Thus far I have been using an old AMD XP 1800+ box with 2x500gig SATA drivers (PCI Sata controller) and an 150gig EIDE drive with XP Workstation and a PCI gigabit controller for the shared network access server. I also have an 500gig external USB hard drive attached to it for backups.
The primary purpose of this shared drive has been to storage has been to storage irreplacable photos, music, and movies to be shared across different computers in the house, I have been kind of keep on coming up with a universal, stable, and easy to maintain solution (as I am moving away from home, and in case something happens would like to have an easy way to have someone fix this).
In the recent time, the motherboard fan on the old computer died, but I can replace that. Still, if a drive fails, or another component dies, I am kind of looking to streamline the solutions.
These are my requirements:
- Share pictures, music, and video files to client computers.
- Data should be available and backed up (RAID1 + backup to external drive)
I want to get rid of the XP on the home built file server and move towards a more reliable easier to use solution (XP consistantly is tracking for updates, etc). I see two approachs to this: 1) use something like FreeNAS and retain the old PC to serve as a file server, or move towards 2) DLINK DNS-323 or the link to perform this function.
DLink DNS-323 seems like the easier option as its just a box that is easily managed. To retain a RAID1 on it and rebuild it if necessary isn't difficult, however to keep a 3rd disc backup of the data seems a bit more cumbersome as I would need to 'hack' the unit to use its USB port and then program rsync, scheduler, etc.
The FreeNAS solution seems to be the lowest cost (provided I replace the motherboard fan), but I am not sure it will support all the cheap PCI ethernet and SATA controller, and in addition not sure how difficult it would be to do a nightly scheduled backup to the external drive.
I am curious as to what people's input is on this solution. I will have all important documents from the client computers on the networked be saved to this NAS, and the key is to keep the data safe and easy to repair/rebuild in case of a hardware failure.
Any thoughts are appreciated!
Thanks.
The primary purpose of this shared drive has been to storage has been to storage irreplacable photos, music, and movies to be shared across different computers in the house, I have been kind of keep on coming up with a universal, stable, and easy to maintain solution (as I am moving away from home, and in case something happens would like to have an easy way to have someone fix this).
In the recent time, the motherboard fan on the old computer died, but I can replace that. Still, if a drive fails, or another component dies, I am kind of looking to streamline the solutions.
These are my requirements:
- Share pictures, music, and video files to client computers.
- Data should be available and backed up (RAID1 + backup to external drive)
I want to get rid of the XP on the home built file server and move towards a more reliable easier to use solution (XP consistantly is tracking for updates, etc). I see two approachs to this: 1) use something like FreeNAS and retain the old PC to serve as a file server, or move towards 2) DLINK DNS-323 or the link to perform this function.
DLink DNS-323 seems like the easier option as its just a box that is easily managed. To retain a RAID1 on it and rebuild it if necessary isn't difficult, however to keep a 3rd disc backup of the data seems a bit more cumbersome as I would need to 'hack' the unit to use its USB port and then program rsync, scheduler, etc.
The FreeNAS solution seems to be the lowest cost (provided I replace the motherboard fan), but I am not sure it will support all the cheap PCI ethernet and SATA controller, and in addition not sure how difficult it would be to do a nightly scheduled backup to the external drive.
I am curious as to what people's input is on this solution. I will have all important documents from the client computers on the networked be saved to this NAS, and the key is to keep the data safe and easy to repair/rebuild in case of a hardware failure.
Any thoughts are appreciated!
Thanks.
