Cheap home server

I can vouch for FreeNAS its very good, easy to install. I used to run it from a compacflash card via IDE. Once installed you can control the whole thing via webpage rather than having to use an SSH.

I would consider it.
 
Happy to pick up whichever software runs best personally - will pass the recomendations on the my mate with all the vigor of the OCUK forums.

Anyone know about RAID?
 
Oxy -
That's cool - thank you for your help so far, it's been bloody useful and is set to knock a fair amount off the spec cost.

OCUK -
Come on guys - you know everything right?! That's what the internet is for. Don't make me use google!
 
Chris Beard said:
Cool - I'm a little lost when it comes to hardware raid - could you suggest some specific hardware please?
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I tend to go with 3Ware kit. LSI or adpatec also good. LSI have bought 3Ware so I'd guess their products will start melding into one range over the next year or two.

I'd look for one of thier PCI-express based Sata RAID controllers, they aren't cheap, but it does give you considerably more stability on the RAID front than your typical on motherboard chipset. I've used RAID 5 on my box, I have 6 x 500Gb drives. Five in a single RAID 5 array (2 Tb usable space) with the sixth as a hot spare that kicks in if one of the other drives fails. Been running for about 4 years now without a hitch. Mines actually based on IDE hard drives and an older IDE 3Ware raid card I picked up of a certain auction site for about £50, the only issue was that the card is a 64bit pci card rather than pci-Exress so I ended up building a dual xeon based server to fit it in. Its very silly to be honest and probably drains a vast amount of power, but it works!

Also if you're thinking of going linux or even a linux based NAS distro, I'd really suggest proper hardware raid as Linux just tends to see whatever you've setup in the RAID cards bios as exactly what its going to use. I've had all sorts of issues with other RAID chipsets like the Intel ICH9R, where even though the array has been setup in the RAID bios, linux sees the individual drives not the configured array (or at least Fedora does which is the distro I tend to use).

In work we have several big storage servers based on the 3Ware cards, they seem pretty rock solid if you want your data to be both safe and fast to access.

E-I
 
IMO I would just look on ebay for a cheap server and add things like a new HDD. Prob get the lot for £200 - £250. Just thinking money saver :p
 
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