trebejo Wrote: > The reason that I haven't yet plunked down the cash for an Infrant box > is that I'm not sure whether I'll be happy with it for reasons having > to do with cpu cycles and noise. Since these boxes are not available > for review at your local Fry's, you basically have to dive in and buy > one before you personally experience it.
I have an Infrant 600 with four 320 GB WD drives. The thing is amazingly quiet. I didn't buy it to run SlimServer, but tried it out when I first got the NAS. It was a dog, but I know others are happy running SlimServer on the Infrant, so your mileage may vary. The biggest drawback is that the OS is not open to the user, so you you must run the SlimServer installation package that Infrant supplies. This means no nightlies, and few plugins. > Regarding the cpu cycles, I am concerned about how slimserver will run > with a ReadyNAS (seeing how it eats cpu cycles in my venerable > powerbook even with its 1 GB of RAM, it is something to think about); > for example, waiting for several minutes or even hours before new > additions to the music library show up ready to play. I have read the > occasional complaint about this from ReadyNAS users so it's certainly a > source of uncertainty. Music doesn't just "show up" in your SlimServer library. If you're talking about running a scan, then yes, it may take hours. But you can always use Browse Music Folder to immediataly have new music added to the SlimServer database. > Regarding noise issues, if the NAS device is noisy then it defeats the > audiophile raison d'etre of the squeezebox in an obvious way. The > alternative is to place the NAS device in a separate room or somesuch, > and rig up the network (e.g. good cable layout, satisfactory wireless > performance) so that it's still accessible. Doable, but in the end a > quiet device would certainly be preferable and give us more > flexibility. Only if the server is going to reside in the listening room is noise a huge issue. If the server is in another room, noise may not be a consideration at all. There's no reason you can't put the SlimServer in a basement, garage or office. > Now onto the hardware side of things. The linux box should definitely > have room for four hard drives, since RAID 5 hits a sweet spot at that > number. One wants to run RAID 5 because it provides a complete backup > of the content of any one drive in the array, and because it does so > without consuming so much hard drive space in the process. There are > other RAID options and in some situations they are the way to go but > for "us" it looks like RAID 5 is the clear choice and four drives is a > good ergoecotechnomic minimax fit. RAID 5 is _not_ a clear choice. More importantly, it does _NOT_ give you a backup of your data. For moderately sized collections, I wouldn't recommend running RAID. It's nice if music is the be all and end all to your life. If a drive dies you keep on listening to music. That is the biggest advantage of RAID - to be able to continue running in the event of a hard disk failure. For moderately sized collections, a large drive can easily contain the entire collection. A second, equally sized (preferably external) drive can be used for backups. If drive A dies, replace it with drive B. Multiple drives can be used if the space is needed. > I don't know if the box should have an additional drive to host the OS > and so forth. The advantage of that that I see is that one can then > take out the drives and put them in some future container should the > need arise, without violating the integrity of the past and future host > boxen. Perhaps there is some performance advantage as well to having the > system on one drive and the data on another (although I doubt that makes > an important difference in our case). Since the DIY cases tend to have > plenty of room it is certainly feasible to spend an extra $50 and get a > 100GB+ hard drive on which to install linux and whatever other OS > tickles your fancy. An extra hard drive not only raises the cost, > however, it also raises the noise level (more on that below). I find the OS drive plus data drive(s) approach attractive. Like you say, then you can take the data disks and move them to another system. If you're running software RAID, though, this may not be easy. > RAM is good and cheap and a gigabyte is a nice round number; that's > another $100. Motherboard and cpu together will probably go for about > $200; I had a look-around at the local Fry's and saw plenty of > motherboards for about $100 that have integrated gigabit ethernet > (which is helpful), but I haven't considered what it takes to run RAID > proper. If you really want RAID5, then there are some chipsets coming out now that offer onboard RAID5 and four SATA drive headers. I imagine that these aren't really hardware RAID per-se, but offload much of the processing onto the CPU. Or just use software RAID, or plan on a couple hundred dollars more for a decent RAID controller card. > 3. If the linux box can be made to run without a VGA card, then that's > an extra fan that doesn't have to run (not to mention a savings of a > few bucks). Motherboards seem to have integrated vga now but I don't > know if that means running an extra fan. Running headless is better all > around wrt the "black box" approach to feeding music to the squeezebox, > anyway. Lot's of onboard video is available now. Even without it, you can throw some inexpensive (and fanless) graphics card into the machine. If a silent machine is your ultimate goal, then you should also consider the chipset's north bridge, many of which require a fan. Many do not, however. Here's a motherboard that I've been considering for a Linux SlimServer. It's targeted for HTPC computers, so has a lot of onboard systems. It's not a gamer's board, so the video isn't state of the art and there aren't many overclocking options in the BIOS. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813131570 - under $100 - socket 939 AMD - onboard Gbit Ethernet - onboard video - onboard audio - DDR 400 w/ support for ECC - 4 SATA heaers, with RAID 0/1/0+1/5 The onboard audio might be used if you also were ripping CDs on the system and wanted to give the occasional listen to a rip. Or just disable it. > The hard drives then pop in at one's leisure. The current sweet spot > seems to be 400gb Nah, the sweet spot currently is still at 320/300GB or perhaps 250GB. If you don't run a large RAID 5 array, though, it may be worth the investment in a larger drive just so you don't have to replace it down the line. I think I'd look at the current size of my collection, then at how quickly I expected that collection to grow. -- JJZolx Jim ------------------------------------------------------------------------ JJZolx's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=10 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=18555 _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
