<div dir="ltr">David,<br><br>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.<br>
<br>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.<br>
<br>Doron<br><br></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Dec 4, 2012 at 10:43 AM, David Suna <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:david@davidsconsultants.com" target="_blank">david@davidsconsultants.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div style="direction:ltr" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">
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).<br>
<br>
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).<br>
<br>
Thanks in advance,<span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"><br>
<pre cols="72">--
David Suna
<a href="mailto:david@davidsconsultants.com" target="_blank">david@davidsconsultants.com</a></pre>
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