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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.
But, consider the electricity costs:
To run 4hdds, you need a old 486/P1 (previous post suggestion), hence a 250W+ powersupply.
What is the amount of storage space you gain. The most you can strap is either 4*8GB (without special drivers), or if you find newer board 4*30GB.
Chances are you have smaller drives, hence the first estimate is more correct.
Does it pay to strap them in, use untill they die, lose data in the process and waste electricity..
Well, no, unless you want to do it for a 'geek' factor here.
The truth is, the older the hardware, the less reliable it is, the more you are prone to loosing data. And with a 120Gb drive hovering around $300 (CAD) dollars, why even bother.
Get one of those, add to an existing workstation, leave it on. Voila, cheapest solution possible, and not a lot of work required.
And believe me, I am speaking from experience. I have had a p-166, p-200 and cel-266 all die on me within weeks/days, doing the exact thing you are looking to do. Then I got my current server duron-850, with a nice new board, and I have had no trouble for almost a year now.
just my 2cents.
I really doubt that the IDE interface is a limiting factor in such a machine.
I haven't met a low-end Pentium yet which is capable of saturating 100MHz ethernet, even in applications where disk IO is not part of the equation.
A new 80 gig drive would be vastly faster than the network, even at PIO 4 (16MB/sec, IIRC) or DMA33 or whatever old-school speed you've got the IDE interface running at.
If your network is not running full-duplex, you'll also have an impossible time saturating the wire because of that -- ethernet gets a lot more efficient when it can talk and listen at the same time, without looking out for collisions.
That all said, run bonnie or some other benchmark on the disk. If you see throughput in excess of, say, 7 or 8 megabytes per second, with sufficiently low CPU utilization to leave a bit for the overhead of tending to the NIC and Samba, then neither the hard disk nor its interface are any sort of bottleneck, and you should look elsewhere for an improvement in speed.
A P233MMX CPU can be had for less than $20, these days, and would probably be trivial to configure on your AOpen board.
FWIW, I've got a K6-2 350 router/file server/print machine, with a 30-gig drive of a couple years old. I haven't done fancy IDE interface tweaking under FreeBSD and have no idea what transfer mode it's using, and the motherboard is positively ancient so I'd be surprised if even DMA33 were an option. But it shoots files across the (half-duplex) network at 5 megabytes per second, generally, which I recall being a vast improvement over the Pentium machines which predated it.
Good luck!
Kid-proof tablet..
I got a hold of a bunch of Sun SCSI four-drive disk enclosures. I had an equally large bunch of four to 18 gig drives. Add in a few surplus SCSI cards and I ended up with more than 100 gig worth of disk space attached to a small linux box.
The drives were quick enough (more spindles = more speed) for a small media server and I had no complaints.
That was, until I noticed that my home office was now running six to eight degress warmer than the rest of the house. That got me to thinking about how much juice these guys draw. All told, I would be paying an extra few bucks a month in power.
The straw that finally broke the camel's back was that having a dozen additional filesystems (yes, I could have striped them) to manage was a pain in the buttocks.
In the end, I gave the drives to someone who had more time on his hands and bought myself a pair of 100-gig IDE drives.
I don't know what you consider 'formerly huge' but unless your drives are bigger than 40 or 60-gig, it may not be worth your time. I know it would not be worth my time nor my electricity.
InitZero