Current Recommendations For a Home File Server?

j.sanchez1 writes "The recent coverage of Shuttle's new KPC has gotten me thinking (again) about a small, low-cost headless file server for home. In the past, I have looked at the iPaq and considered using older computers I have lying around, but for various reasons I have never jumped in to do it. Do you guys have any suggestions on what to use for a home file server (hardware and software)? The server would be feeding files to Windows PCs and connected to the network through a Linksys WRT54GL running DD-WRT firmware." There are a host of good options these days; what has the best bang for the home-user's buck?

Comments

a cheap PC and a free unix

[krog]

did you really need to ask?

Re:a cheap PC and a free unix

[arivanov]

Not quite. There are a lot of caveats.

Cheap PCs suck rotten eggs on cooling. Your drives will go very hot.

One good option is cheap PC and an ICY BOX SATA enclosure. They are 30-50£ for 3-5 drives fit in 2-3 standard 5" slots and keep drives within 5C above ambient with virtually no noise.

Another option are Antec Sonata cases. They have 4 very well cooled hard disk slots. If you chose the right 12cm fans it is once again totally quiet.

As far as the MB, etc they can indeed be as cheap as they get. I am building one right now out of an old P3. It is more than enough to saturate a 100MB NFS. A few important caveats I have noticed (It has been a while since I built a storage box).

1. While there are some very tempting offers for IDE cards on the market they are not real IDE. The market has gone in circle 100%. It used to be people selling IDE cards as RAID, now they sell RAID as IDE. So regardless of how nicely does an offer for classic IDE sound, skip it. You are up for trouble. Go SATA.

2. Same for SATA cards with extra IDE ports. These often do not support IDE drives. Same for some IDE ports on recent cheap motherboards.

3. Some cheap SATA cards do funny things with spin-up, spin-down and flush commands. Either go for well tested stuff like Silicon Image or go for a real hardware RAID like 3ware (this is no longer cheap though).

Re:a cheap PC and a free unix

[Anonymous Coward]

WTB: Quiet drive and fan that are both still quiet 6+ months later.

I always like when I build a new computer, put ear up to case and you don't hear anything. 6 months later it is faintly audible from my desk. 1 Year later and you can hear it from across the room. 18+ months later and you can hear it from across the house. The drive component will hopefully be fixed soon enough with SSDs, but fans and power supplies need more work.

Re:a cheap PC and a free unix

[brainlessbob]

He did have a need to ask. Easy to use 6-Step guide: 1. Get a PC* 2. Get some hard drives (More/Bigger is better) 3. Install the hard drives to the PC mentioned before 4. Install operating system (As cheap as possible) 5. ???? 6. PROFIT! *One that supports a lot of hard drives, a case is not needed

Re:a cheap PC and a free unix

[Solra Bizna]

One that supports a lot of hard drives, a case is not needed

You've obviously never had any hardware die a violent death due to dust*.

-:sigma.SB

*I have.

Re:a cheap PC and a free unix

[TooMuchToDo]

WARN

THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM

I just watched that film the other day, and it's now one of my favorites. Much better ending then Wargames.

Cheapest, best way is to build it

[ajs]

I went to newegg and just built the system from scratch. I got 5 SATAII 250GB disks (the sweet-spot at the time for price per MB) in a tower with a run-of-the-mill motherboard, CPU and RAM. I didn't go headless entirely from the gate, but once I installed Linux, I never connected the monitor again. Simple software raid is enough for my purposes, and I didn't bother mirroring the root disk (which I can always just replace and re-install).

Re:Cheapest, best way is to build it

[Hatta]

Ok, but how cheap can you make your file server and still get good performance out of it? Software RAID costs cycles. How beefy of a CPU do you actually need though? Does 64 bit help, or is an old Athlon XP plenty? 1 core or 2? How much ram is necessary? Are there certain chipsets that are better than others at maxing out your SATA bandwidth? There are a lot of things to take into consideration when building a PC file server.

Re:Cheapest, best way is to build it

[Yosho]

Software RAID costs cycles.

Only a very small amount -- if you're using this computer simply for file storage, especially with 100 Mbit ethernet as your primary means of connection, you will never even notice the tiny slowdown caused by software RAID. An old Athlon XP with 256 MB of RAM are just fine, although if you want to do something like turn that file server into a web & e-mail server, you might want to bump it up to 512 MB. None of those things are computationally intensive at all, unless your server gets a ton of traffic; even then, you'll probably be limited more by your I/O speed than your CPU. A 64-bit processor won't help you at all if you're not doing any sort of scientific computing and you don't need to use more than 4 GB of RAM.

Heck, for years I ran a personal server on an old 450 MHz K6-III with 512 MB of RAM and three hard drives in a RAID 5. The only time I noticed any lag at all was when doing SSL negotation or when it was running a certain PHP-based webmail program on it. I upgraded it just this last year to an Athlon XP 2200+ with 1 GB of RAM, and I never even come close to making the CPU max out, and I'm also running a VPN server and spam filter on it.

Re:Cheapest, best way is to build it

[GenP]

My old Athlon XP 2000 could saturate 100mbit Ethernet from a four-drive software RAID5 array without breaking a sweat. Not sure what my current P4 system can do since the gigabit Ethernet (Realtek r8169) I have can't seem to break ~200-300mbit outbound due to a driver(?) problem.

Re:Cheapest, best way is to build it

[Bandman]

This is a home server, though. Data viability should be the main requisite, then space, then speed, all tempered by cost.

Honestly, I'd probably just go with a home NAS. That way you don't even have to screw with it beyond a web config.

Re:Cheapest, best way is to build it

[Hey_bob]

I've been considering going this route, but using one of the VIA C7 mobo's New Egg has listed. I don't need much power for serving up files and the occasional ssh access. I can tell myself that I'll be conserving power.. tho I'm sure having 6 disks spinning may negate some of that. :-)

Would probably have to use a sata card with one of those boards, but I'm doing that now with an old P2 currently. So no big loss there.

Re:Cheapest, best way is to build it

[Hatta]

Ok, here's another question. What case would you use? Biggest concern, lots of hard drive bays and the ability to keep them all cool. Is it worth while to go for a server case?

Re:Cheapest, best way is to build it

[WuphonsReach]

My preference for home servers of the fire-and-forget variety is to do RAID1 across 3 disks. That means RAID'ing all partitions (including the swap partition).

Why 3 disks? Because home setups tend to get looked at maybe once a month, and a lot of folks forget to turn on mdadm array monitoring or to setup the box as a postfix null server so that it can e-mail out reports. With the 3rd disk, you have a much larger window during which to discover a drive failure before you lose everything.

(And if you're going to put 3 disks in, instead of doing 2 plus a hot spare, why not put that disk to work?)

RAID5 may be nice for having more net space, but again, home servers typically are skimpy on backups and the rebuild time for RAID5 is not nice. So keep it simple and go with RAID1, where you can pull data easily off of any of the 2 or 3 disks in the array.

Re:Cheapest, best way is to build it

[WuphonsReach]

Ok, but how cheap can you make your file server and still get good performance out of it?

With modern motherboards (which means PCIe with the SATA ports not running through the old PCI controller), Software RAID is perfectly viable for saturating a 1Gbit NIC. And probably with enough disks, capable of saturating 2 or 3 gigabit NICs.

Basically, take a motherboard like Asus M2N-E (with 6+ SATA plugs), the $75 Athlon64 X2 chip, and 2GB of RAM and you'll have pretty much an overkill system for not a whole lot of cash. Something like the 45W X2s with that motherboard will cost around $225 in a bundle from some place like MWave.

If, under heavy disk / network load, you manage to hit 10% on the CPU meters, I would be surprised.

So basically $225 for the CPU/MB/RAM, $100 for the case and PSU, and as many hard drives as you can manage to cram inside a case. You can go cheaper, but going too cheap is counter-productive (failed PSUs, cases with inadequate ventilation, etc. can shorten component life).

Re:Cheapest, best way is to build it

[jawtheshark]

I've got a P-III 800MHz/768Meg and an AMD Athlon64 2800+/2Gig... Both run OpenBSD, a plethora of services (actually they do exactly the same thing in different locations) and in "felt performance" is the same. For a small home server, anything beyond 800MHz is overkill.

I also have a 800MHz/512Meg Duron that plays database server and runs SQL Ledger. That's it. Anytime I ask uptime, I get 0.0 usages. It essentially doesn't do shit.

My old servers were P-I 166MHz class machines. Those did choke on IMAP. But that's about it. (Never ran a database on them though)

Re:Cheapest, best way is to build it

[harrkev]

NAS boxes are not all that they are made out to be. Keep in mind one thing: they are made to be cheap. This means relatviely low-end processors in them. You are also stuck with whatever protocols that they happen to have.

I hope to soon gather enough junk hardware to build a FreeNAS box. This is based on BSD, and one of the totally cool thing is that it is also an rsync server. I have not seen an out-of-the-box NAS that supports rsync.

Very often, these NAS boxes are also small, which means small fans that have to run at high (noisy) speed in order to cool the thing.

I am not saying that all NAS boxes are bad. I actually have one and use it. I am just saying that a commercial NAS box is not a slam-dunk. The better ones might do everything you want, but the better ones are also more expensive, and probably more expensive than building one yourself, especially if you have some junk lying around.

Re:Cheapest, best way is to build it

[jawtheshark]

home servers typically are skimpy on backups

Why? There is no reason. I have a cron job which mounts a external USB harddisk and which backup up every night. Results are sent to email. It isn't that hard, and not that costly.

Re:Cheapest, best way is to build it

[plover]

Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)

Thanks! It's been years since I saw a "Karma:" sig that actually made me laugh.

Re:Cheapest, best way is to build it

[twistedcubic]

What about noise and power comsumption? For me, these are the most important things for a computer that will be on 24/7.

Re:Cheapest, best way is to build it

[Anonymous Coward]

Software RAID costs cycles.

*chuckle* If you have a 386SX or better, don't worry about it. Your CPU is a fucking monster compared to the fastest disks on the planet.

Re:Cheapest, best way is to build it

[Bandman]

Trust me, I'm definitely not a huge fan of NAS. I've got a Snap server or two that I would *LOVE* to throw into the street and run over. I'm just at the point with computers that I don't want to have to screw with it.

An rsync server would be cool. All I really want is NFS that doesn't f*ck up the permissions.

Re:Cheapest, best way is to build it

[RhadamanthosIsChaos]

I've always considered the Thermaltake Armor series (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811133020) to be the ultimate in computer-case overkill.

