So late last week I found out that version 13 of Slackware had been released. And because I have so much spare time (I guess in some ways I do), I decided to upgrade
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Flash drives seem easier for portability, unless you really need 500G on the run.
My weird roundabout way of approaching this was started by simply considering a second USB drive to mirror the first. I noticed SATA seems to be preferred over sturdy old RLL drives these days, but like you I have no SATA-compatible machines. So I reluctantly started that whole search of chipsets compatible with my OSes, which cards have those chipsets, which ones of those are known to be horribly buggy, etc, etc. It's one aspect of my OS choices which I really dislike. That's when I discovered that decent SATA cards, especially ones supporting SATA2, are kinda expensive. And what's the point in settling for a feeble SATA1 card when all the drives out there are firey SATA2 beasts straining to unleash ungodly amounts of data?
Around that time I was also idly fondling those cute little netbooks which are all the rage with the kids these days. Having a machine I can keep running with IM and email and all that good stuff without being a spaceheater seems like a nifty idea; I've wanted something like that ever since the original Psion Netbook. And in a curious case of different research converging into one, I ran across MBs based on the same cpu as most of those netbooks and discovered they support SATA2 natively and cost less than a decent SATA2 card. They also appear to consume less energy than my crusty old machines.
So it sounded like something which could sit around serving files, keep windows open for fairly lightweight apps, and potentially spew movies and music out if I wanted. Then I could keep my more power-hungry machines off unless I needed them for stuff like image editing, rather than keeping one or two on 24/7 like I'm doing currently. It'd be more functional and tweakable than a plain ol' NAS appliance for probably about the same cost or less.
And there you have a frightening glimpse into my meandering mental processes.
Yeah, I picked up a small flash drive to move some general stuff around but I wanted that 1TB drive just for pure storage (it's about half-full right now... RAW files are just damn big). Of course, I run myself into a tizzy thinking about back-ups now!
I'm actually intrigued by the idea of a netbook as well... but I think more where I can dump some photos and still futz around while travelling with-out having to lug something more robust around. Then again, with the age of my desktop machine I ponder just getting a good all-around laptop that I can do everything I want.
As you know, so little money and so many things to spend it on.
If you ever do figure out the perfect NAS-a-like, I'd be interested in hearing about it, too.
FBSD, OBSD, and Solaris are still my mainstays. It's not political--I'm posting right now from my WinXP machine, I have Win2k on a couple other machines, and nothing else I've seen is better for supporting a wide variety of filesystems than Linux, making it good for multi-system recovery tools. Every OS seems to have its place.
There's a project called FreeNAS, based on FBSD, which looks interesting. I might set up a test server using that with some unimportant files just to see how it holds up. Until I've gotten some experience with that and either feel comfortable with it or decide it needs to mature more, I'll likely stick with OBSD. OBSD's big thing is of course security, which isn't as much of a concern for this box as it would be for one sitting unprotected on the Intarwebs. But since a big part of its inherent security comes from combing carefully through the code for bugs, the result is a very stable, robust operating system. The only time I've seen OBSD crash was when I was using an old and--as I discovered--faulty HD; this goes with their philosophy that they'd rather the system crashed than risk data corruption or system integrity. Sounds perfect for a fileserver, where data integrity is paramount. The drive I've been using for my fileserver is mounted with soft updates, which is similar in purpose to journaling if technically different, so again good for data integrity. OBSD's also pretty lightweight and easy to pare down to a fairly minimal install, so fitting a functional base system on even a 2G SSD should be no challenge.
As I mentioned before, NVidia's chipset for the Atom is a bit more energy efficient than Intel's; I opted for the dual-core version despite it costing a bit more in energy usage, since I wanted to use it for more than fileserving. Beyond that it's mostly a matter of settling on HDs and assorted hardware like a case and such.
I keep checking up on drive reviews to see if I can settle on one model. Historically Seagate's been the reliable brand for desktops, and I've had enough bad luck with Maxtor, WD, and Fujitsu that I stopped using their products long ago, though I know others have done fine with them. But lately I've been hearing some bad news about Seagate's quality control and customer service slipping, so I think that pretty much leaves only Hitachi or Samsung. I'm a little wary of terabyte drives' reliability right now and will likely stick to 500-750GB instead, which will be mirrored. If I decide I need more space I can always get another pair of drives and do RAID10. I'm also toying a bit with the idea of using 2.5" drives instead of 3.5" for their energy consumption since I'd be looking at possibly four or more drives in this box.
