Headcase_Fargone
Limp Gawd
- Joined
- Mar 25, 2010
- Messages
- 284
Currently I'm running a DNS-321 at home (which I've dubbed "The little NAS that could") and I've been incredibly happy with it for the past year or so. I originally purchased it with the sole intention of having it serve media to my televisions, but I soon discovered Fun_plug and now it does my torrent downloading, FTP/web hosting, and music collection streaming.
It does all of these things very well, and at an absurdly low power consumption. But the little guy starts to struggle when I try to do more than one of those things at the same time. So I'm thinking it might be time to build something a little more powerful/robust.
I'm looking at building an Atom-based box, probably using a 945GSE mobile chipset on a mini-ITX board. I'd like to keep power consumption as close to the DNS-321's as possible since electricity is stupid-expensive here in Texas.
My question at this point though is: What OS? I know there are plenty of threads about this already but I'd still like to solicit opinions for my particular situation.
Windows Home Server. Is there any point to this over, say, Server 2003 or even 2008? Will something like that run on a lowly Atom-based machine with likely 1GB of RAM?
Windows XP. Simple. Fairly quick even on Atoms. Dated as all hell. Enough said.
FreeNAS. This seems to be the most widely accepted solution, but after dealing with Linux on the DNS-321 I'd really rather avoid it if possible. For someone that's completely unfamiliar with Linux it can be pretty daunting to even install and configure things on it, much less keep everything running. Will FreeNAS allow me to run things like Subsonic and torrent applications like Transmission?
Would FreeNAS (or some full Linux distro like Debian) offer as much of a performance premium over a Windows OS as to justify the headaches?
Any input would be greatly appreciated.
It does all of these things very well, and at an absurdly low power consumption. But the little guy starts to struggle when I try to do more than one of those things at the same time. So I'm thinking it might be time to build something a little more powerful/robust.
I'm looking at building an Atom-based box, probably using a 945GSE mobile chipset on a mini-ITX board. I'd like to keep power consumption as close to the DNS-321's as possible since electricity is stupid-expensive here in Texas.
My question at this point though is: What OS? I know there are plenty of threads about this already but I'd still like to solicit opinions for my particular situation.
Windows Home Server. Is there any point to this over, say, Server 2003 or even 2008? Will something like that run on a lowly Atom-based machine with likely 1GB of RAM?
Windows XP. Simple. Fairly quick even on Atoms. Dated as all hell. Enough said.
FreeNAS. This seems to be the most widely accepted solution, but after dealing with Linux on the DNS-321 I'd really rather avoid it if possible. For someone that's completely unfamiliar with Linux it can be pretty daunting to even install and configure things on it, much less keep everything running. Will FreeNAS allow me to run things like Subsonic and torrent applications like Transmission?
Would FreeNAS (or some full Linux distro like Debian) offer as much of a performance premium over a Windows OS as to justify the headaches?
Any input would be greatly appreciated.