Seven available 3.5 drive bays, with several more available via 5.25->3.5 converters. Plenty of fans to keep everything cool, too, and decent airflow.

Re:Cheapest, best way is to build it

[ajs]

Software RAID costs cycles.

Only a very small amount This is true. It's also true that many solutions that claim to be "hardware raid" are actually software raid with minimal hardware support. If you're cranking vast amounts of data through the system that's either locally generated or that's coming in over multiple 100MB or single GigE, then you might get a performance win out of hardware XOR calculation, but with a large L2 cache, you won't notice the difference until you start pushing much more data.

It's also true that using the CPU for such calculations can be a small to moderate win on systems that have both CPU and IO intensive jobs running, but that's only because it's easier to schedule CPU vs. CPU rather than CPU vs. IO.

Re:Cheapest, best way is to build it

[Anonymous Coward]

I use that "old Athlon XP" as my main computer, you insensitive clod!

Re:Cheapest, best way is to build it

[bcrowell]

I suspect you spent something like $200, and got a system that takes up a lot of space and draws at least 50 watts. For under $100, you could buy an NSLU2, which draws 4 watts and is the size of a papeback book.

Re:Cheapest, best way is to build it

[ScrewMaster]

Why? There is no reason. I have a cron job which mounts a external USB harddisk and which backup up every night. Results are sent to email. It isn't that hard, and not that costly.

Regardless, the GP is right ... most people that set up a system at home are skimpy on backups, if they ever back up at all. It's just not a priority until it breaks.

Re:Cheapest, best way is to build it

[sjames]

generated or that's coming in over multiple 100MB or single GigE, then you might get a performance win out of hardware XOR calculation, but with a large L2 cache, you won't notice the difference until you start pushing much more data.

I doubt GigE will be enough to tax even a modest CPU in a softraid system.

The nice thing about a Linux soft RAID is a well documented format that stays consistant for years. Hardware RAID tends to foolishly make incompatible changes in the on-disk format between minor firmware revisions.

deja vu

[CodeMunch]

You could always refer to the recent Ask Slashdot on this very topic.

The Linksys NSLU2 is a little slow & not very intuitive but I just replaced my home file server (Athlong 1.4Ghz, 512MB, yaddahaddah) with one of these. There is a big fanbase for this little device and 3rd party firmware.

Re:deja vu

[harrkev]

The last I heard, the NSLU2 will NEVER spin down the hard drives. This may accelerate the wear on the bearings, and cause premature failure. Drives also consume more power while spinning.

It has been a couple of years since I have checked up on this, though. Perhaps a firmware upgrade has fixed this problem.

Re:deja vu

[shani]

I second this recommendation. I put Debian on mine and now it's totally intuitive. :)

Re:deja vu

[plover]

The last I heard, the NSLU2 will NEVER spin down the hard drives. This may accelerate the wear on the bearings, and cause premature failure. Drives also consume more power while spinning.

Actually, what I learned a long time ago (in a technology-land far, far away) is "never shut down your equipment." The only times hard drives and other computer hardware experience physical wear is startup, shutdown, and under G force loads.

A spinning platter running on new bearings essentially maintains bearing-on-lubricant-on-bushing contact the entire time it is on, and has zero wear. But when the platter is spun down, the bearings will of course stop. At that time the bearings "poke through" the lubrication layer, causing metal-on-metal contact. Over time the weight of the platters on the bearings will cause microscopic deformations to be created on the surfaces of the bearings. These no-longer-round bearings then have high spots that also poke through the lubrication layer, causing metal-on-metal contact while the drive is spinning. This becomes a source of vibration, which leads to more metal-on-metal contact, causing wear.

There are other physical reasons to not shut down your computer, too.

Surge currents are a problem. They occur in a hard drive because a stopped motor takes much more torque to spin up than a running motor. That means that a component which is spec'd to carry the running current of the motor, say 80ma, has to temporarily provide startup current of perhaps 200ma. Most components can handle that much extra current for a very small amount of time, but a marginal component may fail under the extra stress. Avoiding power surges maximizes the life of those components

There is another source of wear that people often ignore, and that is thermal stress. Powering equipment up causes it to heat up, expanding the materials it's made of. And all materials have different coefficients of expansion -- aluminum expands quite a bit more per degree than steel, and both expand much more rapidly than ceramics and fiberglass. When a computer is powered off and cools down, everything shrinks at its own rate -- traces on the circuit boards, soldered joints, the case, the screws holding the heat sink to the motherboard, the gold wires connecting the chip package to the die, everything. That's the only mechanical wear these otherwise solid state components will ever have. The more heating/cooling cycles, the more often they will tug at each other, causing wear.

However, many things have changed since I learned this stuff. The technology of hard drives is vastly different than it was when I learned this; especially the properties of the lubricants that are now used. Also, cheap hard drives may have poor bearings to start with, and may already be vibrating when you purchase them (sound is a good way to detect this -- a good drive is a silent drive.) Hardware designers who are building quality equipment specify components with the capacity to handle the thermal and electrical stresses. And energy efficiency is of concern to everyone. But unless it's really crap gear, I'd suggest that powering down to attempt to preserve the longevity of your equipment might not be the appropriate answer.

Re:deja vu

[larry bagina]

Another vote for the NSLU2. I have debian installed on mine. Another option would be to get a bug base -- it's twice (or more) expensive, but 4 times the memory (128Meg vs 32), faster (600? mhz vs 266), and I think it has floating point hardware.

Compared to a x86 box, the slug uses much less power. Some people have been able to run it off solar power.

Re:deja vu

[Wrenzo]

Count me in as another NSLU2 fan. If all you need is a home file server, the NSLU2 is perfect. It consumes very little power and as some have already mentioned, you can turn it into a "slug" and have a mini linux box. I use my slug as a samba server to Windows and a rsync server to Linux (for backups). The slug can also be used for NFS if you need that.

Re:deja vu

[Anonymous Coward]

It's linux-based and low-power yes, but "little slow" is an understatement.. It's VERY slow compared to a real pc-based fileserver (even an old PII or P3 will beat the pants of a nslu2).

Re:deja vu

[Anonymous Coward]

That must have been quite a long time ago. The cheap desktop IDE/SATA drives of today are actually specified (and hopefully designed) to be powered up and down multiple times per day during their entire lifetime. Shutting the drives down during the entire night or while you're away at work may significantly increase the expected lifetime, and the startup checks (hopefully reported via S.M.A.R.T) may help identify dying drives that my otherwise be just dead after the next power cycle. Additionally, thermal stress will also be caused by all the power saving measures, possibly heating and cooling back down within minutes, hundreds or even thousands of times in a day. The same will cause wide swings in both current and (at least for the CPU) voltage on the components involved.

Re:deja vu

[PolarIced]

I think you've been drinking too much of the cool-aid from the hard drive manufacturers. You know - the same people that arbitrarily offer 5 year warrantees, then 3 year, then 1 year, then back to 5 years - depending on the mechanical reliability of the product and the advances made in the technology, I'm sure (COUGH, COUGH, COUGH).

The items quoted by the parent are physical issues. There is no getting around them design-wise. Thermal conductivity and expansion is a physical reality. So is friction. So is high current startup to get the platters spinning. (As an aside, few people realize that it takes only about 16HP to propel a car down a level road at 60MPH. What's the extra horsepower for?)

Like most things in computing, the marketing people seem to rule the roost. So I'm sure that if Western DIgital says that they've come up with a "New, completely silent and utterly frictionless condensed veebleflux gas fluid bearing," or some other BS for hard drives they're only telling the truth to the most minute extent of the law.

I'll leave the argument about whether to leave the hard drives spinning or not for more qualified silicon jihadists - but I wanted to warn you to take the manufacturers' marketing literature (and yes, even their TBF statistics) with a few more grains of salt. Oh, and let me know when you get those half million hours on a drive, if you please.

Now, where did I put the RMA info for all of these drives?

Re:deja vu

[Just Some Guy]

The cheap desktop IDE/SATA drives of today are actually specified (and hopefully designed) to be powered up and down multiple times per day during their entire lifetime.

The data sheet on a brand new 750GB WD SATA drive says that it's rated for at least 50,000 power cycles. What's your idea of "multiple times per day"? In a low-duty fileserver where you transfer a file, then spin down; transfer then spin down; transfer then spin down 50 times a day, you're going to get about 3 years out of it. Laptop drives are far better, but you probably weren't planning to put those in your fileserver.

Re:deja vu

[bcrowell]

I have an NSLU2, and am very happy with it. Some reasons to prefer it over something like the KPC: it's less than half the price, it only draws 4 watts, and it's the size of a paperback book. I think it's important to understand what "slow" means in the parent post. It doesn't mean that it's slow as a file server, it means that it's got a slow cpu. Serving up files is not a cpu-intensive job, so the slow cpu has no impact of file-serving performance. I'm using it as a music server, and decoding an mp3 only uses about 1% of its cpu power.

Re:deja vu

[bcrowell]

In addition to the points made by the other posts above, I want to point out that for many applications you probably want to use a solid state drive anyway. My NSLU2 has a 16 Gb flash drive as its storage ($150), and that's big enough to hold my whole music collection in mp3 format. The flash drive is more compact than a spinning platter, and uses less power.

You need a home server do you?

[AP2k]

Boy, do I have a site you need to check out! http://www.stayathomeserver.com/book.aspx

Re:You need a home server do you?

[Atti K.]

OMFG, this is a joke, right? Please, tell me it's a joke. Please.

"When a mommy and a daddy love each other very much, the daddy wants to give the mommy a very special gift. So he buys a stay-at-home server."

OMFG!!!

Re:You need a home server do you?

[Atti K.]

-1, Redundant??? Where was this posted before?

I'm -1, Sad :(.

Re:You need a home server do you?

[JK_the_Slacker]

Slashdotted. I think. Or lazy.

Re:You need a home server do you?

[Ajehals]

I'm not sure it is wholly satirical, in fact it appears to be a clever piece of marketing on the part of Microsoft, there are certainly satirical elements (the America's talking thing for one and the author is also a fake) but the various adverts seem to be fairly legitimate and link to the relevant Microsoft pages are real. The Microsoft page linked in turn has references to the marketing/satirical site in question.

Oh and in case you are interested, the Windows logo'd second page of the 'book' reads;

Just so that you know, Tom O'Connor does not actually have a Ph.D. He is also not
actually a person. ant the entire premise of this book is fictional. But on the bright
side, a Windows Home Server is a real product. Perhaps you'd like to buy one.

