Home made NAS

[Doron Shikmoni]

David,

FreeNAS works rather well in an environment like yours, however (a) as of
version 8 it needs considerable amounts of RAM to work reasonably well (v7
could get along well with half a gig) and (b) you need either all HDDs to
be of the same size or at least to have a few groups of similar size HDDs,
otherwise you're gonna lose a lot of space when building the pools.

For a home server with a bunch of varying size disks, you may want to take
a look at unRAID. It's a rather unique solution, with a few rather unique
features, for exactly this situation (different size, different age disks).
Downside: for more than 3 drives, it's not free.

Doron



On Tue, Dec 4, 2012 at 10:43 AM, David Suna <david at davidsconsultants.com>wrote:

>  I have a bunch of old machines lying around which are currently just
> collecting dust.  I would like to collect the disks from all of them, put
> them together into a single server to act as a file server / NAS on our
> home network.  There would probably be a combination of IDE and SATA
> drives.  What would you recommend as the best way to achieve this (with
> minimal cash outlay).  The home network is a mixed Windows and Linux
> environment so I assume I would run Linux on the new server and provide
> access to the disks via SAMBA.  For now the main function of the server
> would be to serve as a place to do backups.  I have never done anything
> with RAID so I don't know if that is something that I should take into
> consideration (especially as the disks are of varying sizes).
>
> Any information, suggestions or pointers would be appreciated.  I am
> viewing this as a learning experience (in addition to making use of old
> hardware for a positive purpose).
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> --
> David Sunadavid at davidsconsultants.com
>
>
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