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

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?

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.....

Throw the Drives Away -- Electricity Ain't Free

[InitZero]

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