I have 4 hard drives -- want to make a network server... what's my best bet?

[Al Neri]

I'd like to create a file server to store my video/music/etc. I rummaged my closet and found four IDE hard drives:

(1) 160gb
(2) 200 gb
(1) 250 gb

810 gb would make for a sufficient server at this time. Anyway - what's my best bet in creating one? I don't think I have any old PC's so I'd have to start from scratch.

Thanks!

Don R.

 

[BurnItDwn]

There are lots of ways to do it.
Here are a few ....

If you want the easiest way, you could just buy a NAS enclosure and stick them in it.

If you want the cheapest way, you could get an old Pentium or Pentium 2 or some other "junk PC" for dirt cheap, or maybe even free. Then all you'd need to do is get an add on PCI card that can support the drives bigger than 137GB. Install a lightweight Open Source OS ... and share the drives via Samba. (Install SWAT if the idea of building your own smb.conf seems like too much work.) You would be best off with something that has at least 32MB of ram, though I know some distros can run on less.

You could also just buy a used p3 or something in that range and stick 256mb of ram on it, and then buy a copy of Win2k or WinXP, and then share the drives that way.

You could also just buy 4 cheap USB enclosures and then use them as detachable storage.






Personally .. I'm a big fan of the Linux File server ...

 

[RaiderJ]

Another option would be to sell the drives and use the cash to buy one or more larger drives. Maybe get a single 750GB and a network enclosure.

 

[Cerpin Taxt]

I had an old HP Pavillion 8670C that was lying around unused so I installed Xubuntu on it. I don't have the drives that I'll eventually want it to hold, but I set it up because I was totally new to Linux. Now I'm sharing ~23 GB on my network using Samba. I installed Webmin to manage a lot of thing on the server from my main Windows rig. I also installed a LAMP stack and Torrentflux, a PHP torrent client that I can access from anywhere on the internet.

It was all surpisingly easy, aside from a few bumps that required me to go searching for support online. I accomplished all of the above having never used a Linux distro before in my life. I even manually configured my smb.conf file.

Now I've just been reading up on Linux-supported PCI IDE controller cards and keeping my eye out for some good cheap IDE drives to connect and combine into a software RAID array.

 

[bob4432]

Originally posted by: BurnItDwn
There are lots of ways to do it.
Here are a few ....

If you want the easiest way, you could just buy a NAS enclosure and stick them in it.

If you want the cheapest way, you could get an old Pentium or Pentium 2 or some other "junk PC" for dirt cheap, or maybe even free. Then all you'd need to do is get an add on PCI card that can support the drives bigger than 137GB. Install a lightweight Open Source OS ... and share the drives via Samba. (Install SWAT if the idea of building your own smb.conf seems like too much work.) You would be best off with something that has at least 32MB of ram, though I know some distros can run on less.

You could also just buy a used p3 or something in that range and stick 256mb of ram on it, and then buy a copy of Win2k or WinXP, and then share the drives that way.

You could also just buy 4 cheap USB enclosures and then use them as detachable storage.






Personally .. I'm a big fan of the Linux File server ...

what lightweight os would you recommend, at least one with a gui or better yet one that can be managed through a webadmin setup.

 

[Talcite]

FreeNAS is a half-decent NAS OS. It has web-admin and samba features, I think they're putting radius on it as well.
I had it running on this old P3 slot1. Ran more than fast enough if you ask me.

I believe Damn Small Linux (DSL) is suitable, although you'd have to add support for samba and definitely put a bit of work in for the web admin. It's 50 megs though.

 

[BurnItDwn]

Originally posted by: bob4432
what lightweight os would you recommend, at least one with a gui or better yet one that can be managed through a webadmin setup.

I have never used any webadmin stuff beyond using SWAT many moons ago when first setting up my network shares.

With Linux and BSD, you can do pretty much 100% everything through an ssh session.

GUI's are pretty resource heavy ... any GUI will be slow on an old box. You could use a "minimalist" GUI like fvwm or Blackbox or Fluxbox, however, it would still use comparable resources to say ... Windows 95.


Talcite mentioned FreeNAS, I personally haven't used it though I have read a little bit about it, and it sounds like a good choice.

Something like Slackware or OpenBSD would take a bit more work than something like FreeNAS (though I'd say comparable to Damn Small Linux), though you would end up with a little bit more flexibility in the end.

