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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?"
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
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.
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.
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