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[zzsprade]

I have researched this and changed my ideas over and over again. I turn to everyone for what guidance and experience they can offer.

For some time now I have been meaning to use my old computer hardware to setup up a machine as separate NAS for my home. The purpose of which would be sheerily for storage, and not performance (streaming media etc.)

For this exercise I am more than willing to take the performance hit and embrace a ‘software’ RAID 5 setup – due to cost of ‘hardware’ alternative with onboard XOR processing.

For such an exercise I was originally going to use the Windows XP hack for RAID 5 on my main machine. However, I am in a quest for greater functionality.

Particularly I am looking at the alternatives of Windows Server 2003 and in particular, Linux (of which I have no experience, but am very interested to develop my knowledge) on a separate box.

With recent advancements I am keen to deploy this functionality:

• Expandability – That the array size can be grown with the addition of extra drives (A particular of the recent Linux kernel as I understand). Also whether it forms space as part of the main pool.

• Better to partition the RAID 5 array with separate drives for each media type (music, tv series etc) or use as a single pool of space.

• I have seen somewhere (very vague) the option of different sized HDDs and using the normal loss in space for the extra drive (parity) as a separate partition (not as important… just for future proofing upgrades).

• To have the array be functioning/accessible across Windows machines in a home network.

• SAMBA, FTP, accessibility away from the network and other interesting options available.

• E-SATA: Peoples experience with expanding for more drives via this option.

• Windows Server 2003 vs Linux build (for the functionality purposes above)

Can everybody share their personal experiences with such a task. Links? Recommended builds of Linux etc?

This is in an effort to compile recent advancements and knowledge for such a task that I wish to share as a resource. Also to see other peoples ideas.

The specifications of the machine will be as follows:

AMD64 3000+
1Gb DDR400
4x400gb Seagate SATAII drives
1xHDD for operating system etc.

(Parts spare from recent builds etc).

My apologies for the detail, but I seem to be going around in circles and would like some clarity.

-Alex

[bjs1400]

I am actually looking into setting up a similar setup.  I currently have a Debian Linux box with ~1.5 TB of hard drive space (not raided, just jbod) that all my storage sits on.  All disks are IDE whichI am growing tired of and am looking to turn a mini itx box I have sitting aorund into a NAS.

I think your setup is actually overkill for just a file server.  I understand that the CPU is going to be doing XOR computation, but thats still overkill in my opinion.  I'm gonna have a 1ghz cpu with 256mb ram doing pretty much the same thing.  I already bought a hotswappable sata enclosure (link) so I'm just gonna need drives to fill it up with and a sata-raid controller.  Looking at getting 4x500GB (SATA-II of course) or more, depends how rich I feel at the time.

As for the OS...  There are free NAS/SAN unix-based OS's out there.  Check out FreeNAS (which is based on FreeBSD) and OpenFiler Linux. They both support pretty much any transfer protocal you might want to use and I think they both support Active Directory integration, but for home use you probably wont need that.  Everything is set up web-based besides for an initial setup I believe.

If you are looking into exploring linux a bit more and want to set up everything manually with a regular distro of linux I'd say try out Ubuntu 6.06.  I use Debian which is similar, but many people find Ubuntu easier for new linux users.  There is plenty of help out there on Google for it and it can get you on your way pretty quickly.

As soon as I get my hardware I can provide a little more insight on both Openfiler and FreeNAS.