You can find out more about Windows Home Server at
www.microsoft.com/windowshomeserver and at www.stayathomeserver.com As for technical information about the site that may give a clue, the (partial) whois data is;

Registrant
  Domains by Proxy, Inc.
  (***) ***-**** Phone*
  (***) ***-**** Fax*
  DomainsByProxy.com
  XXXXX X XXXXXX XX XXX XXX XXX XXX*
  Scottsdale, Arizona 85260
  United States

Domains By Proxy, Inc is just what it claims to be, one of those (in my opinion) rather dispicable organisations that allows people to hide behind a third party when registering domains.

*I've removed the phone numbers and half the address, if anyone wants that info they can do their own whis lookup, not sure why, just felt better after doing it.

As for the server itself, its an IIS box (as expected) version 6, so all that tells us is that its Windows 2K or better, (although not a pre-release of 2008 Server), and the ASP version looks about right to be current;

Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727
Cache-Control: private
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 6827

Two potentially interesting things to note in the source are;

1) A comment attached to some js

        -- Microsoft Internal Tracking Tool //-->

2) The apparent use of Google Analytics

        -- Google Analytics //-->

So there you go. Is it Microsoft Marketing at work? Probably, is that provable, Probably not.

Re:You need a home server do you?

[Ajehals]

OK Maybe original would be a more accurate description, although to be honest I dont think its aimed at kids....

Re:You need a home server do you?

[Anonymous Coward]

STFU boszgor.

Shuttle's KPC?

[eldavojohn]

There's a story right after this on on the KPC which is $200. You could swap out the HDD for a half terabyte $100 cheapy from Microcenter or rebated somewhere. I believe the motherboard has gigabit ethernet. Although I can't say for sure. I think this is as cheap as you can go without a used/DIY idea and on top of that, it will take up hardly any space.

If you're concerned about heat around the HDD, I would simply suggest a DIY project that moves the HDD to its own enclosure with heat sinks and fans. But one of those would look cute underneath your router or even in your living room.

Going to go out on limb and recommend... Linux.

[XorNand]

Drag that old PII out of the closet and install Linux and Samba on it, maybe upgrading the HDD a bit first. I also use my primary home server a firewall, caching DNS server, transparent web proxy (Squid), voice-over-ip/ultra-advanced answering machine (Asterisk), and for experimenting with various web projects.

Re:Going to go out on limb and recommend... Linux.

[ivan256]

I'm as much... Scratch that... I'm more of a hardware pack-rat than most people judging by the hundreds of pounds of obsolete rack-mount equipment in my basement, and I'm all for re-purposing obsolete hardware. However a home server is the wrong place to do it, especially if saving money is your primary goal. A well-selected modern machine, especially an underclocked machine, with a new energy efficient power supply will pay for itself in energy savings against an old Pentium [123] in less than a year. And as a bonus, it'll perform better too.

Re:Going to go out on limb and recommend... Linux.

[Jim Hall]

Certainly re-using an old PC workstation as a file server (especially after adding storage) running some distro of Linux is a good suggestion. If the original poster doesn't mind setting up the environment (I think he's ok with it) then this is a very cheap, effective solution. But the original poster also said he considered re-using older hardware and had decided not to.

What I did in my house was buy a low-end MacMini ($600) with extra external storage ($180) and enable SSH. I have a home network with wireless + wired, and the Mac is on a wired port. I use the Mac as a backup server for the Linux boxen in our house. The neat thing is that the Mac can boot itself each morning, and shut itself off each night, saving on power when I'm not likely to be using it. I have it boot at 6AM and shut down at 10PM. Also, when the system isn't being used, it goes into a low-power mode.

It's a decent solution. Works great for rsync/SSH backups, or to save off some files that don't need to be on my laptop. I also mapped a connection to it via GNOME if I want to browse for a particular file.

And yes, the MacMini can run headless just fine. Although when I later bought an HDTV, I plugged it into that via the VGA port, so now I have a 40" 1920×1080 display when I want it! :-)

Buffalo Linkstation

[TeknoHog]

I've considered a Buffalo Linkstation with a custom Linux distro. http://buffalo.nas-central.org/index.php/Main_Page

Re:Buffalo Linkstation

[Richard Steiner]

That's what I use -- a little 250GB LinkStation Pro with a DriveStation (250GB external USB hard disk) as a backup drive for the file server. It works wonderfully.

Re:Buffalo Linkstation

[bjpirt]

Me too (but without the drivestation), and you can install the full debian arm distro on it without having to take it apart. It's quiet, low powered and so far has been very reliable.

Highly recommended.

Re:Buffalo Linkstation

[bjpirt]

Oops - meant to link to the information about hacking the device. Here you go

Re:Buffalo Linkstation

[Richard Steiner]

I also have a Compaq Proliant 2500 with Mandrake 8.2 on it playing fileserver, but three 18GB disks just don't go very far these days. :-) Besides, the LinkStation was great -- just plug it in, plug in the network cable, turn it on, and use a browser on some other machine to bring up the web-based control interface. It's really easy.

Re:Buffalo Linkstation

[eap]

The LinkStation is a convenient choice because it allows you to connect another USB hard disk, and do automatic backups from the internal disk to the USB disk. If you can get by with daily backups instead of RAID, this is a great choice due to its simplicity.

As mentioned, the Linksys NSLU2 is also worth checking out. At $89, the price is good, but you will have to buy a USB hard drive for it. If you want automatic backups, you'll need two hard drives.

I have both, and I prefer the LinkStation. The process by which you hack it into a fully capable server is easier than the NSLU2. Also, it seems to have more pre-built software packages available than Unslung. The LinkStation is a bit more expensive, however.

Both give you the capability to serve files to Windows computers, and both will let you stream music files over 100mbit ethernet. Both use less power than a regular PC. Another advantage is that they are easily portable for travel.

Windows Home Server

[JCSoRocks]

Say what you like about Microsoft, but they appear to have finally made a decent product here. You can buy an OEM copy through Newegg for $169. Then slap it on any machine you like. It's got built in support for automatically backing up all of your files. If you have multiple HDD's in your server you can specify at the folder level which folders should be copied onto multiple drives (for redundancy should one of your HD's fail). It's also got nifty support for managing it from outside your home and streaming music, videos and photos to other machines inside / outside of your home. Take a look at it - http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/windowshomeserver/default.mspx

Re:Windows Home Server

[Applekid]

Say what you like about Microsoft, but they appear to have finally made a decent product here. You must be new here. ;)

Re:Windows Home Server

[pogopogo]

It's perfect if you don't mind a little data corruption in your backups.

Re:Windows Home Server

[LMacG]

That would be the Windows Home Server that corrupts files?

Re:Windows Home Server

[Anonymous Coward]

It's got built in support for automatically corrupting all of your files.

There, fixed that for you. :-)

Re:Windows Home Server

[elrous0]

I admire your bravery, sir.

Re:Windows Home Server

[JCSoRocks]

RTFA. I've researched this issue a lot as an owner of a WHS box. From Microsoft's KB -

You can still use the Windows Home Server home computer backup to back up and restore files from and to your home computers.

It doesn't corrupt your backups. Those are fine. The issue only occurs when the machine is under a high load and you save a file to a shared folder on the WHS using one of a handful of applications. It's easy to avoid and they're working on a fix - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/946676/en-us?spid=12624.

But you know, feel free to ignore the facts and resume your mindless fear mongering. You should run for President!

Re:Windows Home Server

[rtb61]

Personally I prefer a home server absent of some one else's DRM, when it comes to digital rights, I'd prefer my home server to be looking after and securing mine, so that particular product would not even get a look in.

Re:Windows Home Server

[kevinroyalty]

I have to agree - Windows Home Server rocks, even with the known (rare) corruption issue out there that is fully documented in the KB someone already mentioned. With the new Power Pack 1 and several new free add-ins, its becoming a really great product, for very little money. Oh, and there is NO DRM :)

A great site to check out (non MS) is http://www.wegotserved.co.uk/

Kevin

Re:Windows Home Server

[pla]

You can buy an OEM copy through Newegg for $169.

Alternatively, you could flip Billy G the finger, run Linux, and spend cash on another 750GB.

XP has its place - But "headless home file server" does not match that description. And $169? Why the hell would you pay more for a stripped-down version?

Re:Windows Home Server

[JCSoRocks]

Ugh. Windows Home Server is basically Windows Server 2003... not XP.

Re:Windows Home Server

[Ajehals]

The minimum system requirements are a 1Ghz or better x86 processor and 512Mb RAM, so whilst they should be easy to meet they are higher than the absolute minimum you could make do with (and obviously you are going to need a x86 box, no using a nice little ARM box or an old PPC Mac). Having said that is apparently runs very well at close to the minimum system requirements. There also seems to be a requirement for a DVD drive and a monitor, which I assume is for the install, so you can probably get rid of both once your 'server' is up and running.

However according to the FAQ's on MS's own website;

*Why aren't you releasing the software standalone to consumers?

We want to help ensure customers have a simplified, quality experience with Windows Home Server. The best way to do this is to deliver Windows Home Server on integrated hardware/software solutions through OEMs and system builders that are tested and meet system requirements. So buying it and installing it is apparently not what you are supposed to be able to do. (not saying you can't, obviously, if you can get hold of the software legitimately). That presumably means that anyone *buying* a Windows Home Server as a package, is going to end up with hardware of a higher specification that absolutely necessary, and probably pay a higher price.

Personally I would say that if you are running (or planning to run) Vista *and* have a requirement for the features provided *and* are not too interested in flexibility *and* have the budget for it, then this is probably a nice and simple approach. For anyone else there are lots and lots of options that (with various degrees of work) will do the same or more for less.

Re:Windows Home Server

[Anonymous Coward]

"Say what you like about Microsoft"

FUCK Microsoft, and all the pathetic scumfucks who try and convince us to buy their products.

Re:Windows Home Server

[barzok]

"Any machine you like" may yield a much hotter, higher power draw device than buying a WHS box off the shelf. http://www.hanselman.com/blog/PowerConsumptionOfTheHPMediaSmartHPHomeServer.aspx

Re:Windows Home Server

[JCSoRocks]

Yeah... but in my case it was a lot cheaper to buy two 750 GB drives and put them in a machine I already own than to buy an entirely new box. I have a feeling the same is true for a lot of other /. types.

Depends but Software is better then Hardware Raids

[angus_rg]

Unless you are really hell bent on speed or aren't mirroring, avoid hardware raids. While hardware may be faster, if the raid controller blows up, you probably have to find the same one to replace it since there is no standard on how the data is written.

