Cross Platform, Low Powered Home Servers w/ RAID?

Milo_Mindbender asks: "At home I've collected too much data to easily backup, so I've been thinking about RAID5 for a little extra data security. I multiboot my computers for both Linux and Windows so I really need a RAID solution that will make the data at least readable by both OS's. I don't think this can be done on a single machine (can it?) so I'm looking to put together a Linux home server with RAID5 serving both SAMBA and NFS. Aside from the usual questions (software/hardware RAID, types of disk to use...etc) because I live by myself in an apartment I have a few tricky requirements I hope the Slashdot crowd can help me with." How would you set up a RAID5 server to perform Samba/NFS sharing duties without it wasting a lot of wattage, while it idles? "I hate to waste electricity, so how can a Linux RAID5 server be setup to automatically spin down to the lowest possible standby power use, then spin back up when a computer accesses it? I don't have a basement, garage or other remote place to put the thing, so it needs to be quiet or at least not die a thermal death if I lock it in a closet. What's the sweet spot for choosing CPU type/speed, hardware/software RAID controller, motherboard and memory to make a home server? Since this is only going to be serving a few machines (and maybe doing router/gateway duty), I'm sure there's a point where adding more CPU horsepower doesn't improve performance much. Any suggestions on motherboards, cases or even complete systems that work particularly well for this kind of small headless home server?"

Comments

Servers don't reboot

[ka9dgx]

A file server has one job, to serve files, reliably. You shouldn't care what OS it uses, as long as it's stable. You definitely shouldn't be trying to run more than one OS on it. Get it up and running, and leave it alone.

However, you've then got all your eggs in one basket... not a good long term situation... you're going to need off-site backup... which is yet another Ask Slashdot question.

--Mike--

Re:Search..

[egarland]

The poster asks different questions than the articles linked raise and they are valid questions.

The objectives of large scale redundant and able to be put in a closet are needs unmet by todays storage designs and are likely to be as common tomorrow as wireless ethernet is today.

So.. basically.. snoo snoo off. :)

Backup

[fjf33]

I have three computers at home, plus a KuroBox running my mail server, and LDAP for centralized accounts. I was going to set it up as an NFS server for homes but I haven't been able to use AMANDA to back it up. For some reason it hangs xinetd. Anyway, the Kuro takes no power whatsoever and the other machines can be up and running as needed. For backups what I did is buy the biggest IDE drive I could find and set it up on my machine. I run AMANDA and set it up to backup to that drive, it does compression and it tries to keep at least one full backup of every drive so it doesn't really follow a set schedule of backups which I like since sometimes the machines are off or booted into Windows. AMANDA sees the big drive as a set of 8 100GB tapes and it uses an autochanger routine to move. Since I don't use / as the whole drive but break things down with LVM it has never ran out of space for backups, plus sparse files take no room. I probably could haveee gotten away with smaller tapes and have more allowing me to keep a longer backup history but so far it's been good. VERY HANDS OFF.