What is Digg?37 Comments
- just_chris, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1> Sorry, but there is no reason for a personal server
> with this much data. If anything, you should have a
> smaller backup system, and then copy that to another
> media.
What a stupid thing to say. Some people store things on their hard drives beside text files and Excel spreadsheets. Ever heard of a media server? or an HTPC? I have a server with a terabyte of space (hardware raid 5) and it is NOT NEARLY enough. A terabyte holds about 150 ripped DVDs. I have about 50 more than that, and my collection is constantly increasing. Also, I would like to rip all my CD's as well (a few hundred of them) into lossless format, which will use up a hundred gigs or so. Then using Windows MCE I can pull up any movie or CD and broadcast it anywhere in the house. Some people also use the same server as a back end to store all their recorded TV shows as well. That can easliy take up a few hundred gigs, especially if the shows are in HD. - dbr_onix, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1"You may want to consider purchasing a dedicated fileserver. A bare-bones server capable of holding six disks (fully preassembled, no disks or OS) can cost less than $1,500 US. With this initial investment, you can expand disk space as needed for less than $0.80 per GB or grow by plugging in USB disks"
Wouldn't you be far better of useing something like the Lacie 1TB drive? Costs something like $800, for home usage it's far better I'd say..
- Ben - CrunchyToes, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1People should check out OpenSolaris's ZFS "raid-Z" implementation. Easy administration, scalability, automatic disk scrubbing, snapshots, optional built-in compression (including swap, if you're feeling masochistic), checksummed data, and a whole lot more. It's been covered before, but it really needs repeating:
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/whatis/
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/demos/basics/
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/elowe?anchor=zfs_saves_the_day_ta - rydawg, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0wow, who needs a terabyte? Not me.....at least not until Hi-Def movies start coming out :P
- shafiq, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0is it just me, or the site got dugg?
- Otto, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Funnily enough, a terabyte-plus backup and storage system is now an affordable option for Windows users as well. :P
- laser314, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I went with NASLite from Server Elements. The OS fits on a floppy disk. Using a P166 with 24M ram. Add 4 250G hard drives. 1 Tera Server. Doesn't have all the bells and whistles but its cheap and easy.
- bmcnitt, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I turned an old windows machine into a file sharing, print, and backup server using basic utilities within XP (SMB file sharing, ntbackup, etc.), which works great in my hybrid environment of Windows, OS X, and Linux. The only piece I am missing is offsite backup. Right now I only backup select files (financial data, etc) offsite using FTP. It would be nice to be able to replicate all data offsite, perhaps even do away with local backups altogether, but I have yet to figure out how to do this affordably and within the constraints of DSL and Cable upstream bit rates.
- enricosuave, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Site is toast (will have to bookmar it for later use)
- CrunchyToes, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0oh, and, like linux, OpenSolaris is free (as in beer). Great for home use.
- wyngnut, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0The only conceivable reason for a terabyte server is p0rn.
- jdong, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Oh yeah, one other thing, why on earth do you need dual 3GHz Xeons for a backup server? It overly inflates the price of the higher storage solutions to make it seem like the LaCie appliance is drastically cheaper by the GB, though that's not completely true.
and also, many modern mobos already come with 3 ATA and 6 SATA ports, so with a large enough of a case (or the duct tape hard drive stack solution) nothing forces you to go external so soon. - binarypower, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I can think of a lot easier and economical way.. a regular pc case with 4 250 drives, suse 10.0, samba and a 10/100/1000 gigabit lan.... that will run about $500 shipped.
- jdong, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Well, maybe to us conditioned *nix folks it's not too neat, but mind you the average PC user is already blown away at the idea of a Linux router, and I'd rate popping Smoothwall CD's inside old P1s to be pretty boring.
Just showed a friend the other day the idea of traffic shaping and wondershaper, and he was overwhelmingly fascinated with the idea that no matter how much he's torrenting, his online games are still lag-free... Oh well, some people are easily amused I guess :) - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Actually this would've been neat about 5 years ago. Now its rather drab. If someone can show me how to build a cheap exabyte server I'd be pretty impressed.
- NinjaBoy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I get three netflick movies about once a week. Not junk ;)
- NinjaBoy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0"wow, who needs a terabyte?" I have a linux based terabyte file server. Its full, and not of with just junk either. If you have the space, you can always find something to fill it.
- kzinti, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Ben: "Wouldn't you be far better of useing something like the Lacie 1TB drive? Costs something like $800, for home usage it's far better I'd say..."
Agreed. The benefit of the Lacie is that it's portable. I have one that I use to make backups; then I take it to work and lock it in my desk. If someone should break into my house and steal all my computer stuff, I still wouldn't lose my data (12 year email archive, 8 years of digital photos, digitized family movies, and the like). - gaspero1, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0"I went with NASLite from Server Elements..."
I did the same. I picked up an old P233 with 32MB RAM from the local University Salvage shop for $5. I don't need a keyboard, monitor or mouse after the initial installation, and I used a couple of old drives I had lying around. Mine isn't a terrabyte yet, but for a total investment of $5, I can't beat it. It's functional, fast, and it does the trick. - arcanelinux, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Thanks For the site. Im Trying to start a Private FTP for umm stuff and this is a great article. If anyones interested give me a ring.
