bluesdoggy
Limp Gawd
- Joined
- Jul 14, 2000
- Messages
- 442
This is probably a going to be a bit of a longish post, so thanks in advance for taking the time to read.
Background: My wife and I are wanting to consolidate our data / media by implementing a server at home. Both of us are quite technically proficient, so an "idiot proof" solution from an usability standpoint isn't required.
Current available hardware: 24 " iMac, self-built c2d based pc, mac mini, old 3ghz p4 mothballed system, 3 or 4 sizable external drives (500 GB +), and a couple of 1 TB WD "green" internal drives.
Serving media / files to: above mentioned macs + 1 macbook, 1 macbook pro. The mini is our "livingroom" box and runs boxee most of the time. Also a PS3, Xbox360.
My problem exists more at the hardware level than software. I was all set to grab a drobo, hook it up to one of the above systems, setup some samba shares + upnp services for the game consoles and rock on.. .but then i got to reading about the (seemingly high) number of catostrophic failures people had experienced with the drobo. One common theme of these seemed to be high i/o levels, and with the application we are looking at, i could see that being a problem. We generally always have a torrent seeding / downloading , music or video playing when we are at home, so if the drobo has a low tolerance for alot of sustained i/o requests, then it wouldn't be a good solution.
My next thought was to build out an atom-based system or take the existing pc / mothballed system, throw in a decent raid card, and build up a traditional file server. I looked at some software raid solutions as well ( like ready nas). My concern here is data redundancy and the ability to restore from failure of the array. Also ease of expansion of the array. I would imagine we start out with about 4 TB of data and will only grow from there, so expansion is something we have to think about. I'm also not crazy about using that old p4 box since its a power hungry old work-horse.
I've also looked at a few other NAS appliances and they either seem to be feature sparse (no raid 5 or equivalent stripe + parity solution) or too expensive and aimed at more of an enterprise problem set.
What would you folks suggest? Should i bite the bullet and try the drobo? I could always backup the data that we absolutely did not want to lose, but its not really cost-effective or plausible to back up EVERYTHING. The attractive thing is the ease of upgrade and the (supposed) ease of recovery from a drive failure, but the horror stories on new-egg and other sites give me pause.
Your suggestions are greatly appreciated.
Background: My wife and I are wanting to consolidate our data / media by implementing a server at home. Both of us are quite technically proficient, so an "idiot proof" solution from an usability standpoint isn't required.
Current available hardware: 24 " iMac, self-built c2d based pc, mac mini, old 3ghz p4 mothballed system, 3 or 4 sizable external drives (500 GB +), and a couple of 1 TB WD "green" internal drives.
Serving media / files to: above mentioned macs + 1 macbook, 1 macbook pro. The mini is our "livingroom" box and runs boxee most of the time. Also a PS3, Xbox360.
My problem exists more at the hardware level than software. I was all set to grab a drobo, hook it up to one of the above systems, setup some samba shares + upnp services for the game consoles and rock on.. .but then i got to reading about the (seemingly high) number of catostrophic failures people had experienced with the drobo. One common theme of these seemed to be high i/o levels, and with the application we are looking at, i could see that being a problem. We generally always have a torrent seeding / downloading , music or video playing when we are at home, so if the drobo has a low tolerance for alot of sustained i/o requests, then it wouldn't be a good solution.
My next thought was to build out an atom-based system or take the existing pc / mothballed system, throw in a decent raid card, and build up a traditional file server. I looked at some software raid solutions as well ( like ready nas). My concern here is data redundancy and the ability to restore from failure of the array. Also ease of expansion of the array. I would imagine we start out with about 4 TB of data and will only grow from there, so expansion is something we have to think about. I'm also not crazy about using that old p4 box since its a power hungry old work-horse.
I've also looked at a few other NAS appliances and they either seem to be feature sparse (no raid 5 or equivalent stripe + parity solution) or too expensive and aimed at more of an enterprise problem set.
What would you folks suggest? Should i bite the bullet and try the drobo? I could always backup the data that we absolutely did not want to lose, but its not really cost-effective or plausible to back up EVERYTHING. The attractive thing is the ease of upgrade and the (supposed) ease of recovery from a drive failure, but the horror stories on new-egg and other sites give me pause.
Your suggestions are greatly appreciated.