I've been withholding a reply to avoid thread fragmentation... Very informative comments to y'all, thanks. Nice backup scripts. LA's too far away from DC, Pat, otherwise I'd take you up on the offer.
btw I agree about the *BSD v. linux approachable interface issues, but it should be mentioned at least in passing that I'm currently running a pretty approachable BSDish interface made by a Cupertino company. Good to hear that the Readynas is AMAZINGLY quiet. Too bad it dogs it with slimserver. I suppose slimserver could run on some other machine on the network and let the Readynas handle the storage only, but not actually play the tunes. This, for people that delete a thread when it heads down the linux way. wrt what I meant by "headless", I meant at the very least that it would run unattended without a monitor or keyboard. If it can reboot unattended and so forth that's all the better, since then I can get ambitious and actually park one of these things at my parents' and spread the joy. In either case, I'd run the slimserver either from another computer via a web browser or (and this feels like a stretch) solely with the remote control. Sure, it's nice to just put the hardware away from the squeezebox with good wiring or wireless, but I'm not counting on having a garage or a basement available. In fact I'm probably looking at a small apartment in a few months. But it's good to heap on all the arguments in favor of putting the server far away from the audio, since in the end it's an imperative that can be addressed. There's always a closet and a long ethernet cable... I'm surprised at how little you guys care for the RAID 5 idea. My problem is that at the moment I've got a couple of those external seagates (nice quiet gadgets and they look nice btw) and between the two of 'em they combine 700gb of room (ok 640gb actually) and they have about 30gb free combined. And that's after I backed up a little onto some DVDs. Perhaps it's the size of the collection that's the problem (I'm tagging like a madman so at the moment I only show the usual 900 album and 10000 songs but I think that by the time it's said and done I'll be around the 3000 album line). Rock 'n roll won't take up so much space, but classical is a toughie because you can always get another version of symphony X... Anyway, back to the RAID issue. Doesn't the RAID do something about the occasional hard drive death? Like, if one dies, I can replace it and not lose any data? Yeah, sure, the big fire hits and all bets are off, but otherwise, isn't the RAID 5 setup quite a bit more robust than nothing at all? You guys make it sound like such a loser. I suppose that in RAID, the hard drives never get a break, whereas in "regular" the one that is currently playing a song runs while the others idle? Ugh. Ok. Use the RAID on a daily basis, and leave a bunch of these seagates in a closet in some other county as the data icebox. That means the same byte is written in three different places(!). Or don't run RAID at all, backup each drive in the server to the offshore seagate once in a while but only for the files that have changed; or some more sophisticated variation on that theme. btw Pat I think I was getting about 30GB/hour (so it'd take over 30 hours to do a terabyte--yipee) with the external seagates daisychained over firewire but my memory may be off; I'd run a test right now but when these guys get low on space they run a LOT slower so it'd be a bad reference. The box says they can do 400 Mbps but I never got close to that. Ok, RAID or not, I need a box, it needs to run linux, it needs four hard drives inside it, and I need an offshore closet to sleep soundly at night. The rough outline is becoming focused. > > 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. It depends on the fixed cost of the supporting hardware. With Pat's setup, that cost goes down dramatically and I'll bet the 320gb is sweetest; with the ReadyNAS, it's a push (I'm using the prices I can get via pricewatch.com). As a stand-alone, yes, the 250gb is cheaper in $/gb but your box maxes out at a lower storage total and then when you want more than a terabyte you have to build another one. I put some numbers in the spreadsheet and they told me it was so. :) http://tinyurl.com/8ykmz +-------------------------------------------------------------------+ |Filename: readynas_cost_analysis.jpg | |Download: http://forums.slimdevices.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=507| +-------------------------------------------------------------------+ -- trebejo ------------------------------------------------------------------------ trebejo's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=730 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=18555 _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
