Cross Platform, Low Powered Home Servers w/ RAID? 94
Milo_Mindbender asks: "At home I've collected too much data to easily backup, so I've been thinking about RAID5 for a little extra data security. I multiboot my computers for both Linux and Windows so I really need a RAID solution that will make the data at least readable by both OS's. I don't think this can be done on a single machine (can it?) so I'm looking to put together a Linux home server with RAID5 serving both SAMBA and NFS. Aside from the usual questions (software/hardware RAID, types of disk to use...etc) because I live by myself in an apartment I have a few tricky requirements I hope the Slashdot crowd can help me with." How would you set up a RAID5 server to perform Samba/NFS sharing duties without it wasting a lot of wattage, while it idles?
"I hate to waste electricity, so how can a Linux RAID5 server be setup to automatically spin down to the lowest possible standby power use, then spin back up when a computer accesses it? I don't have a basement, garage or other remote place to put the thing, so it needs to be quiet or at least not die a thermal death if I lock it in a closet. What's the sweet spot for choosing CPU type/speed, hardware/software RAID controller, motherboard and memory to make a home server? Since this is only going to be serving a few machines (and maybe doing router/gateway duty), I'm sure there's a point where adding more CPU horsepower doesn't improve performance much. Any suggestions on motherboards, cases or even complete systems that work particularly well for this kind of small headless home server?"
Hardware RAID (Score:3, Interesting)
Some Ideas (Score:4, Interesting)
Then grab a PCI SATA card. It won't need RAID capability, just a ton of SATA ports.
Attach a smallish hard drive to the master onboard PATA port and set a CDROM on the slave on the same channel. Install your SATA card and attach some big-assed SATA drives.
Install Debian to the PATA drive and then remove the CDROM. Disable, in BIOS, everything you won't be using.
Once you are in Debian and everything works, use 'mkraid' to initalize the SATA drives in a RAID5 config. Mount that under
Some might say that RAID5 will be too slow. But, across a network, chances are the wire will be saturated before the hard drives hit the sustained transfer rate. If you are concerned about performance, throw a Gig-E NIC in there and use RAID0+1 or RAID3.
I'm not sure how well Linux can deal with suspending the hard drives in a RAID controller during inactivity. If the kernel can handle it, use something like 'hdparm' to sleep the drives when they aren't in use.
Good luck, man...
Low wattage storage array (Score:3, Interesting)
VIA C3 (Score:4, Interesting)
Now, anyone know of a socket 370 motherboard that'll take 4 or more SATA drives?
Get a Buffalo (Score:3, Interesting)
I recently bought a single drive NAS unit with a 300 GB hard drive, use it for backup/storage for both Linux and WinXP (uh oh.) I also has additional tricks like built-in Gigabit ethernet, ftp server, printer server, backup of itself to attached USB 2.0 drive and misc. other tricks. Very nice device.
The main advantage of doing your backups onto a device such as this is the power savings -- this thing uses very little power compared to running an additional PC/server. Doesn't make much noise and generates very little heat. You can get up to 1.5 TB of storage out of one of these for a pretty price.
Check out the handsome little Buffalos at:
http://www.buffalotech.com/ [buffalotech.com]
Re:File server as a router (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, I initially did it because I had the parts laying around, and those routers at the time (> 5 years ago) cost a tad more than they do now. So, it was a question of free vs. $$$, and free won the day (and $$$ went to groceries for my family). One could argue that the smaller box might have saved me money from electricity usage, but I doubt my box is using that much anyhow - probably less than 20 watts total, but I have no way to verify that currently. I do know that the switching power supply in it is more efficient than the cheapo iron-core saturated AC wall wart that comes with most commercial routers, but all in all they probably both consume the same wattage. I did have longevity and power considerations in mind when I built it though, which is why it was underclocked. I once opened it for cleaning, and noticed the fan had stopped turning, but it was still running fine, so it isn't pushing anything.
I also like the fact that I can easily modify it however I want. I can add more NICs, or alter the distribution to add other extras to it - or swap out the distribution altogether for another floppy-based distro if I want. I am not limited in the number of ports I can use - just slap a larger switch on the inside NIC. If I ever needed 802.11x, a wireless NIC could be set up as an AP.
Really, the only thing I don't like about it is its size. But, it would be in the junkyard if it wasn't being used as a firewall, so I spare it the fate. Also, I am lazy when it comes to changing something that just works and does its job (and does it extremely well, I might add - it has been a very reliable unit all these years). Finally, if I got a different router/firewall, I would need to have my broadband provider (COX) reprovision my cable modem, since the MAC address would be different (of course, if that outbound NIC ever failed, I would have to do this as well). They might want me to explain myself - who knows, they might even want to kick me in the nuts with the AUP (you are running a network instead of a single machine - you must buy extra static IPs to do so or move to a business account - I can see COX doing this - really).
So - I stick with what works and has worked over the past mumble years - why fix what isn't broken?