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

Re:Just use old PC MBs

[dasunt]

Actually, I did something similar. I have a Pentium 166mhz (AOpen), a 2 gig HDD, and a new 80 gig HDD. With only 16 megs of memory, and a stripped down version of debian on it, its fast enough to saturate the 10 mbit/sec connection via samba. On a 100 mbit/sec connection, I use about 30% of it. (IDE controller seems to be the limiting factor here - but I haven't found an ATA/100 controller that I can 'borrow' yet).

So, with new HDDs, your limiting factor should be the older IDE controllers in the motherboards. With old HDDs, the bottleneck should be the drive itself, which means that any old pentium-era machine will work.

As the other poster said, it should cost you free/close to free. Plus, since its all in software, its easy enough to turn it into an ftp server/smb server/webserver with just a few config files. Remember, linux only needs to see the boot partition, even with lilo, its possible to support large disks with bioses that don't recognize them.

Just my $.02

Cheap NAS

[Nyarly]

You can build your NAS on an old Linux box, without a doubt. My understanding is that using plain vanilla NFS with ext3 or similar is not going to get you the performance that a NAS appliance would.

Basically, the appliances use special filesystems and NVRAM along with retuned NFS in order to squeeze out the speed - to the point where some NAS is faster than local storage.

How much of this is available OSS, I wonder? Are there any NAS-ready filesystems out there? quickNFS? What about NVRAM cards/mbs and NFS to work with them?

Re:Cheap NAS

[n9hmg]

Not all NAS vendors are doing that kind of optimization. Some vendors are making very-low-end systems, just like he's describing - actually, in my main experience, much lower-end. We standardized on the Maxtor MaxAttach NAS 4000 320GB machines, which are p166/64MB/4x80GBIDE, running FreeBSD 2.5. While we were negotiating the deal, they decided to end-of-life this new product, and have left it as an unreliable, poorly-performing product. They even refuse to fix the problem where the box locks up on reboot if rebooted while filesystems are mounted from the NFS shares.
The basic concept is solid, and i'm probably going to end up doing just what the article is about, though with slightly-higher-end hardware, so I can buy a hundred or so identical systems, make an image, and splat it onto them all. It should come in at about 25% what all the NAS vendors are asking for equivalent products.

the older the hardware, the less reliable

[oliverthered]

Not so true,
New hardware has a higher fail rate than hardware 2 years old, because all the hardware that dies in the first 6 months is already dead after 2 years.

Also, mass production of old hardware might not have come upto speed, components of far higher quality than required may have been used.

e.g. The first CD players have far better lasers

current CD players use top emitting laser diodes,
old CD players use better side emitting laser diodes.

The spindle on old CD players was manufactured to a stupid precision ( a few atoms or something)
because they could make crap spindles or amazing spindles but not ones just good enough.

I should imagine the same is true with a lot of electrical equipment

I have a 30year old
Fridge,TV,hair dryer,dish washer etc.... and they all work fine.....

Um... why?

[Wakko Warner]

Buy a 3Ware Escalade RAID card. The real money is going to go to hard drives anyway; you're not going to save much by buying cheap-ass featureless controllers. At least, with real hardware RAID you're getting some resiliency.

- A.P.

Erm...

[Anonymous Coward]

...I think the idea is to use the smallest, dumbest hardware available, and that all the "use old PC posts" are way off the mark.

I'd look at something like the embsd.org board (mentioned previously) rather than go with old PCs. Remember, the guy specifically mentions looking at Embedded Linux and finding it too much of a hassle, so I guess he doesn't want an old PC. He just wants a _simpler_ embsd board...

Mod me up, please. I forgot my password!

Re:Just use old PC MBs

[megabeck42]

A, a Pentium 90 can saturate 100Mb/s ethernet. It's trivial, after all, it's only around 10-12 megs of data, a second.

B, 100Mb/s ethernet operates at 31.25Mhz, not 100Mhz.

C, At PIO 4, It's not going to get near 16MB/s. They processor would waste an insane amount of time copying the bytes from the interface.

D, I suspect you have something horibly misconfigured with your router/file server/print machine; perhaps you are using a PIO mode, as I mentioned above. I used a pent 200 w/ a 20 gig drive on a UDMA-33 card. It pushed an easy 8 to 9 megs a second.