[ale] Build-yer-own NAS server

Robert Story rstory-l at 2006.revelstone.com
Wed Jun 7 22:59:20 EDT 2006


On Tue, 6 Jun 2006 12:48:36 -0400 Pete wrote:
PH> With the flurry of cheap, high-capacity hard drives out there, I am
PH> beginning to think about
PH> moving my home machines towards using some form of NAS for the majority of
PH> the disk space
 ...
PH> 2) what should I look at w/r/t the NAS device proper (which distro,
PH> mobo issues, etc)?

I'm using CentOS (RHEL clone) as my distro, the theory being that it should be
stable and relatively secure.

PH> 3) what type of RAID would be suitable for this?

Unless you have enough space to back it all up, RAID5. I have a 4 port IDE
card, w/3 active drives and 1 spare. I boot off another drive on the on-board
controller.

I use software raid because:
	speed isn't critical
	cards much cheaper
	recovery from card failure is a simple as getting drives into another
		system

PH> 4) am I forgetting anything?

Some say to get the same sized drives form different vendors, to reduce the
chance of failures.

I recommend a thorough test/burn-in for each drive before trusting your data
to it. ('mke2fs -c -c', even if you are going to use some other filesystem).
Note that this can take a looooong time on modern, large drives.

Make sure your power supply has enough drive power cables and/or invest in
some splitters (4 drivers for raid, 1 boot, CD/DVD = 6 connectors).

Invest in a ups, preferably one with usb communications, so you can have
automated shutdown in case of a power failure.

If you expect to be moving large amounts of data between computers regularly,
make sure everybody has gigabit ethernet cards w/jumbo frame support, and get
a gigabit switch w/jumbo frame support...

That's it, off the top of my head...




More information about the Ale mailing list