Perhaps you might consider taking a glance at Distrowatch.com and reading a little bit about some of the top distros, and then make your decision from there.

 

[bob4432]

Originally posted by: BurnItDwn

Originally posted by: bob4432
what lightweight os would you recommend, at least one with a gui or better yet one that can be managed through a webadmin setup.

I have never used any webadmin stuff beyond using SWAT many moons ago when first setting up my network shares.

With Linux and BSD, you can do pretty much 100% everything through an ssh session.

GUI's are pretty resource heavy ... any GUI will be slow on an old box. You could use a "minimalist" GUI like fvwm or Blackbox or Fluxbox, however, it would still use comparable resources to say ... Windows 95.


Talcite mentioned FreeNAS, I personally haven't used it though I have read a little bit about it, and it sounds like a good choice.

Something like Slackware or OpenBSD would take a bit more work than something like FreeNAS (though I'd say comparable to Damn Small Linux), though you would end up with a little bit more flexibility in the end.

Perhaps you might consider taking a glance at Distrowatch.com and reading a little bit about some of the top distros, and then make your decision from there.

thanks for the info, will do

 

[Dragonbate]

My server is running Xandros- best thing about it it's ease of use. Runs more like windows than any other distro I've tried. I'm not sure how it would fare if resources were short. My server is a P4 1.9Ghz with 256mb of ram. Its been running smooth for over a year now.

 

[Warpirate]

naslite is also another good recommendation. I have used both freenas and naslite. Both offer different pro's and con's. Naslite is much faster on file transfers but has no where near the configartion options that freeNAS has. FreeNAS allows for external network access as well as user and groups configuration and integration in Active Directory.

 

[err]

I run a P4 1.5 ghz server in my garage with Windows Server 2003. I have 4 drives on it (3) 160GB and (1) 120GB.

If you're only looking to do file sharing, you can find older hardware such as P3 500 Mhz and 512MB Ram and install windows 2000 on it to run your file share.

Nothing fancy needed

 

[ShawnD1]

Originally posted by: BurnItDwn
Then all you'd need to do is get an add on PCI card that can support the drives bigger than 137GB.

It's interesting you brought this up. I just got a brand new computer with a 320GB drive, but Windows XP saw it as 137gb when installing. After I got into Windows and into the drives management, I was able to put a partition on the remaining portion of the hard drive. Given that it's a brand new computer using an old operating system (XP Home with no service pack is from 2001), I would assume the 137gb restriction was based on the software rather than the hardware.


For whatever computer you get as your server, make sure it has a gigabit ethernet card, connected to a gigabit router. Having a gigabit network makes a huge difference. It's so fast I can even play games like World of Warcraft or BF1942 from the network drives, all while somebody else is watching a movie on a network drive.

My server's a 350Mhz P2 with ~400mb ram on Windows XP Home. Even a slow P2 is enough to make a great file server.

 

[bob4432]

Originally posted by: ShawnD1
It's so fast I can even play games like World of Warcraft or BF1942 from the network drives, all while somebody else is watching a movie on a network drive.

so you install the game to a network drive....interesting, i might have to give that a try just for sh!ts and grins...at least 42 w/ dc

 

[BurnItDwn]

Originally posted by: ShawnD1

Originally posted by: BurnItDwn
Then all you'd need to do is get an add on PCI card that can support the drives bigger than 137GB.

It's interesting you brought this up. I just got a brand new computer with a 320GB drive, but Windows XP saw it as 137gb when installing. After I got into Windows and into the drives management, I was able to put a partition on the remaining portion of the hard drive. Given that it's a brand new computer using an old operating system (XP Home with no service pack is from 2001), I would assume the 137gb restriction was based on the software rather than the hardware.

You are absolutely correct. Windows XP with (pre-SP1) only can handle drives up to 137gb

This is because due to past barrier issues, the "fix" was to use "logical" block addressing rather then "physical" locations on the the drive (cylinder, head, and sector numbers.) Well, when they came out with this fix, they used a 28 bits for the sector number. 2^28 = 268,435,456 "sectors" each being 512 bytes. This translates to 128 GiB, or 137GB.

Hardware was upgraded to 48 bit logical block addressing several years ago. Windows XP Service Pack 1 gave windows the ability to see beyond the initial 137GB.


Pretty much every Linux and BSD distro out there can handle these big drives with no issue, provided the hardware is capable and supported.