I have a setup where "give me maximum capacity for the money" is the key objective. Therefore, I didn't go with a NAS because they are going to be quite expensive when you realize 2 + 1 TB as I did. However, here are my experiences with these servers, one having 14x160 GB harddisks in linux software raid 5 and the other one having 6x250 GB harddisks.
1. Noise. They are noisy but if you have a lan/wlan in your house most times you can find a room where 24/7 noise doesn't bother (cellar, untility room, etc) 2. Hard disks: I tried maxtor, wd and samsung. Samsung are the coolest and most silent from my experience. I can very much recommend the spinpoint P80 and P120 series. When you have that much drives you will notice that some of them will fail over time. After 2 years of non-stop service I usually sell the whole bunch on ebay and get a fresh new generation. As they have 3 years of warranty you don't take a great risk. 3. Board: My server boards are good old intel 815 with p3 1GHz or less. They work very stable and don't generate much heat. performance is very well for slimserver. even real time audio conversion tasks (alienbbc for example) work well. 4. Graphics: some 815 boards have graphics on board, if not just get an older nvidia card (TNT, TNT2, MX200, etc) without active cooling. They are cheap and work well with linux. These servers are a bit outdated but they are very cost effective and generate much less heat than the actual setups. I am very sure that the TCO for 3 TB in total is much lesser than with any NAS. Having the full flexibility of linux and some processing power and as much ram as you like, these babies can do for another couple of years. I strongly recommend not to look for a quiet server solution that fits into the living room. In order to get rid of the heat will certainly not work very well (at least if you are in the TB space). Find a place for them to run behind a door in a room where you can afford some airflow noise. just my $0.02 -- docbee ------------------------------------------------------------------------ docbee's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=26 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=18555 _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
