Home made NAS

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

Oleg Goldshmidt wrote:

> 
> All of the above is probably negligible compared to two important
> arguments that have already been mentioned: 1) as a home appliance
> there are better, more economical, and - most importantly! - quieter
> solutions for a modest price; 2) tinkering with such a heterogeneous
> system will yield invaluable experience, especially in terms of never
> trying anything like this for anything important.
> 


I want to point out that disk failure statistics may be less useful than 
one would think. The majority of hard disks came from a factory in 
Thailand which was wiped out by a flood about 2-3 years ago.

This caused a large rise in the price of disks, and the reamining 
manufacturers scrambling to produce more disks from existing factories 
at lower prices.

The price of hard disks has yet to be as low as it was.

Since those "new" disks have not been around long enough for long term 
failure statistics, I would be careful using the old ones.

BTW, in an unrelated discussion somewhere else two days ago, several 
professional sysadmins I know recommended OpenIndiana (an open source 
fork of Solaris) and ZFS for home NAS's.

Geoff.

-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson,  N3OWJ/4X1GM/KBUH7245/KBUW5379
"Owning a smartphone: Technology's equivalent to learning to play
chopsticks on the piano as a child and thinking you're a musician."
(sent to me by a friend)