If you rebuild your system, reloading the same software for the raid should be cake.

lots of options

[garinh]

I'm now using a QNAP TS-109 (http://www.qnap.com/pro_detail_feature.asp?p_id=79/) and love it. It's silent (no fans), low-power-consumption (about 14 watts max draw), has lots of built-in functionality managed through a web interface (including DLNA for media streaming to a PS3 or similar), and runs Linux...

NAS

[aphxtwn]

1. linux+raid5+lvm but the only problem is with more hdd's the more power, then you'll need to upgrade the psu, etc. 2. another option is something like promise tech's smartstor 4300 (4xSATA drive NAS enclosure that supports RAID). 3. there's drobo which is a RAID usb drive which can take 4xSATA drives, but it doesn't have a network connection. 4. dedicated windows machine with file shares also, another consideration is noise & placement. For noise, pc's are more flexible.

Re:NAS

[nxtw]

1. linux+raid5+lvm but the only problem is with more hdd's the more power, then you'll need to upgrade the psu, etc.

If you have more than 4 or so drives, you're better off getting some sort of backplane / externally powered enclosure instead of dealing with PC power supplies (many of which are designed to support overclocked CPUs and dual video cards instead of hard drives). External SATA enclosures often implement staggered spinup and support hotplugging, whereas a typical PC power supply might have difficulties. Plus, it makes things much more manageable.

I use 5-drive eSATA enclosures ($46/drive + 1 controller port per 5 drives), and I may use 12-drive SATA over InfiniBand enclosures in the future ($48.33/drive + either 3 SATA over InfiniBand ports, 12 SATA ports, or 3 port multipliers and 3 SATA ports).

Re:NAS

[andrewjnr]

Can you recommend a particular make/model for a 5-drive eSata enclosure? How do they work - does each drive appear to the OS, or does the external box RAID them?

For software.

[LWATCDR]

For super simple.
Freenas.org offers will do the trick.
Want to get fancy? Openfiler.com will do anything you could want.
For hardware. Well if you have a spare case with a good power supply sitting around you could go with this. http://www.clubit.com/product_detail.cfm?itemno=A4842001
It will be low power and is pretty cheap. Just buy some DDR-2 ram and what hard drives you want and your good to go.
This board does have two slots free so you do have some expansion options for more drives or even a raid if you want.
If you don't want to build a system then you could get the $199 Walmart Linux PC which uses this motherboard. If you are going to put a lot of drives on it I would still upgrade the power supply.
You could also pick this up at geeks.com http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=TS-X2002RS
Or if you want just use what any old PC you have.

It all depends on what you want to do. There are some nice small NAS systems that you can just plug in as well.

Ubuntu

[kextyn]

When I upgraded to a new gaming system my old one turned into my file server. The only reason I used that particular system is because of the motherboard and case though. I have 10 hard drives installed with just over 3TB total (well, not nearly 3TB after using RAID5 and formatting disks.) The system is running Ubuntu Feisty and has been running great for quite a while. It's sitting in my laundry room hooked up to an UPS so I pretty much don't have to touch it for anything. I know this isn't exactly a small, cheap, home server. But you don't have to use a high end motherboard or fill up the case with hard drives to achieve the same results.

Editors are slacking!

[Otter]

I'd read Microsoft's Brainwashing Children's Book: Mommy, Where Do Servers Come From? on Reddit yesterday, saw this headline and counted on more witless conspiracy theories about M$ here. Instead, it's a reasonably useful topic for discussion! I'd think my DNS was screwed up and I'd come to the wrong site if Timothy hadn't oddly followed it up with a semi-dupe on the smae subject.

Windows Home Server

[willith]

I've had fantastic luck with Windows Home Server since about October of last year. I've got 1.5TB in it (three 500GB Western Digital HDDs) and it serves files via CIFS/SMB over gigabit ethernet. My three Windows PCs, my Leopard iMac, and my Xbox360 can all watch movies, play music, and look at pictures hosted on the server (and access non-multimedia files as well, of course). Further, the client backup/restore offered by WHS is awesome (though Windows-only). Nightly backups of my three PCs, with data de-duplication, and it keeps a few months' worth of data. Backups can be accessed from any client through Windows Explorer or through the WHS console.

The crown jewel, though, is full PC restores. I swapped the hard drive out on one of my PCs for a bigger one, and instead of re-installing Windows onto the new drive and then laboriously copying my user files back, I just restored its image from WHS onto the new hard drive. The fact that the new drive was a different size didn't affect the restore at all--I popped in the restore CD, hit the "GO" button, and about an hour later my PC was exactly as it was before, but with a bigger hard drive.

I have no complaints about WHS. It handles as much hard drive space as you can throw on it, it will automatically duplicate shared data to multiple physical drives to mitigate the loss caused by drive failure, it functions as a web-facing RDC gateway for your clients if you'd like, and you can access your shares from the Internet if you'd like. It's great.

Low Power

[SlashdotOgre]

I leave my "file server" always on at home, so I wanted to pick up something with low power. I went with the VIA CPU/Mobo/VGA combo from newegg for about $60 a couple years ago. The Via 2000+ C3 is basically like a P3 800MHz, but it's power consumption is ultra low (we're talking half the wattage of its celeron equivalent). I picked up a small form factor shuttle like case from Fry's with a built in PSU (200W I believe), 512MB of PC2100, and have two 250GB HDD's in there. The system is now running Fedora Core 7 (would have preferred Gentoo, but it's kinda pointless to use the binary version of that in my opinion).

While it's fairly weak compared to modern systems, it has more then enough power for serving files, so I have it set up as my web & email server as well. I also have a UPnP server running to share music/video's to my Xbox 360 & SlimServer for listening to my music collection remotely.

For a while I ran MythTV on it with a Hauppage 150 card, and it ran fine (could even transcode on the fly to watch live TV in horrible quality on my Motorola Q). I also picked up a battery backup from APC which I configured with nut for when we have rolling blackouts.

One thing I'd recommend doing is sticking with NFS for file sharing if you have a choice. All major platforms now support it (well I can't speak for Vista, but XP works so I presume it would as well). If you need to share to Windows XP, you need to download the (now free) Services for Unix 3.5 from MS to get their NFS client. I'm not a Mac person, but I know you can mount NFS on those out of the box (at least from the CLI). I use amd (Auto Mount Daemon) for my other Linux systems to auto mount. The performance of NFS blows Samba out of the water, I can stream Xvid on 802.11B with NFS with virtually no issues (can't do that with Samba).

I should probably note I'm a Unix sys admin at work, so I'm fairly competent in Linux, but with that said I think even a novice could set this all up (exceptions being the email server and MythTV) without too many headaches. I let yum take care of all my system updates and am quite happy with my investment in this system (under $350 total).

Re:Low Power

[HydraSwitch]

I do not recommend NFS for windows clients.
SFU 3.5 stops at 2 Gig files.
Have you tried to backup one of your windows boxes?
One with > 2 G of data on it? It won't work.
It didn't the last time I tried anyways... samba does work.

Re:Low Power

[nxtw]

One thing I'd recommend doing is sticking with NFS for file sharing if you have a choice. All major platforms now support it (well I can't speak for Vista, but XP works so I presume it would as well). If you need to share to Windows XP, you need to download the (now free) Services for Unix 3.5 from MS to get their NFS client. I'm not a Mac person, but I know you can mount NFS on those out of the box (at least from the CLI). I use amd (Auto Mount Daemon) for my other Linux systems to auto mount. The performance of NFS blows Samba out of the water, I can stream Xvid on 802.11B with NFS with virtually no issues (can't do that with Samba).

If NFS is faster than SMB on Windows, something is seriously wrong. I regularly reach the peak expected speeds (~25mbit/sec on 802.11g, ~480mbit/sec on 1000BaseT) using Samba as a server on Linux and Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Mac OS X as clients.

Re:Low Power

[Mad Merlin]

480 mbit over gigabit ethernet? That's awful. I regularly see ~110 mbytes/s (= ~880 mbit) through HTTP via gigabit ethernet. I'd post the wget output, but the lameness filter doesn't seem to like that.

Re:Low Power

[nxtw]

In all of those examples, one end of the copy was a single desktop drive.

Re:Low Power

[Anonymous Coward]

The low power AMD Semprons can be pretty efficient too. I have a Fry's system with a Sempron 3200+, RAM, hard disk, power supply, etc. that uses only 40 watts when not doing any work. If I spun down the hard disk this would go down further.

What I've Used for a Home LAN

[Otter Escaping North]

In the past, I have looked at the iPaq and considered using older computers I have lying around, but for various reasons I have never jumped in to do it. Do you guys have any suggestions on what to use for a home file server (hardware and software)? The server would be feeding files to Windows PCs and connected to the network through a Linksys WRT54GL running DD-WRT firmware."

It's hard to supply advice without knowing what your requirements are and what the "various reasons" were that prevented you from employing the old PCs you mention. However...

In my basement, I have an Athlon 800 MHz, with 256 MB of RAM that houses a DVD drive, plus 3 IDE hard drives. A 15GB for the OS and such, and a 500GB and 200GB that are made available on my home network via NFS and Samba. The 200 gig is a "public" drive for people in the house to use. The 500 gig was a media drive until I built a myth box over Christmas, now it's a backup drive. I'm not doing RAID or anything. The machine runs Slackware 11, and is connected to the network on a 100 Mbit LAN.

Performance is fine. The most taxing I got was when I played my ripped movies from the file server in the basement to my Mac up in the family room. No stuttering or any other issues unless I saturated the link (ie. it couldn't serve two movies at once).

If you've got old PCs around - I see no reason not to use them. Otherwise, I'd probably just use an inexpensive NAS unless you want more out of the machine. I got Grandpa Otter a NAS for Christmas as he wanted centralized file storage on his LAN, but is not a hobbyist, and didn't want to muck with PC innards.

Knowing your requirements would produce better suggestions for hardware and software...but for file serving a home LAN - I'm thinking old hardware and any Linux distro will be most economical and get the job done.

Re:What I've Used for a Home LAN

[mrzaph0d]

yep, similar setup at my place. I had an old PIII 733MHZ. I put in a total of 512MB RAM, slackware 12. for backups, it rsync's to another box exactly like it, only with a smaller drive (soon to be replaced by equal sized drives).

Samba shares it out my wife's windows box and to my linux box. we even run apache and gallery on it for pictures and edna on it for mp3s.

the most taxing part is the rsync every night, but after the initial backup it only takes about a minute most days to sync it.

