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

Some Ideas

[Bios_Hakr]

Grab one of the Via MoBos. They'll have at least one PCI slot, onboard video and NIC, and maybe even sound if you look around.

Then grab a PCI SATA card. It won't need RAID capability, just a ton of SATA ports.

Attach a smallish hard drive to the master onboard PATA port and set a CDROM on the slave on the same channel. Install your SATA card and attach some big-assed SATA drives.

Install Debian to the PATA drive and then remove the CDROM. Disable, in BIOS, everything you won't be using.

Once you are in Debian and everything works, use 'mkraid' to initalize the SATA drives in a RAID5 config. Mount that under /mnt/storage and then use samba to share that across your network.

Some might say that RAID5 will be too slow. But, across a network, chances are the wire will be saturated before the hard drives hit the sustained transfer rate. If you are concerned about performance, throw a Gig-E NIC in there and use RAID0+1 or RAID3.

I'm not sure how well Linux can deal with suspending the hard drives in a RAID controller during inactivity. If the kernel can handle it, use something like 'hdparm' to sleep the drives when they aren't in use.

Good luck, man...

Low wattage storage array

[DanteLysin]

http://www.mini-itx.com/projects/tera-itx/

VIA C3

[metamatic]

VIA C3 processor. Socket 370, up to 1GHz. Runs on 11W of electricity. If you get a VIA motherboard, you'll probably find that everything has open source Linux drivers. (I know the EPIA M-series do.)

Now, anyone know of a socket 370 motherboard that'll take 4 or more SATA drives?