The box and disks arrived early last week but I didn't get a chance to do anything with it until today.
The box has 6 SATA ports on it: 4 in the RAID cage, 1 on the motherboard for an optical drive, and 1 eSATA port on the back of the chassis. The 250GB disk that ships with the unit takes one of the RAID cage slots. I moved this up to the optical drive bay where it runs fine as a system drive. It has a USB socket on the motherboard for an internal flash drive for those who want to go that route. I wound up getting a batch of Western Digital WD20EARX disks at MicroCenter. Same price as NewEgg. That's hard to beat. The Hitachi disk will go to some other purpose. Flash boot with FreeNAS was my original intention. I abandoned it for vanilla Debian because I couldn't get the sharing services to start. A NAS box is pretty useless if it can't share file systems. So, Debian Squeeze onto the box, recreated my RAID set and copy over my existing configurations. This marks one of the things I like about Debian: relatively easy hardware migrations. It really is remarkably quiet even under load. I can hear the disks seeking under load if there are no other sounds in the room to mask the noise. Otherwise it's unnoticed. Here it is live and running: http://www.gweep.net/~ratinox/02-12-12_1244.jpg Not so impressive to look at, is it? That's a G4 Mac mini on the left to provide some scale. The USB disk on top is my video library, currently being rsynced over to the ZFS RAID. --Rich P. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