Try out a Via C7-based machine

[HesAnIndieRocker]

I have one of these in my kitchen (long story) that has been happily chugging away without any downtime for about a year now.

These processors/computers are certainly now the highest-performance machines in the world, but they handle most home tasks wonderfully and consume almost no power when idle. For 24/7 operation this becomes very important. Also, most varieties of C7 can operate with passive cooling, meaning your power supply fan will be the only noise it generates.

If you can afford it (I put mine together with a gig of memory, 500gb disk, and DVD for about $350 a year ago), this is a better approach than "throw slackware on an old Pentium 3" because you can get the same or better performance without the ongoing electricity cost and loud operation.

don't skimp

[infonography]

under-performing fileservers can kill you fps on HD go with the best available.

http://www.isilon.com/products/index.php

Re:don't skimp

[Knara]

This is a file server, not a streaming media server or gaming machine. FPS are mostly (if not entirely) irrelevant.

Re:don't skimp

[AllNicksTaken]

I think it's a joke making fun of the killer nic. http://www.killernic.com/

Re:don't skimp

[The Master Control P]

That doesn't seem very likely unless you're doing multiple 1080p streams at once.

Even at the highest bitrate video you're going to have, a Blu-ray rip at 54Mbps, you're only utilizing half of a bog-standard ethernet interface, a small fraction of a hard disk's sequential read capacity, and about 1/20 of an old (32bit/33Mhz) pci bus's bandwidth.

Why not get a NAS?

[cylcyl]

There are a number of NAS's out there with good file server features. Netgear's new servers sound interesting. Synology also has lots. They come with web server, file streamer. Some even have bittorrent and USB hub for print servers.

It's not ultracheap (~$500-$600 + HDD cost) but have low power usage compare to any full PCs

Synology

[Spalti]

Well, from my own experience, I would recommend one of the Synology NAS systems. I'm using a DS207+ myself, and while it's probably not the cheapest option, the device is well build, running linux, there is a ssh package available from the manufacturer and it comes with preinstalled mysql+php support. It also supports smb+afp, iTunes Sharing and offers a bunch of other services...
The only downside at the moment is that the UDMA service is not compatible with my PS3, so no direct streaming right now.

Re:Synology

[Spalti]

d'oh, of course the UPnP service is not compatible with my PS3 - I don't know how UDMA got in there...
BTW, they have already announced to fix this problem with a firmware update later on.

I settled on one of these for 139...

[riseoftheindividual]

http://www.buy.com/prod/iomega-320gb-home-network-nas-external-hard-drive/q/loc/101/205120567.html

Only 320gb but that was plenty for my needs. Low cost, easy as pie to setup, low power consumption, no hassles/headaches(and no MS tax).

Infrant ReadyNAS NV

[iiii]

I got an Infrant ReadyNAS NV , before the company was bought up by NetGear. It's pretty awesome, though not perfect. Real hot-swappable RAID, dynamic reconfiguration, and lots of other good management tools. Looks pretty sweet, fairly quiet. Using it as a print server has always been problematic, tho.

Also, they seem to have gone up in price *quite* a bit. This site says the no-disk one is $1049. I think mine was around $600. I got one with no disks, and found a good deal on two 500GB disks (which were on their approved h/w list) and still ended up under $1200, and that was two or three years ago. But mine didn't have gigabit ethernet. I guess that explains some of the cost increase.

I set mine up with 500GB of storage, mirrored, and two open bays. I started offloading pix and video and backing up everything else, and a couple years later have not yet had to fill the other bays. But I like knowing I can expand to 1.5TB in RAID5 when I need the space.

Re:Infrant ReadyNAS NV

[codemachine]

I'll add briefly to the other reply.

I don't have one of these ReadyNAS units myself, but I have a friend with an earlier revision. They look very nice.

Their proprietary X-RAID is quite handy, since you can add drives later on and have the volume dynamically scale up. And being an appliance, it will use less power and be less hassle than a PC. Slightly less flexible, but it supports so many protocols already that it likely does everything you'd need as a file server.

I personally just use an old Pentium II system with some large drives. Originally it was NetBSD on an Pentium 133 with only 24MB of RAM, and this ran great for us. Might want a bit more power if you're using RAIDFrame for software RAID though.

Eventually we switched to Linux, because we added a PCI-ATA card that NetBSD didn't support at the time. Linux was painful to install and set up in that limited RAM/CPU environment, but ran fine once it was installed. However, we eventually upgraded to a mighty P2 450 with 256MB of RAM, which is a lot more comfortable.

So if you want to build and customize it yourself, Solaris, any BSD, or any Linux should work fine. I found the BSDs to be very lightweight and efficient as a file server. Linux has journaling file systems, which may be a consideration for it over the BSDs. Not sure what Solaris 10 hardware support is like, but perhaps ZFS would be nice for your needs.

If you just want to plug it in and have it work (and use less power to boot), something like the ReadyNAS is the way to go. Despite being very much able to set up routers, file servers, etc, I find myself recommending these low-hassle appliances over PCs.

Re:Infrant ReadyNAS NV

[pyite]

Their proprietary X-RAID is quite handy

And this is exactly why I bought one. It's good enough. I had a power supply fail, but they replaced it under warranty no problem (I fell in a range of bad serial numbers). Coincidentally, the reason I originally bought one is the reason I'm going to get rid of it. The "proprietary" notion of X-RAID bothers me. I'm going to move to a small server with several drives in RAID-Z on OpenSolaris.

Re:Infrant ReadyNAS NV

[codemachine]

Yeah, but anytime you use hardware RAID, your disks and data are usually tied to that specific RAID controller anyhow. So I'm not sure if it matters whether you use RAID5 or X-RAID.

Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris are definitely interesting options for file servers nowadays though, if you do wish to go with the software route.

Re:Infrant ReadyNAS NV

[pyite]

Yeah, but anytime you use hardware RAID, your disks and data are usually tied to that specific RAID controller anyhow. So I'm not sure if it matters whether you use RAID5 or X-RAID.

And this is why I will never use hardware RAID unless it's from a trusted vendor, e.g. EMC.

What's wrong with a NAS?

[plopez]

Seriously; cheap, runs out of the box, bare bones and as big as you want it to be. Usually runs some form or Unix and samba. Since it is bare bones it has a small vulnerability foot print.

Re:What's wrong with a NAS?

[zmollusc]

I have had 2 (admittedly cheap-assed) NAS enclosures that died within 6 months of 24-hour operation (the ide drives were fine, just the control card packed in) and a Netgear NAS that got noisy after a couple of months but is still whining away (although it needs power cycling every couple of months). The PII-350 desktop machine, which was old even before it got pressed into service as a server, worked for over 4 years till the psu went pop. The PC could support more simultaneous connections than the NAS enclosures, and faster too. For me today: Freenas FTW.

Re: home server question

[singingjim1]

Maybe I don't understand the question, but I installed a 500GB drive as a slave in one of my numerous machines at home, partitioned it to appear as 2 250GB drives on the network, set them as shared on the network over my Netgear router, then mapped to the drives on the other machines - wireless and wired. Transferring files is very fast. I even signed up for free DNS and installed free FTP software on that machine to use one of the partitions as a password protected FTP site that our friends and family have access to. Very easy to share files and pictures that way. My Azureus downloads directly into the FTP partition so I have access to those files anywhere in the world I have internet access.

I'm not a computer genius by any stretch and this setup can be done by anyone who knows how to use Google to learn stuff. But like I said, given that I'm no genius, maybe I'm just missing the gist here. I've never tried to stream anything over the network and maybe that requires more advanced software, I don't know. My XBOX 360 takes care of my media access as I have it pointed to all the places I have stuff stored and it works like a charm over my THX stereo and HDTV.

SME Server

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm testing SME Server v7.2. It's based on CentOS and configures as easy as a router or NAS box. File access is much faster than my NAS and plays nice with both Windows and Linux (Ubuntu anyway). YMMV

DLINK DNS-323

[Lust]

A friend just pointed me to this set-up and I'm fairly happy for home:

DLINK DNS-323
Two SATA bays. Can slide in the drives w/o tools.
Print server (USB)
Can run in RAID0, RAID1, or JBOD (I chose RAID1).
web interface for config.

I bought two 512Gb WD drives which were on sale for $119 each.

Some peculiar behavior if you really want a secure system: passwords couldn't include non-alpha chars!? And it didn't allow spaces in the WORKGROUP name for the samba mount, which isn't an MS requirement.

But for home use where you're already considered secure and not so worried about multiple users, I find it great having one giant /Storage that the whole network can access.

The reviews on Amazon are love/hate, I think for the above reasons. Probably not be the best set-up for an office or in The Wild.

Random review here: http://www.techworld.com/storage/reviews/index.cfm?reviewid=469

Re:DLINK DNS-323

[GRW]

I just bought one and put two 500Gb drives in it. It also acts as a daap media server, so it is a great place to store all of your mp3 files. Make sure you have the latest firmware before you put anything on it. The older firmware had problems with the ext3 file system. The latest version went back to ext2.

Re:DLINK DNS-323

[maxrate]

I have this device - I loaded it with about 120 CD-Roms of info (i was trying to make an online archive) - it KILLED all my files! (Raid 1) - I will take your advice an update the firmware. It really disappointed me!

Re:DLINK DNS-323

[GRW]

I am having problems with foreign characters in filenames not displaying properly. This is apparently fixed in the upcoming firmware revision.

Thecus N2100 NAS

[Facegarden]

I just got a Thecus N2100 NAS for our office, and it rocks. It runs linux, so you can do whatever you want with it if you know how, but even if you don't (like me), it is still really easy to use. It holds 2 HDDs and i've mirrored them for safety, set up all the computers in the office to connect to it (on 2 different wired networks... it has 2 network ports, and can even be modded for wireless), and even set up FTP access for when i'm at home. It also functions as a USB print server that has some quirks but should be great for normal use, acts as an iTunes sharing device (shows up in the itunes shared computers sections), supports UPnP, and pretty much anything else you can throw at it. It was $275 or so without drives, and i love it! Oh, and it's also super silent. -Taylor here's the URL: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822102012

Easy

[Wiseman1024]

Anything you can scavenge, with as much RAM as possible (for the system cache), running Linux without GUI and needless stuff (saved RAM goes for the system cache), and the best storage drive you can afford having the size you require. Of course, your priorities as far as storage goes should be:

1. RAM (make all of it fit in RAM; most expensive; ridiculously fast; will probably require a 64 bit machine). Hint: Google uses pulls the critical stuff off RAM, not hard drives.
2. Flash storage (excellent for concurrency; fragmentation and parallel operations don't degrade performance; lots of other advantages such as durability, power, noise, size, weight, can be turned off anytime, etc.).
3. Hard disk drive. Disregard the bus, the hard disk is usually slower anyways. Especially skip SCSI unless you have a very good reason for it; prefer SATA.