- sound, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Backup protection is for more than just "the disk/system died and ate my data", it needs to provide "I need to get that file back to the way it was 1 week ago, because sometime in the past week it got corrupted" ... and you don't always realize *when* a file gets corrupted. This looks like just a cookbook for building a server with 1 TB of storage. I really need a tape based backup system capable of a couple hundred GB per tape ... cheap ... using lots of 7/14 GB 8mm tapes just doesn't cut it anymore (I have a file server with about 300 GB capacity). Yes, I mirror all my disks, but I want the ability to pull a file from a previous timeframe.
- Beller0ph1, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Will definitely need to try this at home. I already know plenty of people who have lost data because of crashed systems and no backups.
- fugitivALiEN, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Most older motherboards don't support large hard drives past 32GB be cautious when building your NAS boxes. You could go with another adapter card but there may be further BIOS limitations. =/
- fugitivALiEN, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0NASLite from Server Elements : http://www.serverelements.com/
- jdong, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0"However, it is not clear whether the RAID-5 system is of much use, as there are many variables affecting the probability of multiple disk failures."
With IDE's, often times if one disk on a channel goes down, the entire channel is shut off, thus taking the RAID offline. However, as long as the offending disk is removed from the array, the data is still preserved. Just downtime.
With SATAs, initial testing shows that they are pretty resilient to the double-failure effect...
Either way, RAID is simply a performance + uptime tool, and is no substitute for backups. Many kinds of events (bad RAM, loosely seated cable, power failure/filesystem corruption, etc) could even ruin data on a RAID5. While it makes little sense to do backups of a backup server, if you're using more as a network storage appliance make sure you do your backups on that, too.... - zeromatrix, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0We did something similar in the apartment. Used a Gigabyte motherboard with 8 SATA ports and 2 SATA controllers on board. Currently, 4 are used with 4x320GB disks. After RAID-5, it is about 900GB. Also has 2 gigE PHYs on board. Total cost was ~$900, including the case.
However, it is not clear whether the RAID-5 system is of much use, as there are many variables affecting the probability of multiple disk failures. Also be careful of heat issues, and use a power supply with adequate margin.
I can also recommend OpenBSD's RAIDFrame implementation. It is really easy to set up and use. - wireloose, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I have a similar story. A lightweight old PIII processor and 2.5TB of disk. I scanned all our old family photos, documented and indexed them. After 26 years of marriage and kids, that's a lot. I also have all my ancestor's photo collections and some geneology data. Also, all my military, college, and employment records, as well as my wife's. And now all the school and employment records my kids have. All that, plus my music collection, is running 87% of that storage space.
Anyone that says you don't need all that, either has no family/life, or stores all the old stuff on paper. - skwhirl, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0It would just become another file server for additional capacity around here...
- CrunchyToes, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0"Yes, I mirror all my disks, but I want the ability to pull a file from a previous timeframe."
With OpenSolaris's ZFS (and FreeBSD and -- I assume -- linux) you can just take filesystem snapshots. Assuming sufficient disk space, you just write a simple cron script to make periodic snapsnots (and get rid of old ones). To get an older version of a file, you just cd to the appropriate directory. Voila. No muss, no fuss. - chrisgalfi, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I did some research a while back on free backup solutions and found that this software was the best out there.
http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/ - wireloose, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I built my first one as a file/print server with CAPS, Samba, and Linux in 1991. That was on the beta 0.99 Linux kernel. (CAPS = Columbia Appletalk Protocol, allows you to share with Macs, too. Or did.)
My client workstations at the time were, of course, Win 3.0 which had no IP stack, and Win 3.1, which didn't work right, but at least had the stack. I also had 2 Unix boxes - one older SunOS and one SCO Xenix box. And my server I migrated "from" was a Microport Unix on a 1985-circa Compaq deskpro 286, which I dumped because Microport stopped distributing Unix for the Intel platforms. That's when I migrated everything over to Linux, although I did also have a Sun386 platform at the house for a little while, and an SGI Indigo running Irix, all of which could also access files on the Microport/Linux servers.
I think these all predated Win Server by several years. :) - starman, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I've been doing this for years, first with Win Server, and now OS X. Is Linux just catching up?
- Coltron, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0Hmm. I guess I'll need to get that terabyte boasting home system I've been pondering first. Then, maybe, just maybe I'll can consider the terabyte backup.
Get Real.
no digg
http://thebrig.org/ - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0I have done it with Windows. Maybe I should give linux a try.
Gabriel
http://www.myfinancesonline.com - theblackapple, on 10/12/2007, -3/+0Will have to give this a try when i have some time.
http://theblankapple.blogspot.com/ - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -3/+0"wow, who needs a terabyte?" I have a linux based terabyte file server. Its full, and not of with just junk either. If you have the space, you can always find something to fill it.
Yea, its junk then. Sorry, but there is no reason for a personal server with this much data. If anything, you should have a smaller backup system, and then copy that to another media.
No digg.
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