Would that be via mirroring or RAID5? For 1.5 mirrored, get 2 1.5TB drives. They're actually cheaper per GB ($190 each) than the 500, 750, and TB drives. And with fewer drives you're drawing less power.
I just built a Windows Home Server machine. I don't think it plays with Linux clients, but for Windows machines it does automatic daily backups and plays nice for sharing multimedia and other files. Designed to run headless; you do everything from a console app run from any of the workstations. You can also manage & share over the Internet.
I mention it as it does some nice things from a storage management point of view. For one, it does data de-duplication so any file you back up from any machine is only stored once. That includes files that exist on multiple machines (like the OS and common apps). My 5 workstations total 778 GB of storage yet the total backup took 455GB.
You can restore individual files to any machine, and if a machine crashes, you can boot off a supplied boot/recovery CD & restore from WHS. No need to install Windows only to restore over it.
And backups are managed; you can tune how many days/weeks/months to retain & it will automatically clean up.
And one beautiful thing is you don't need to do RAID or mirroring for redundancy. Just add drives and tell it to replicate a folder. It will automatically use alternate drives when available to make redundant copies. The extra drives can be internal, USB, or whatever and the capacities don't have to match. You can add a USB drive, let it replicate folders to it, then disconnect it & move it to another location for off-site storage.
This is worth it for me from the home backup solution standpoint alone (try pricing 5 copies of True Image or another backup app + sufficient drive space), but it also solves my other nagging home network item: Building a true media server.
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John A. Jones, CISSP
Sr. Analyst, Global Information Security
Jones Lang LaSalle, Inc.
Voice: +1.630-455.2787
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-----Original Message-----
From: pctech-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:pctech-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Joe Pluta
Sent: Saturday, October 04, 2008 11:24 PM
To: PC Technical Discussion for iSeries Users
Subject: Re: [PCTECH] Netgear ReadyNAS Pro?
David Gibbs wrote:
Of course, if I really wanted to, I could build my own NAS server with RAID.... but I'm lazy when it comes to hardware these days.
Any updates on this? I'm still looking into various things, including
building my own. However, most enclosures don't have easy access hot
swap, although this one looks interesting:
http://usa.chenbro.com/corporatesite/products_detail.php?serno=100
Tiger Direct has 500MB 7200RPM drives on sale for $70; could build a
1.5TB NAS for about $600-$700, but that means getting a motherboard and
memory and installing Linux and da de da de da...
Another system I saw was the SystemMax:
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/searchtools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=3127552
Joe
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