And there you go.

WRTSL54GS

[Shadyman]

The WRTSL has a USB port, and you can rig it with a samba server.

NSLU-2 or ASUS WL-500gP

[yermej]

Somebody already mentioned the NSLU-2 with one of the non-Linksys firmwares. I had one and, until the lightening killed it, it worked really well and uses very little power. I'm now replacing my router (a WRT54GS) and the NSLU-2 with an ASUS WL-500gP. I haven't heard anything good about the stock ASUS firmware, but OpenWRT (and probably others) work well. The ASUS has two USB 2.0 ports for attaching storage (or other hardware) and you could even use a powered hub to add even more drives. I don't have it all set up yet, but it should work well as router and file server while remaining quiet, cool, and using little power.

ZFS

[FunkyELF]

Use ZFS if you don't want bit-rot.
Bad thing is you need to have a 64bit machine and 1Gb min (>= 2Gb recommended) to run it and most file servers are the underpowered machines we keep around when we buy a new machine.

Re:ZFS

[imemyself]

I don't think you have to use a 64 bit box for ZFS. It may help performance, but its not a requirement (unless its changed very recently). I have ran Solaris with ZFS in VMware on a 32 bit box before.

Re:ZFS

[FunkyELF]

You are right. I have never ran it because of some bug which preventing it from booting on non SSE machines. But it is not recommended on a 32-bit machine.

Learn from my mistakes - Keep your data safe

[tripmine]

These are three little things that I learned the hard way from my own home server experiences.

1. Ventilation - You don't want your hard drives getting hot and crispy. Hard drives tend to break more often when you leave them cooking themselves for a couple of months.
2. CPU - Software RAID (especially writing to RAID 5) is very CPU intensive. Ideally you'd have a hardware RAID controller, but they're too expensive. Your better off getting a decent CPU that can handle all of the RAID goodness and everything else the server does. I'd recommend either a dual core or hyper threading.
3. Logs - Make sure whatever setup you have emails you, beeps at you, or does something to let you know if one of your drives fails. A 4 disk RAID 5 is worthless if more than one drive fails. If you're really serious about keeping your data, don't limp on with a missing drive on your array.

WRT350N and a USB drive.

[Anonymous Coward]

how about a WRT350N with a USB drive?? there is a usb port on the router, and admin pages on the router to make shares and assign permissions (AFAIK, it won't integrate with LDAP). even act as an FTP server. lower power consumption than even a VIA.

http://www.linksys.com/servlet/Satellite?c=L_Product_C2&childpagename=US%2FLayout&cid=1162354643512&pagename=Linksys%2FCommon%2FVisitorWrapper&lid=4351239789B01

Nforce chip set

[Joe The Dragon]

I would get a nforce 570 SLI / Ultra board with dual gig-e ports with teaming and tcp/ip off load.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813138059
this costs less then the one you picked

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813130048

Also alot of the upcoming am2+ nforce board will have tcp/ip off load as well.

you still need a load end video card even a low end pci one will work + you have open pci-e slots for pci-e raid cards if you need one.

QNAP NAS Servers

[ckeck]

Look into the QNAP TS-109/Pro or 209/Pro...I have a TS-209 Pro and it works great!

Seconded

[unsigned integer]

Buy it without disks, and then start cheap. You can always buy another large set and swap them all out, as long as you select their special raid mode (basically like raid5). Likely you picked up a low-memory one as well (256MB up to 1GB expandable).

The Infrant rocks, and their support forum is awesome.

I finally have it streaming to my PS3, which is pretty cool.

It also supports almost every file share mechanism you want. (NFS, SMB, FTP, WWW, AFP).

My personal favorite feature is just plugging in my USB flash stick, which the Infrant takes an automatic backup of. Great for snapping a quick backup of data with zero-effort.

Sweet Setup

[mathimus1863]

I've been doing this for quite a while. Put Ubuntu 6.06 and a 300GB HDD into a PII, 400 MHz desktop that's about 8 years old. It works beautifully!

I use sshfs to mount the server's harddrives on my local computer with full access to samba directories. Then I configured samba to provide a "publicShare" directory, readable and writeable by any computer. Another directory called "fileServe" which is read-only from any computer. I even set up apache on a separate folder and port-forwarding so it doubles as webserver as well.

Anytime I find anything interesting at all--videos, documents, images, software--I post them to my fileServe directory for everyone else to use. And they typically backup all their stuff and share things with each other on the publicShare since it's publicly-writable.

I've been running this setup flawlessly for 1.5 years. It's a lot better than paying $15-$30 to have the hardware recycled.

Shuttle SD11G5

[Misch]

I know it's a little limiting because it only has 2 internal 3.5" drive bays, but I think the Shuttle SD11G5 could be a good choice. It is a mostly-quiet Intel Pentium-M driven solution with on-board graphics and an external power supply (sort of how a laptop operates.) Power supply is rated at 220 watts, but running pretty barebones, the draw is far less than that.

I run one with Mandriva on it and do some file sharing on my home network and use it as a print server.

Any Pentium III 700MHz computer...

[Anonymous Coward]

With a SATA II PCI card and however large of a hard drive you'd like. Combine that with Damn Small Linux, booted from a USB pen drive and running from RAM (dsl toram), you're not going to find a faster, easier to use setup without spending more money than you really need to.

If you want to buy a new system for use with Damn Small Linux as file server, I would suggest building a system with a Celeron 400 series processor (Core 2 based, single processor core) as it will be more than enough to serve files with the benifit of it being very low power. Spend more on a large hard drive than anything else. Onboard video is all you need (heck, my $14,000 Proliant server has onboard video - and three redundant power supplies). Focus on what is important. A battery backup might be a good idea if you are in an unstable power grid area.

As a 'generosity-challenged individual'..

[zmollusc]

.. or 'miser' as other people put it, I hate to throw away working computers. Instead, I use them as file servers in the cellar (where i can't hear the fans whirring).
Even the humble PII has better performance and more simultaneous connections than a NAS enclosure ( or at least the cheap NAS enclosures I have bought ) and lasts a lot longer too.

My formula for home fileserving : cram an old PC with whatever IDE drives you have to hand and run FreeNAS on it, it will be plenty fast enough for 100megabit lan (which is fast enough for me). Whenever a drive fails, throw it away and put in whatever other (usually much bigger) hard drive is kicking around. When the motherboard fails, rescue the disks and build them into another fileserver.

RAID? why bother? Build another fileserver and keep your copies on that.

But what about the noise? Mine are in the cellar, only the spiders and woodworm can hear them.

Ah, but what about the power consumption? Pah! The heat slightly warms the house, reducing the energy used by the (admittedly more efficient) heating system, and is utterly dwarfed by the power consumption of other crap in the house. Also, a headless PII box uses much less power than you might think. Measure it.

Anyhoo, _my_ fileservers cost nothing but electicity, hold over a Terabyte and have uptimes of several months, so there :P

Build new or reuse an old one

[mollog]

I am looking at this same question. I investigated using a WRT54G or similar device for network attached storage, but eventually concluded that I could buy equipment on Newegg and build a low-power, high speed server for cheap, using an old case. The expensive part will be buying a new, efficient and quiet power supply.

I am looking at a 65w dual core processor on a mobo with a GB LAN interface built in. Lots of cheap memory. If you stay off the power curve, you can get processors, motherboards, system memory, and disk memory for cheap. Sometimes, you can use left-over stuff. I have a 1Gb memory stick that came out of a MAC. It's only worth about $25, but it's plenty for a good OS like Linux.

I could use an old HP Pavilion mobo, but it's power supply is noisy and I'd have to buy a GB NIC.

I'd recommend browsing the 'net for a cheap, low power mobo/processor that's using relatively current technology like SATA, GB LAN, and supports dual core processors. You can outfit it with a single core processor to save $40 and pick up a peppy multicore processor in the future. An AMD AM2 board with SATA and GB LAN can be found for $50, 45w processor for $40, 512 memory for $10, 160GB HDD for $50, and scrounge a case and power supply. That's $150 for a headless server that can be upgraded as component prices drop.

Older systems have pci bus limts that make useing.

[Joe The Dragon]

Older systems have pci bus limits that make useing raid + network slow and they are limited in how much ram they use.

Build a system get a nforce 570 sli board with dual gig-e port with teaming and tcp/ip offload and amd x2 cpu. DDR2 is cheap now days You also need a low end video card.

You will need a good PSU if you want to run a lot of disks.

Re: home server question

[michrech]

Well, I can't answer for everyone here (obviously), however, I can tell you why I had a home server at home (I took apart my old one -- will be creating something more energy efficient).

I, as you seem to imply about yourself, have several computers at home. I also had family that would bring a PC/laptop over occasionally. I also have a linux PC running Apache/Gallery/MySQL (it was in addition to the "server" I had for my Windows PC's). The linux PC is an old Blue and White G3 with a defective IDE controller (Apple sent out a bunch with a CMD chipset that had a defect, but it wasn't noticed until it was too late). I can use this machine for my file serving, but I want something a little more modern. I was looking at this for a while, but the reports I've read state the MySQL access is too slow for Gallery (though people *are* using it). I am also keeping an eye on that mainboard (it was either on digg, or here, or both) sold at ClubIT that is supposedly the same board as in that $199 PC at Wal*Mart. Of course, I like my Intel "Bad Axe 2" board I just picked up, and I could put a cheap Celeron in one (I like it's 8 SATA ports and the built in firewire, should I choose to use it). I'm sure I can find a similar AMD board and get an even cheaper Sempron to put in.. I'll have to sit down and make up my mind. :)

I told you all that, to tell you this: The reason I have the server on a separate machine is so that I don't have to leave any of my desktops on all the time (I do leave my "main" machine, which is a laptop, on all the time, but it's not always at my desk which would make accessing anything on its, or an external HDD, rather difficult). Once I put together a new server, it will take over the duties of the G3, and be a "storage dump".

I'm not the type of person that will go around and unplug every electric item in the house to cut down on every watt of power -- I don't care *that* much, but if the machine isn't doing something, it's generally off. Now, before you ask, no, I'm not going to do Folding@Home (or the varied others) on all my machines -- I don't need all my machines running 100% CPU, driving up my electric bill (I have enough problems with my waterbed -- I just discovered it's thermostat died and it was always on, full blast, all the time.. GAH!). So long as my electric bill stays reasonable, I'll continue with things as they are (save for purchasing a newer, better, water bed heater/thermostat).

