Home made NAS

[Nadav Har'El]

On Tue, Dec 04, 2012, David Suna wrote about "Home made NAS":
>     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

A couple of years I started doing something similar to what you are planning.
I took an old computer, and stuck in it a bunch of hard disks I had from
previous years - one was 1 terabyte, another 300 gigabyte, and a third
80 gigabytes. The computer ran Linux, and served files (mostly CDs and DVDs)
on my home network with NFS and Samba.

But then I realized how annoying this setup was: the computer was very big,
noisy, and had to be on all the time. The old disks (especially the 80
gigabytes) were a joke, and I all three disks summed together were
smaller than a just new disk I could buy.

Instead, I decided to buy a 2-terabyte WD My Book Live for $160.

For this price, I got both the 2TB hard-disk and a tiny (ARM-based)
server in one package. The package is 10 times smaller than my old computer,
nearly silent, and uses up less electricity, and came preconfigured with
the server software (it runs Linux, but you don't have direct access to
it).

So in my opinion, unless you're completely broke, and/or treating this
as nothing more than an educational experience, building a NAS out of
old equipment is waste of your energy.

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Nadav Har'El                        |      Tuesday, Dec 4 2012, 20 Kislev 5773
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