Dogberry2;387373 Wrote: > This question comes up so often it should probably have its own forum, > and every time it does, comments that focus solely on Slim/Squeeze miss > the point of when and why a NAS makes sense. If the only thing of > interest to a user is running SqueezeCenter and serving up a few > thousand music tracks, a NAS probably isn't really necessary. > > But to those who have other things going on in their lives, a NAS can, > and often does, make sense. I have yet to see a small, low-power PC > that has four (or more) hot-swap drive bays and a footprint of less > than 70 square inches (450 square cm). With five full-time PCs in the > house, plus occasional come-and-go laptops, a central networked file > server that has plenty of capacity and is painlessly expandable makes > sense for accessible, redundant storage of data, including massive > amounts of not only music, but photos, video, business and financial > documents, software, and everything else. It can host nightly backups > of all the computers, and then itself be backed up either on- or > offsite, weekly (or whatever other schedule is suitable). The fact that > it can also do duty as a music server is a side benefit, not its primary > function. It's primarily a storage server (hence the name), and when not > viewed through the narrow lens of SqueezeCenter-only it can, for some > households, be an excellent option. For others, of course, it is > completely unnecessary. But just saying "a NAS is stupid" doesn't > really do justice to the topic. It's like saying "a pickup truck is > stupid" just because you happen to live in a condo in the city. Not > everybody has the same needs, interests, skills or experience, and what > makes no sense for some might make very good sense for others.
Dogberry, again, not one thing that you said is NAS specific. Your description is exactly what I have said before where you have a very limited subset of server functionality running on a slow PC. My whole point of a small pc being able to do so much more than a NAS was the exact opposite of your squeezecenter narrow lens thought. You can set up a small microATX computer with nearly the same footprint and more than four hard drives easily. Granted, only two or three will usually be hot swappable, but who really cares about that at home? Also, a server at home can do everything you described and more. It can also be your primary DHCP server if you want more power than your router gives you, be a web proxy so that you can control your kids and your guests internet access, run a webserver to host files for your friends and family to download and more. The sky is pretty much the limit with a small linux or windows home server, the hardware and built in firmware is the limit with a NAS. Your situation is actually the exact scenario I would recommend someone build a more beefy server with either WHS (if you don't want to learn linux) or Ubuntu/Debian. -- Jonnio ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Jonnio's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=18575 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=58489 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