I should know better than to type this stuff at work -- my mind is scattered everywhere. Hopefully this will at least give you more insight into the topic. :)

Maybe I don't understand the question, but I installed a 500GB drive as a slave in one of my numerous machines at home, partitioned it to appear as 2 250GB drives on the network, set them as shared on the network over my Netgear router, then mapped to the drives on the other machines - wireless and wired. Transferring files is very fast. I even signed up for free DNS and installed free FTP software on that machine to use one of the partitions as a password protected FTP site that our friends and family have access to. Very easy to share files and pictures that way. My Azureus downloads directly into the FTP partition so I have access to those files anywhere in the world I have internet access.

I'm not a computer genius by any stretch and this setup can be done by anyone who knows how to use Google to learn stuff. But like I said, given that I'm no genius, maybe I'm just missing the gist here. I've never tried to stream anything over the network and maybe that requires more advanced software, I don't know. My XBOX 360 takes care of my media access as I have it pointed to all the places I have stuff stored and it works like a charm over my THX stereo and HDTV.

Re:Depends but Software is better then Hardware Ra

[TheThiefMaster]

A little program called "QueTek File Scavenger" is capable of retrieving files from a broken raid array, given access to the disks and the raid settings (mode (0,1,5,10), stripe size (0,5,10 only), plus parity ordering if raid 5). There are other programs available (e.g raid reconstructor) that can figure out the raid settings given access to the disks, in case you don't know and can't figure it out through trial and error.

I used both recently to retrieve data from a broken raid-5 array (dead SiI3114 controller). I retrieved all hundreds of gigabytes of data, over the course of a couple of days.

I've used file scavenger in the past to completely recover all files from a single ntfs drive that had been quick-formatted, and a raid-5 set where one disk was completely dead (it happily reconstructed the disk from the raid-5 parity info).

The raid-5 capable version is fairly expensive, but not as expensive as having a professional data recovery company recover the data.

A bit pricy but worth it

[_Hellfire_]

For years I used old hardware an cobbled together bits to run my home file server. In the end I felt my time was worth more than the constant restarts due to kernel panics (I suspected the motherboard was going) and the constant forced fsck due to a dodgy hard drive.

I few years ago I finally bit the bullet and spent AUD 2K on an Asus TS-300 pedestal server and have never looked back. In Australia they come with a 3y advance replacement warranty but I'm sure that Asus would offer that in other parts of the world. I tweaked my setup a little hardware-wise but the base model is less expensive now at about $1700.

I installed Debian Etch, with software RAID, Apache, Postfix/Dovecot/Ilohamail, Samba, SSH and Jabber. I fine tuned it for about 2 weeks, and then left it alone. I never hear a peep out of that box and it runs everything I need flawlessly.

Industrial strength software on rock solid hardware means no downtime for me (and no more late nights troubleshooting failed hardware). I have sworn that I will never go back to using cobbled bits again unless I'm just playing with it.

mini-itx and openbsd

[capsteve]

IMHO the most important aspects of a file server is uptime and network connectivity. my most recent home server has ftp, nfs, http, ssh, rsync, smb and afp running... on top of openbsd.

i chose the mini-itx because of the small form factor and low power usage, on-board network/video/sound, without totally sacrificing cpu power. since i use it purely for file storage and retrieval, nothing else, so an 800mhz cpu is fast enough.

YMMV, but i've run a home fileserver in one form or another for the last 10 years, and i've had better reliability and uptime in the last 6 years with openbsd than any distro of linux(or qnx, solaris, or mac os). i attribute the stability mainly to the source code audits that are performed to discover security bugs. in the course of eliminating security bugs, the secondary effect is more stable builds.

Why not use SME Server

[Anonymous Coward]

I can strongly recommend using SME Server from http://www.contribs.org/ - It is fast, stable & secure and works well with almost any hardware, especially older machines. I have been using it in its various incantations for about 7 years and it is really great. It is a snap to set up and has full RAID support, automatically setting up various RAID configurations, depending on how many disks you install. Give it a try, you won't be disappointed. It will also double as a web and email server and has great community support. Best of all - its totally free - currently based on CentOs

Fast Cheap and Green.

[Linux_Bastard]

An old PC full of hard drives looks cheap, but it will cost you in watts. An old PC server can easily pull 250-400 watts continuously. And don't forget this summer, when you will have to pay twice for the waste heat.

A better solution is a VIA PC1 board, plus a couple of new drives.

The "$60 PC 1" will only pull 20 watts at max. Combine this with 2 "$250 terabyte drives" mirrored, and a small low wattage "$35 case" and the "(Free) Linux" of your choice,

You will have a reliable Terabyte server for less than $700, that only pulls as much power as a small appliance bulb.

Re:Fast Cheap and Green.

[afidel]

Dude a fully loaded gaming rig is going to have trouble pulling 400 Watts! An older CPU with some idling HDD's even with a crappy PSU is probably only going to pull 30-50W. That's still more than an appliance but it's hardly the horror you describe.

Re:Fast Cheap and Green.

[Linux_Bastard]

I get my numbers from an actual measurements. Where do you get yours? If you don't have an meter, play with this for a bit.

if your interested in how it works you can read this or a less technical WIKI

Older Processors used lots of power too, and the old power supplies were usually less than 70% efficient

A 25 watt P3 with 3 10 watt (idle) hard drives with no video and a super efficient 10 watt mother and memory and no fans will still use 65 watts, but with the efficiency of 70% that means 85 watts for a best case scenario for an older pc.

Since the pc does little real "work" virtually all of that is expressed as heat in your house. Fine in winter, but in summer that takes another 100 watts to cool that hot air.

Here is a nice article from 2000 that has real measured usage of these now vintage machines

-----

and another from 2004>

But most likely these are going to be machines from the last 2 years that can't play the new games, and will likely use far more power.

For reference, my SLI game setup (AMD64 5600 X2, 2 Raptors, 2 Asus 6600 GTS's) pulls 520 real watts playing half life.

I can only afford to play in winter. :P

Re:Fast Cheap and Green.

[afidel]

Ok, your links are more like what I would have expected, 100W plus or minus 30W without power management. I doubt that a current generation PC that is mostly idle would use much more. Heck my servers with loads of drives and dual PSU's, etc average under 300W while running at a normal business load. My media PC with an Athlonx2 4200+, dual drives and a 7600GT pulls about 175W from the wall at full tilt, of course that was built with a high efficiency PSU, low voltage CPU, passively cooled MB and GPU, etc. 400W idle I can't even imagine, even our 16 core 32GB ram beast of a DB server doesn't pull that high at idle (well it might if you include it's percentage of the SAN but you get my point). The point is the difference between hooking a couple HDD's to an old PC and buying at $700 solution could be decades of running and cooling the old PC.

Re:Fast Cheap and Green.

[Linux_Bastard]

The point is the difference between hooking a couple HDD's to an old PC and buying at $700 solution could be decades of running and cooling the old PC.

My $700 number included $500 for a "couple HDD's" so I think your point is that the cost for the rest of the system of about $150 is much more than the cost of using the old less efficient kit.
Lets talk about the difference between operational cost. At the best case scenario of 85 watts for the old system and an estimated 40w for the new system, we have 45w difference.

45w increased eficiency X 24 hours X 11c/hour e- = $1.19 a day saved with the new system.
That makes the new system pay for itself in about 130 days.

130 days is somewhat less than decades.

Your Media PC is very impressive,
Super Green (no fan's) media pc "at full tilt" from the wall...
65w Athalon X2 4200 (Windsor) EE
51w generic 7600GT
20w 2 hard drives
35w "Super Green" motherboard w/sound,lan and memory (I am being very generous here, 50w is more likely)
3w keyboard,mouse
---
174w
Would you post full spec's on the system components? They seem very impressive. Do you use some kind of chimney to get a heat draw to move the heat out, or does the power supply have a fan? I am particularly interested in the make of the PSU, it appears to be 99.4% efficient!

I might have believed a Windsor 3800+ EE-SFF (35w), but not 4200
A 16 core 32GB server that doesn't pull 400w? Thats 25w per core, even Turion TL-52's are 15w/core. Just what is this server?
I am happy to discuss this further, provided you stop guessing and do some real measurements and cite hardware details.

Or perhaps you just need to get in the last word.

Re:Fast Cheap and Green.

[afidel]

The CPU never pulls TDP under any load I give it, the 7600 pulls 45W max, not sure what the HDD's pull but they are never both running flat out, etc. My PSU is rated at 92% efficient. With a Kill a watt meter the most I've seen is 175W give or take a bit. The server is an HP BL680c, at idle it averages 375W according to the blade centers onboard administrator. Any more questions?

Re:Fast Cheap and Green.

[Linux_Bastard]

The 65w Athalon X2 4200 (Windsor) EE has a ACP rating of 65w, not TDP.
TDP for this processor is over 100w.
WOW or COH or HL2 will easily push this processor to 65w+.
The Nvidia 7600 typically pulls over 50w while in game play. It is possible that you have an underclocked 80nm GPU (Asus?). In that case, you might see 30w-45w in 3d game play. All the 7600's I've seen were 90nm GPU's. 7600GT's usually ran at 520mhz, but I did have an integrated 7650 80nm GPU at 400mhz.

What make and model is your PSU? 92% peak efficiency is very good.
If your PSU is rated at 92%, that is at 50%-70% rated output. Unless you have a 300w PSU, I doubt you are getting 92%. This is especially true if it has active PFC.

Kill a watt's are a great cheap way to be aware of power usage, but they excel at showing power consumption over time, not spontaneous peak. They used to use 115 as a fixed calculation point for voltage, so higher line voltages could skewed the results. They may have fixed that by now. If you will try your test again, with your machine running the graphics benchmark of your choice, use the voltage and amperage real time readouts to get your numbers to calculate wattage. 175w for your machine "at full tilt" is not realistic, but 175w average over an hour of mixed use and some idle time is.

The HP BL680c with 4 Xeon L7345 or perhaps even E7320's and no drives in the blade should run at idle 350w-400w depending on OS. What is the power usage like at 50% load, and which CPU's do you have?

Re:Fast Cheap and Green.

[afidel]

We have the 7345 to match the 5345's in most of our BL460's and 360G5's. I haven't checked what it's at during the day but the blade enclosure as a whole is under 3KVA 95% of the time.

