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Ask Slashdot: DIY NAS For a Variety of Legacy Drives?
An anonymous reader writes "I have at least 10 assorted hard drives ranging from 100 GB to 3 TB, including external drives, IDE desktop drives, laptop drives, etc. What's the best way to setup a home NAS to utilize all this 'excess' space? And could it be set up with redundancy built-in so a single drive failure would cause no data loss? I don't need anything fancy. Visibility to networked Windows PCs is great; ability to streak to Roku / iPad / Toshiba etc would be great but not necessary. What's the best way to accomplish this goal?"
If you use Windows, the forthcoming Windows 8 "Storage Spaces" feature appears to be perfect for situations like this. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/01/05/virtualizing-storage-for-scale-resiliency-and-efficiency.aspx
FreeBSD has fast ZFS support which is wonderful file system to fight data loss.
Ah ha! Who else amongst you has a huge surplus of huge hard drives going unused, now that netflix streaming has displaced 60% of all the crud you had spinning idle in a closet the 3 years before you signed up?
My storage requirements went from about 3 terabytes to about 30 gigabytes over the past 2 years. I believe I am the archetype and that I am doing the same thing as the average geek. I suspect there are piles of huge disks sitting offline because of this streaming displacement.
It cost me about 18 dollars a month to leave my x86 file server online, idle (killawatt meter, nh rates); netflix is cheaper than that.
Come on, who else has a comment related to this.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
Windows Home Server (V1) - mix and match to your hearts content and all the addins you can eat for adding features.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
Why am I the only one saying this? Setup Greyhole, throw a bunch of disks at it, and enjoy! And to all those saying "those drives are going to die soon", you can actually tell Greyhole that you consider a drive "broken" and it will still use most of its storage (albeit redundantly) until it does die and have to be removed.
I've had nothing but bad luck with btrfs, including irrecoverable data. (well, data not as valuable as time it would take to restore) It is my opinion that the push to make btrfs the new standard is happening way too quickly and for the wrong reasons. It has been my experience that it simply isn't as reliable as the more established file systems. I would highly recommend XFS over btrfs.
Full disclosure: I am the developer
Check out: http://stablebit.com/DrivePool
It's a software disk pooling solution that combines any number of disks of any size into one big virtual pool. You can designate certain folders to be duplicated on the pool. Any files placed in duplicated folders will be stored on 2 disks at the same time.
The implementation is a hard core NT kernel driver with a virtual disk. There is a full NT kernel storage stack, no user mode hacks here.
Unlike RAID and similar solutions, all your pooled files are stored as standard NTFS files on each individual disk in the pool. This means that you can simply plug in any pooled disk to any system that can read NTFS to get at your files in case disaster strikes.
It's commercial software, $20 USD per server.
look at amahi.org, it is a turn-key Home Server based on fedora and greyhole as it's replication engine.
Dump anything less than a TB except one drive and you are set.
You set the replication level by share and it keeps a full copy on each drive until the replication count is reached for that file on that share.
Example:
you have 4 1TB drives and 1 500Gb drive.
You have the share photo configured to replicate on each drive.
You have replication off on the video share.
You have a replication level of two on the mp3 share.
When you store a photo greyhole write it to your 5 drives.
When you store a video it goes on a random drive.
When you store a mp3 it goes to 2 random drives.
So if you lose a drive you should loose about 25% of your videos, 6.25% of your mp3 and 0% of your pictures.
Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
I probably shouldn't answer an AC but since the AC has been put as "insightful" I will answer with why I think he/she is wrong: If the data has already been backed up (which if you don't back up your data you're a dumbass who should be posting to yahoo Answers and not here) then frankly there is no "risk" to using drives you already have as its only a question of how long it would take to restore.
Now of course he can mirror the data on half the drives to add some redundancy but your answer of using new drives? Until WD is back up to full speed frankly that isn't possible without a LOT of extra cost. Sure you can find cheap Seagate drives but you know what? they're shit. Not badmouthing Seagate but read the reviews and you'll see that Seagate drives over 640Gb are having a crazy high failure rate. Some say they are using ARM controllers made by the Maxtor guys and those are shit, some saying its a firmware issue, I personally don't know but what I DO know is that I've had to shitcan a crazy number of Seagate drives, especially the 1Tb and 1.5Tb drives which are the only really affordable ones ATM.
Now for how to do this, I'm gonna stay out of the software side since I don't want to jump into a Windows VS Linux flamewar, I'm sure the guy has an OS he is comfortable with and will probably go that way anyway so I'll deal with the hardware. This is how we cooked up something similar at my previous shop with a shitload of SCSI drives the boss got at an auction...Buy a couple of matching cheap full size computer cases, geeks has several for pretty cheap. We then tore the cases apart leaving a couple of skeletons, how far you take them apart is up to you, one can just as easily take the side of one and the opposite side off the other and cut the bracing, the reason we did it this way will become obvious in a minute. Pick up a cheap old server board, you want one that will fit the case and has as many PCI slots as possible, you will of course fill the PCI slots with SATA adapters just like we did with SCSI. Then in our case for the final touch we wired up a $10 Walmart box fan to the side to cool all the drives we piled into that sucker. In our case we used a copy of Win2K Server since we had drivers for the SCSI cards in Win2K Server, but again software is your choice.
And there you have it! While drives were topping out at 400Gb and cost an arm and a leg we had nearly 2Tb of SCSI goodness containing every single driver for every single part for every single version of Windows from 3.1-WinXP. I don't see why someone couldn't do the same with SATA, sure PCI won't give you as much bandwidth as PCIe but if you have a decent sized amount of RAM (say 2Gb) to buffer I don't see why it wouldn't work. in the end this is about using something you already have which won't cost anything VS spending hundreds of dollars to acquire a more compact solution. Personally I'm all for using what you already have, that is why I have a drawer filled with drives from 80Gb to 400Gb that I then throw into computers that are short on space, certainly cheaper than buying a new WD drive and as I said I don't trust Seagate ATM. Personally I'm just glad I loaded up on Samsung EcoDrives right before the flood when Tiger had them cheap so I can afford to wait until the prices drop before i have to look at drives. But if he already has them, why not use them?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Pogoplugs are great, can plug in 4 drives via USB or more with a USB hub. I paid $25 for mine, can't really go wrong.
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." - Every fascist, ever