Network Attached Storage on a Budget?

Full'o'MP3 asks: "Wondering what to do with all those (formerly huge) hard disks on the shelves? Well, so am I. After looking at all sorts of USB enclosures, I remembered that, a long while ago, I saw a description/review/whatever of a small board (around 3" by 4") that essentially had an Ethernet interface on one end, a microcontroller in the middle and an IDE bus on the other end. It was designed only for that purpose, could not even format the hard disks on its own and only supported SMB without any access control, but by golly, I'm looking for about a dozen (or about 1 per 4 disks). Slap them inside old PC cases, fill them with hard disks, and you have a very simple, cheap file server for home or school. I've looked at a lot of embedded Linux and commercial storage stuff, but they are all overkill and require brand new hardware. Anyone have any pointers for this? (Butchering old laptops, iPAQs or similar stuff won't cut it...)" Readers may remember this thread from early May about doing something similar with new hardware. Since this is the "budget version" of the similar question, I felt it was deserving of its own post. How hard would such a device be to build fom old computer parts and hard disks? Details on cheap electronics (like the submittor-mentioned device) that would make this easier would be appreciated.

Comments

Just use old PC MBs

[ghostlibrary]

The cheapest/easiest method would be: snag some old 486 or Pentium systems, install 4 IDE devices per, add an ISA ethernet card, and put linux on it with the few services needed (networking, yp). Probably cost you, oh, free, since a lot of folks just are tossing old 486s/Pentiums. Or buy a bunch at your local gov't auction (NASA centers have these frequently, etc).

Re:Just use old PC MBs

[mbyte]

my P233MMX with an promise UDMA 66 gives:

# hdparm -tT /dev/hdh /dev/hdh:
Timing buffer-cache reads: 128 MB in 3.10 seconds = 41.29 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 3.21 seconds = 19.94 MB/sec

So the harddrive can read twice as fast as max. network. Another question would be how much CPU is needed to get it on the wire ?

Btw .. is there any variant of NFS that uses hard drive caching ? i.e. make a special room of a few gig on the local harddrive to store frequently accessed data ? (this would speed up nfs-mounted /home quite a bit ! ;)

Performance Tuning can make a big difference

[bill_mcgonigle]

Check out the FAQ.

I found that ext3 in data=journal mode got sync performance back up near async performance (which you almost never want). The NVRAM disk might be a good route; they're pricey but still cheaper than commercial NAS.

Does anyone have any good experience with particular NVRAM units?

Re:the older the hardware, the less reliable

[afidel]

actuall the first generation of cd players have laser with much shorter run lifes and much, much crappier AGC circuitry which makes them less capable of recovering from disk inperfections and scratches. Besides modern cd players have multifrequency lasers for multiread compatibility.

i think the question here is:

[itzdandy]

can i use old drives, in an old computer, and use some sort of "smartdrive" program to cache frequently accessed data to improve speed. right?

well..im not sure about the cacheing, but my celeron300a with 64MB of ram, work great. have four hd channels onboard, and 8 additional from the two highpoint controllers. i run 12 drives, in software RAID0+1, all of them are 40Gb WD 7200RPM drives and i have 240Gb avail. the speed of this array easily maxed out my network cards bandwidth(12MB/s vs. 50+MB/s) so i installed 3 3com NIC's, i still cannot match the 50+MB/s of the drives, but 36MB/s over a network is very good, since no one computer can pull this much through on one NIC anyway. and this is just a celeron300a with 64MB of RAM.

im running a pretty fast setup with minimal CPU, so slower drives should work well with a low pentium class machine..

ps - i have noticed that my network storage array is not as fast as id like as im running a file server for a my local network, with 20+ machines on most of the time, but you could put multiple machines around your network to simulate more speed. not as many poeple accessing the same resource will of coarse improve performance.

just my $.02..good luck