David, FreeNAS works rather well in an environment like yours, however (a) as of version 8 it needs considerable amounts of RAM to work reasonably well (v7 could get along well with half a gig) and (b) you need either all HDDs to be of the same size or at least to have a few groups of similar size HDDs, otherwise you're gonna lose a lot of space when building the pools.
For a home server with a bunch of varying size disks, you may want to take a look at unRAID. It's a rather unique solution, with a few rather unique features, for exactly this situation (different size, different age disks). Downside: for more than 3 drives, it's not free. Doron On Tue, Dec 4, 2012 at 10:43 AM, David Suna <da...@davidsconsultants.com>wrote: > I have a bunch of old machines lying around which are currently just > collecting dust. I would like to collect the disks from all of them, put > them together into a single server to act as a file server / NAS on our > home network. There would probably be a combination of IDE and SATA > drives. What would you recommend as the best way to achieve this (with > minimal cash outlay). The home network is a mixed Windows and Linux > environment so I assume I would run Linux on the new server and provide > access to the disks via SAMBA. For now the main function of the server > would be to serve as a place to do backups. I have never done anything > with RAID so I don't know if that is something that I should take into > consideration (especially as the disks are of varying sizes). > > Any information, suggestions or pointers would be appreciated. I am > viewing this as a learning experience (in addition to making use of old > hardware for a positive purpose). > > Thanks in advance, > > -- > David sunada...@davidsconsultants.com > > > _______________________________________________ > Linux-il mailing list > Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il > http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il > >
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