Storage Solution Components

[mobius111001]

What does everyone think of this motherboard/processor setup http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... /processor for a file server? This will be the home of my personal files, mp3s, myth storage, and maybe even a print server.

Will this be powerful enough with 1GB of RAM? It doesn't say it in the spec, but it has a 1.4gHz processor on it. The reason why I'm looking at this particular unit is for low power consumption.

Will this do the job? Other recommendations?

[Tsuroerusu]

What does everyone think of this motherboard/processor setup http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... /processor for a file server? This will be the home of my personal files, mp3s, myth storage, and maybe even a print server.

Will this be powerful enough with 1GB of RAM? It doesn't say it in the spec, but it has a 1.4gHz processor on it. The reason why I'm looking at this particular unit is for low power consumption.

Will this do the job? Other recommendations?

Well, what sort of stuff do you want it to do? I use up hard drive space faster than the US uses up oil, so I've been looking into trying to save up for a high-end LSI Logic RAID controller and do a fairly big RAID-5 array. And any modern AMD processor you can fit into the motherboards that have the PCI-X slots would work fine.

If you're gonna do software RAID, you definitely need some more horse power since you'll be doing the RAID calculations on the main CPU.

If you're just gonna throw in a bunch of drives and store stuff on them, with no RAID or stuff like that, well then you could get away with like a 600 MHz Pentium 3 CPU, hell even less! The consumer-level NAS devices you can find use like a 100 MHz ARM CPU or something like that. Simple storage stuff really doesn't take up a lot of horse power at all.

[mowestusa]

What does everyone think of this motherboard/processor setup http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... /processor for a file server? This will be the home of my personal files, mp3s, myth storage, and maybe even a print server.

Will this be powerful enough with 1GB of RAM? It doesn't say it in the spec, but it has a 1.4gHz processor on it. The reason why I'm looking at this particular unit is for low power consumption.

Will this do the job? Other recommendations?

Wow, your server has more horse power than most of my desktop systems. I believe you could do all of that with way less ram too. If you want to save power, no sense having more ram taking power when it isn't needed. T's comments are good about the RAID stuff. Personally, I don't need RAID nor do I need a ton of space. What you said you want to use it for is key. Store personal files, mp3s, and print server. All of this takes very little power. Myth storage, also not a big deal, it you had said you want to do Commercial Flagging, and re-encoding than I would suggest more power. Just to give you some perspective. I run a home server that is a Pentium III 500Mhz with 192 megs of RAM holding two hard drives on IDE 0, one being 200Gigs, and the second being 120Gigs. I have 50Gigs left on the 200Gig drive, and I not even using the 120Gig yet. I have all of my important work and personal files backed up to this server, I have all of the movie files that I care to watch on it. I have my mp3 collection and all of my podcasts backed up on it. I back up everything to it using rsync from 3 different machines. It serves up the movie files to another Celeron 500Mhz with 192megs of RAM running GeeXBoX and hooked up to my old 25" TV with a scan converter. I have no issues with the speed or not enough power. Often for a home server it spends most of its time idle (I even turn mine off which is easy to do with FreeNAS from any computer). Why even keep it on if you really want to save power if it is for storage and a printer server. No one needs a file in your house at 3:00am or needs to print a document. FreeNAS also boots up in about 30seconds. I can hit the power button and grab a cup of coffee and it is ready before I'm ready to use it.

Personally, I'm all for saving power, I really feel we waste a lot of energy. I like the idea of low power computers, but only if I can't get an old computer for free that someone wants to put in a landfill. I would rather keep more computers out of landfills, and shut them off when they aren't doing tasks. Also I have heard that a number of older CPU's run with significantly less power than modern CPUs (of course VIA chips and others will probably still be less), so we could save a lot of power by not upgrading our equipment as often too. I would encourage you to save the cash of buying a new motherboard and memory, and see if someone you know is throwing away a computer and has an old Pentium sitting in a closet that they are not using. Load it up with FreeNAS and then shut it down when you aren't home and every night when you go to sleep. You can feel good about saving power and stopping the increase of landfill pollutants. However, if you can't find an old machine to recycle I commend you for thinking about saving energy.

Let us know what you end up doing, what distro you install, and how it works out for you.

[davijordan]

Try at your own risk!!!! According to one article you can use a b/w monitor(10 dollar tv with composite in) with vga output.