What is the best way to set up network storage?

[Biscuit]

Christ I thought my Dell T20 seemed hard to setup, this looks like an absolute pig! Doesn't anyone make a small server aimed at the home-user or small business anymore like the the old Gen 7 N45 & 54L HP Micro Servers?

Sure:

https://www.serversdirect.co.uk/p/10...x-non-hotplug-

[jimborae]

Gen 8's have their quirks too re licencing & support iirc, that's why i went with a T20.

[peterb]

@peterb, you must be one of the few guys using a tape drive at home! Good point about the drive cost, how are the files stored now? Perhaps a fair amount of the cost is already paid for.

Sorry, not sure what you are asking...

I bought a second hand Ultrium2 drive after a scare with a logical volume array (very long sort short, a faulty data connector was causing random errors so the array made itself inactive to prevent data loss - I didn't lose anything). I go the SCSI card from someone here, and I just use dump to dump a file system to tape.

It worked well, and then I had an offer of a used Ultrium 4 drive. It worked but the scsi card wasn't fast enough for continuous streaming, so I updated that and it works well.

[AETAaAS]

Sorry, the latter part was aimed at ik9000, wondering how the files are currently stored. Didn't structure that post well.

Out of curiosity, what happens when a tape drive doesn't get data in or out fast enough because of the bus? Hard drives can just wait but I imagine a tape drive has to drive the tape at a certain speed?

[peterb]

The drive does buffer, but if the data stream is too slow the early drives tended to 'shoe-shine' with the drive repeatedly stopping and starting and rewinding, which is not good for it. Later drives can slow down for low data rates. The buffer acts as that (like the buffer on an optical drive) but if the data rate is too high I suspect it just sends a wait signal until the buffer is empty.

The write seeds are very high - the later Ultrium drives have abandoned the SCSI parallel bus and either use SAS (serial transfer using the SCSI protocols) or fibre channel.

[AETAaAS]

'Shoe-shine' is quite a pleasing term to me as it very graphically illustrates the point.

How fast does your drive write? Or is it more frequently hampered by the source? I have no idea what SCSI speeds are; the last SCSI device I had was a 16x Yamaha CD burner.

[Bonebreaker777]

I have this chassis:



...running Windows 7 a fairly low power Intel mITX setup, with two 2TB WD Reds in RAID 1, which backup to another 2TB in bay three. This is backed up periodically to a 2TB USB HDD and another encrypted drive I keep in the car as an off site backup.

If you want to keep the cost down, you can use just about any old PC and install XPEnology on it, which pretty much turns it into a Synology box. Your greatest outlay will be for the HDDs.

Do the XPEnology, the new 6.x version is out and it is fantastic!

[Dashers]

old pcs that we have are:

HP P4 2.8GHz (S478) with 2GB DDR400

Dell Inspiron 530 core2duo DDR2 not sure how much

And a Pentium D + Mobo (without any chassis) and 1GB DDR2

I don't any of them would cut it, and I'm reluctant to sacrifice the Dell at this point - wife's a bit possessive of it. It doesn't have enough mobo connectors for a bank of drives either. Thrifty dell custom job.

I wouldn't write them off completely. I've only just retired a P4 3GHz from the same role. The Core2 would be the best as it's less power hungry than the Netbursts. If you're using magnetic disks then you don't need to worry about saturating SATA2 ports (which they'll probably be). Only SSDs can do that, and you can always put a PCIe add-in card to work around that.

I used to use the old-PC approach but when my last one gave up, I just bought the cheapest lower-end stuff I could. I'm running a Sandy Bridge Celeron (or Pentium, can't remember). Got 8GB of RAM in there, heaps of hard-disks, a SATA HBA for more disks, extra network cards and what not, run a bunch of virtual machines off it etc.

For serving up file content, you don't need anything fancy.

All that said, you have to be happy to setup and tinker at the trade off of cost. If cost isn't a massive issue, then one of the off-the-shelf products come with easy-to-use web-pages and what not.

[Biscuit]

Few things on HDUK

http://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/hp-m...ter-70-2654868

http://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/dell...rsplus-2650282