Network Drive

[11Blade]

I posted this question a short while ago and the responses were very helpful. Unfortunately the cheap solution was exactly that.. cheap and slow.

My current home setup is a based around a Linksys Wireless-G 4 port router.
I have 2 P4-3Ghz workstations for imaging work, a P4 desktop for accounting, email etc that are all wired into the router. My wife and son use laptops around the house and
occasionally I use my laptop upstairs. The network suits me fine for performance and
even for machine to machine file transfers.

I however need to centralize some file storage for work, home media, accounting and
backup purposes.

I bought and returned the Argosy Network Drive and also a Buffalo Linkstation. Both were fine but slow.

I would like to take a small form factor box and make a 500 gig RAID(for redundancy)
available to the network with decent performance. Can someone give me some pointers?
I have an old legit copy of win2000 available but am not against installing Linux

What do I need?

has to be energy efficient and quiet. I would rather not slave one of my P4 machines because I like to turn them off unless I am using them. The space is not so big and
heat and noise are big factors from the machines.

cheaper is still better, otherwise I would go buy a NetApp or something. performance is
still an issue.

My idea..
SFF board with fanless box, some ram, a couple of SATA drives, cheapo videocard and
win2000 or linux.

thanks for all your helP!

11Blade

 

[n0cmonkey]

One of the newer VIA boards, available from places like mini-box.com and mini-itx.com are energy efficient. Nice little buggers really. I'd have a dozen of them, if I could afford them. 😛

They even have fanless options. Get a decent RAID card (something like an AMI MegaRAID), and a couple of disks and you're set. :beer:

 

[nweaver]

going with Linux can save you the raid card, as it has very nice SW raid.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: nweaver
going with Linux can save you the raid card, as it has very nice SW raid.

Hardware raid keeps you from getting locked into any solution. 😉

 

[11Blade]

I am considering a ViA board. Since I will be networking the storage, someone mentioned I may see some performance gain by getting a gigabit switch for my PC's and network drive
and bridging to a wireless router for the home network.

Any opinions? Do any SFF boards have onboard RAID?

 

[Slowlearner]

It all comes readymade from mirra.com - though it may not be 500 GB or RAID

 

[skyking]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey

Originally posted by: nweaver
going with Linux can save you the raid card, as it has very nice SW raid.

Hardware raid keeps you from getting locked into any solution. 😉

hardware raid and a no-gui install of <favorite distro or bsd> with samba. done deal🙂