A potential bonus of having a small system like this is it shouldn't be any worse to lug around than one of those LAN party type rigs if I really wanted to.
My weird roundabout way of approaching this was started by simply considering a second USB drive to mirror the first. I noticed SATA seems to be preferred over sturdy old RLL drives these days, but like you I have no SATA-compatible machines. So I reluctantly started that whole search of chipsets compatible with my OSes, which cards have those chipsets, which ones of those are known to be horribly buggy, etc, etc. It's one aspect of my OS choices which I really dislike. That's when I discovered that decent SATA cards, especially ones supporting SATA2, are kinda expensive. And what's the point in settling for a feeble SATA1 card when all the drives out there are firey SATA2 beasts straining to unleash ungodly amounts of data?
Around that time I was also idly fondling those cute little netbooks which are all the rage with the kids these days. Having a machine I can keep running with IM and email and all that good stuff without being a spaceheater seems like a nifty idea; I've wanted something like that ever since the original Psion Netbook. And in a curious case of different research converging into one, I ran across MBs based on the same cpu as most of those netbooks and discovered they support SATA2 natively and cost less than a decent SATA2 card. They also appear to consume less energy than my crusty old machines.
So it sounded like something which could sit around serving files, keep windows open for fairly lightweight apps, and potentially spew movies and music out if I wanted. Then I could keep my more power-hungry machines off unless I needed them for stuff like image editing, rather than keeping one or two on 24/7 like I'm doing currently. It'd be more functional and tweakable than a plain ol' NAS appliance for probably about the same cost or less.
And there you have a frightening glimpse into my meandering mental processes.
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I'm actually intrigued by the idea of a netbook as well... but I think more where I can dump some photos and still futz around while travelling with-out having to lug something more robust around. Then again, with the age of my desktop machine I ponder just getting a good all-around laptop that I can do everything I want.
As you know, so little money and so many things to spend it on.
If you ever do figure out the perfect NAS-a-like, I'd be interested in hearing about it, too.
Are you still primarily a FreeBSD-fox?
Reply
There's a project called FreeNAS, based on FBSD, which looks interesting. I might set up a test server using that with some unimportant files just to see how it holds up. Until I've gotten some experience with that and either feel comfortable with it or decide it needs to mature more, I'll likely stick with OBSD. OBSD's big thing is of course security, which isn't as much of a concern for this box as it would be for one sitting unprotected on the Intarwebs. But since a big part of its inherent security comes from combing carefully through the code for bugs, the result is a very stable, robust operating system. The only time I've seen OBSD crash was when I was using an old and--as I discovered--faulty HD; this goes with their philosophy that they'd rather the system crashed than risk data corruption or system integrity. Sounds perfect for a fileserver, where data integrity is paramount. The drive I've been using for my fileserver is mounted with soft updates, which is similar in purpose to journaling if technically different, so again good for data integrity. OBSD's also pretty lightweight and easy to pare down to a fairly minimal install, so fitting a functional base system on even a 2G SSD should be no challenge.
This is the motherboard I'd likely use:
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=4683885&sku=Z700-2015
As I mentioned before, NVidia's chipset for the Atom is a bit more energy efficient than Intel's; I opted for the dual-core version despite it costing a bit more in energy usage, since I wanted to use it for more than fileserving. Beyond that it's mostly a matter of settling on HDs and assorted hardware like a case and such.
I keep checking up on drive reviews to see if I can settle on one model. Historically Seagate's been the reliable brand for desktops, and I've had enough bad luck with Maxtor, WD, and Fujitsu that I stopped using their products long ago, though I know others have done fine with them. But lately I've been hearing some bad news about Seagate's quality control and customer service slipping, so I think that pretty much leaves only Hitachi or Samsung. I'm a little wary of terabyte drives' reliability right now and will likely stick to 500-750GB instead, which will be mirrored. If I decide I need more space I can always get another pair of drives and do RAID10. I'm also toying a bit with the idea of using 2.5" drives instead of 3.5" for their energy consumption since I'd be looking at possibly four or more drives in this box.
A potential bonus of having a small system like this is it shouldn't be any worse to lug around than one of those LAN party type rigs if I really wanted to.
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