money ... alway a good plan I'm looking to try and build a NAS from some computer bits I've got lying about, I have a few hard drives spare aswell so thats ideal What I'm after doing is being able to add drives to it as space requirements increase and replace faulty drives when neccessary (with some kind of redundancy). I've been reading about using FreeNAS and creating a ZFS space (so it expands across the available space) but also combining that with a RAID 5 array. This should give expanding storage with redundancy, even at the expense of some HDD space around (50%) Anyone got any advice or suggestions on this? Cheers Andrew
Take a look at unRAID too. It allows you to add disks at will to expand the array, but each disk is formatted with ReiserFS, so it can still be read in any other Linux box. It offers full parity, and apart from the parity drive, all the space on the other drives is available for storage.
nexenta? its basically opensolaris (so it uses ZFS) but with the linux userland (so it looks like ubuntu). specifically look into nexentastor - its paid for but theres a community edition that limits you to 12tb of used space (should be more than enough).
Ta very much Looking into those now 12TB at the moment would be a very distant limit me thinks I'm working with small old drives at present to see if what I'm doing is going to be of use or not Cheers Andrew
