In deciding to go with a computer I already have, now I'm mainly looking for software and concerned about reliability.
FreeNAS: I have been looking into FreeNAS. I set it up on an old 600 MHz computer I have laying around and realized that the computer is capable of holding 9 3.5" drives. Four are 5.25" bays, Four are 3.5" hard drive bays, and the 9th is a floppy drive holder which holds a 3.5" drive fine. Does anyone have experience with FreeNAS?
Since everyone here is interested in media so much, many utilize large NAS devices and I wouldn't be surprised if a few of you have had experiences with FreeNAS.
Interestingly enough, I have a solution. I just ordered 2 4-port SATA cards and I already have a 2-port card. This will allow me to run 9 500GB drives RAID5. I must say I'm VERY impressed with the write speed on that software raid! It is much better than a Windows box could ever provide even on a machine of 4 times the MHz. I get close to 50% network usage when copying from C: and I only get around 65% with my current RAID0 setup.
My biggest question now is how many drives can an Antec 300 watt power supply power? Here's the specs:
Athlon 600 MHz
Low end AGP graphics
10 total SATA ports on 3 cards
768 MB RAM
no cd-rom, floppy, or any other extra cards.
Technically speaking, I have got it running right now with 7 drives. In the end, I will need ten drives because one has to be the boot drive--if there is a way to boot from a USB key even though the bios doesn't support it, I'd love to know. Wonder if I could hookup the floppy, boot to the floppy, and then the floppy could load the USB drivers and boot to it.
Ten drives is a lot! I've had 4 HDD & 4 Optical in this system before but optical don't really take much unless they're in use. Will the 300 watt supply even come close? What are the symptoms of too little power? Will I ruin the power supply or computer if I draw too much? Or will it just restart or not startup at all?
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Topic: Looking for 6-10 drive NAS enclosure (Read 1987 times)