Xbox

[Monsuco]

Ever think of using an origional Xbox. It is fairly easy to hack an Xbox, and deep down an Xbox is just a regular PC with a 700-ish mhz cross between a P3 and Celeron, a hard disk that is either 8 or 10 GB, a Nvidia Graphics card (though 3-D isn't fully supported on Linux), and 64 MB of RAM. For a small file server it works well enough. Most hacked dashes have an FTP server, but you can install Linux (my fave is X-DSL) easily. Some of the distros are rather old though.

If you don't mind the old hardware, you can usually find an old used Xbox for about $50 at a used game shop. Versions of 007, Mech Assault, or Splinter Cell are usually required to softmod the box, and you can pick those up on ebay for nearly nothing.

Re:As a 'generosity-challenged individual'..

[timcrews]

Actually, as long as you need heat in your house, how can efficiency possibly be an issue? Isn't all of the lost power simply converted into heat, which is something you need anyway? 100% of the energy is being used for something you want. Based on this thinking, in the winter-time I've stopped harping on the kids to turn off the lights when they leave the room.

Use virtualization on the server for ease of mtce

[KeithH]

The CPU and I/O loads on the typical home network server are minimal. Since most servers are a geek's second or third string computer, the typical horsepower for an affordable home server is something like a three or four year old althon. Within a year or two, or if you can afford it now, a Core 2 Duo is perfectly affordable. This opens up the possibility of using its virtualization support for segmentation. Here's my recommendation:

• RAID-1 2-disk mirroring for user files, music collection, photo collection, and other valuables. Export these file systems. If you can afford it, then definitely raid 5 with a spare. Use mdmadm and configure it to notify you via email when it detects and swaps out a bad disk. This has saved me twice. It's free and marvellously simple. Yes, it's software only and there is some overhead but it is more than fast enough for streaming video; your network will still be the bottleneck.
• dom0 (using XEN terminology) provides bare bones and runs without X
• domU1 provides basic services such as:
  • DNS
  • NTP
  • SAMBA
  • CUPS
  • HTTPD
• domU2 dedicated to mail running:
  • postfix or qmail
  • courier-imap
  • spam-assassin
  • clamd

  If you run your own mail server, this is a critical service that you will want to be able to update infrequently and independently of any "hacking" that you might do on the other user domains.

• domU3 dedicated to mythtv

A home server's most demanding function is serving up files over the network. Performance over 100T is more than adequate for the vast majority of cases. gigE is nice if you're moving video files around a lot but isn't necessary for streaming.

The Slug!

[jddj]

My NSLU2 is running Debian Etch, serving music to Roku Soundbridges and iTunes clients 24x7 with Firefly Media Server / mt-daapd. I administer it via ssh (passwordless with keyed access), and since it's on 24x7, I'm thinking about implementing local (in the house) DNS ('cause I'm tired of dicking around with hosts files on six machines).

When it spins down the Maxtor One Touch, it's using 2 watts. When it's running full out, disk and Slug are using 6 watts. I have the whole thing on a closet shelf next to my wireless router and gigabit switch.

I sometimes think that my much bigger dual-core AMD server could break in a way that could burn down the house if I leave it on unattended. No such worries with the Slug.

It's not a fast machine, but really handy, doesn't guilt me over leaving it on all the time, and if I needed an always-on file server, I'd take the Slug purely on power management grounds.

It'll be a little slow with file transfers, but scores very high marks on its compact size, silent operation and pretty-green power use.

SME Server - Linux distro for this...

[WoTG]

I've had an ancient PC running home server stuff for years. For the operating system, it's SME Server, http://www.smeserver.org/. A Linux distro that does email (and webmail), SMB for file and print, firewall and DNS cache, web and ftp if you're into that.

I think the current machine is a Pentium 166 MMX with 128MB of RAM, the hard drive is too small to hold media, but that could be easily fixed. When routers became cheap, I stopped using it as a firewall and NAT.

That said, I'm planning to replace the box soon and start using a TV Tuner to record some TV shows for the network. The plan is to run the PVR software on Windows, and run the SME Server in a VMWare virtual machine. I might move email to a separate VMWare machine running Scalix - better Outlook support and better webmail.

I'm confident that it'll be fast enough on the cheapest dual-core machine I can find, undervolted if possible.

Simple solution

[gerardrj]

Airport Extreme router: $179
LaCie 1TB BigDisk Extreme: $369.95
Boom, file server for under $600.

The extreme shares files from the drive over SMB and AFP simultaneously and can allow WAN access. Passworded or open access.

Re:efficiency.

[zmollusc]

Efficiency in heating matters when you are comparing apples and oranges.

For me, it is cheaper to heat a house using a gas powered heater than a load of PCs, although gas boilers won't run DOOM lan games while they are heating.

Home server.

[mac1235]

My current one is a 150Mhz. I will be upgrading in a few months though. I'm thinking of a refurbished laptop for low power.

The parent summarised

[Anonymous Coward]

No, but yes but no.

PowerPC Mac Mini and Debian

[simong]

I used to have a rack-mount AMD server running Fedora but it was way too noisy and I wasn't doing anything useful with it. When the Intel Mac Minis came out I scored a PowerPC model for £199 from my local PCWorld, and finally managed to repurpose it over Christmas by installing Debian 4 (about the only Linux that is distributed and supported for PowerPC at the moment). I added a 250Gb external Seagate drive for my music and video, built Firefly media server for music (supports daapd for iTunes), and VLC for video, added netatalk and avahi for OS X support (most of my machines are Macs) and I will be adding authentication, DHCP and DNS caching when I next have time. Next capital job is to set up a power over ethernet network and to get a Neuros OSD to serve video, as video isn't quite up to it. Moreover, it's completely silent and only uses about 85 watts against the average PC's 350 or so. A PowerPC MacMini can be had from eBay for £150 - £200.

Re:PowerPC Mac Mini and Debian

[NCG_Mike]

I do something similar with a PPC MacMini. Didn't change the OS though but I have Samba and AppleTalk going for file sharing. It's mostly used for subversion and/or perforce but I do have it connected to the TV for VLC Player etc. I control the UI with VNC from either a PowerBook or with a MacPro so I don't have a keyboard or mouse plugged into it or use ssh.

Re:As a 'generosity-challenged individual'..

[Anonymous Coward]

On that same note I've decided to stop telling my kids not to eat so much candy. After all, as long as they need to eat something, how can it matter what they eat?

NAS

[JagRoth]

You are already running dd-wrt on your router... Get a NAS that will be low power storage. Then smb mount your nas from your dd-wrt router to run any linux stuff you need on it. Then you can ssh into your router from the internet and still have access to linux and all your storage. Granted, your "linux" box will be a 200Mhz (or so) machine, but for a low power solution it may be enough. And there are plenty of extras that you can install on dd-wrt...

Soon, the Asus Eee

[BenEnglishAtHome]

All those people who bought base-configured Asus Eee PCs have so little money invested that I would expect quite a number to upgrade when the larger-screen version comes out. So what will happen to those old machines? I love my Eee but I can't help thinking that by the end of the year, I'll have a different one and this one will be sitting somewhere with an ethernet cable connecting it to my network and 3 USB-connected hard drives hanging off the sides. Sure, performance through the USB connections means that network file access will be slow, but for archiving away media files or other simple home user tasks, it's enough for me.

I'm betting that by next fall, Ebay will have a bunch of base-level Eees for cheap. When that happens, people are going to find all sorts of ingenious ways to repurpose them. A home file server is just one.

Re:Soon, the Asus Eee

[Cheeze]

Why would USB be the bottleneck for network transfers?

Doesn't it just have a 100Mb/sec network connection? that's around 10MB/sec if you're lucky, and any USB2 drive should be able to fill that easily.

If it has gigabit, nevermind then.

stay away from Promise

[krock_of_PB-HF]

I bought their SX8300 with big dreams for a 2.5 Tbytes file server. Now I'm stuck with a 2.6.11 kernel because they have not updated their drivers for 3 years. I've sent emails asking them to please help me get the module compiled for a newer kernel- they just ignore me.

Re: home server question

[singingjim1]

My girlfriend works on the computer at home so the machine is always on. We also do run BOINC projects on our machines. I guess there's a better way to setup a network file server than to just map a drive on a networked machine, but isn't that the essence of a file server anyway? It works fine for me anyway.

Thanks alot!

[j.sanchez1]

Thanks for all the responses! I learned a lot and also heard some things I never thought of.

Based on these comments, I decided to go with this.

FreeNAS + spare PC

[sabreofsd]

The cheapest way I can think of was exactly what I did:
Cheap PC case with plenty of drive slots and FreeNAS (www.freenas.org) Been working great!

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Learn from my mistakes - Keep your data safe

[pyite]

CPU - Software RAID (especially writing to RAID 5) is very CPU intensive.

What in the world? Do you know what CPU function is being used for RAID 5? XOR. It's not CPU intensive at all. It's four NAND gates for goodness' sakes. For most uses, unless you have dedicated storage appliances, like a Clariion or DMX array from EMC, software RAID should be used. If your RAID card fries, you can't be certain that you will be able to replace it with an identical model. You can always load the right version of Linux or BSD to recover a software RAID.

MOD PARENT TROLL

[Anonymous Coward]

"boszgor"? Would you elaborate on that, "büdös oláh"?

My home server

[alterego1935]

Just to throw in one more home fileserver config for the sake of information.. My server is an old thunderbird core Athlon machine running at 1.33 GHz / 1 Gb RAM / Abit KT7-A RAID mainboard. I am not using the onboard RAID chip. Right now, I have Fedora core 4 on a 40 Gb drive and a 120 Gb drive for storage. I run a web server and print server (Shared printer on this box is usable to any other computer on my network). I've got a bunch of shared folders on the 120Gb drive shared via samba for my windows machines (Movies/Music/Documents/etc..). There is no keyboard, mouse or monitor on it.. just a network cable and power cord. I can open terminals on the windows machines using X-Win32 (or some other equivalent product). On top of all that, I also use Octave and Sage on this linux machine and there is no degradation in performance. This arrangement has served me well for the past three years. I am considering implementing RAID 5 on this machine just to support possible gigabit ethernet and fast file transfers when I get a home theatre PC in the near future (and to ad some redundancy). The OS will remain on a separate 40 Gb drive though. RAID 5 will be for storage only. This thing just sits in my closet and hums away.. God I love linux.

Reverse-dupe!

[ggvaidya]

Steve Jobs is going to announce the Time Capsule at the MacWorld Expo, which might be exactly what you're looking for.