Netbook as a fileserver?

[amanpatel]

My goals:

- expandable RAID-5 (rules out zfs).
- cheap (rules out hardware based raid).
- very low power (ideally should be <20W, and idles at ~10W -- excluding the HDDs).
- not performance sensitive (will be streaming 1080p movies and videos, and thats pretty much it).


My question is this:

Will this:
http://www.sansdigital.com/towerraid-plus/tr8mbp.html

work if I connect the eSATA port that comes out of it directly to a netbook's SATA port?

The TowerRaid comes with a PCI card that lets you plug it in to a normal desktop, but what would be my options for having it connected to a netbook?

I will be using it with Ubuntu and Linux's excellent software RAID-5 (mdadm -- which is expandable!).

I can buy one of these netbooks for about $100 on craigslist, and have myself a nice networked 8-port DROBO equivalent for a total cost of about $400 (vs almost $1500).

 

[cganesh75]

i use a old beat up E1505 laptop as my server. i have amahi installed and its wonderful. I have an external array from addonix that i connect through USB.. but i am going to move to a e-sata express card (this addonix enclosure also has esata connection), I have not used raid, the tower provides various raid options + jbod

 

[Zap]

Hello amanpatel. Wow, registered in 2005 and this is your first post?

I don't think it would work. The SATA port needs to support port multipliers.

I would find an E-350 ITX motherboard with six SATA ports, and shove it into a little case. The E-350 is the same as used in the AMD netbooks, so you get low power draw.

 

[amanpatel]

I never thought about that... ofcourse the sata port has to support multiplier (as the standard does not require it).

I think I might go with the E-350 route (it seems very low power) (atom boards with 6 ports are hard to find). And with this option, if I have a crummy old case lying around, I don't have to spend $300 for the towerraid product...

Thank you for the suggestion!