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

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

[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.

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

[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.

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

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.

Buffalo Linkstation

[TeknoHog]

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

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

[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

[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

[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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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).

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.