How To: Power Efficient & Low Budget Home Servers

[wtg]

I think RAID is a very important consideration, especially if you're going to use it for photos and home videos. These are too important to lose, and with videos, home or otherwise, difficult if not impossible to backup.

I very much intend to put in a RAID 5 NAS device soon. RAID 5 gives a nice trade-off of reliability and efficient use of space. At least you can survive one drive failure with it.

[ACTCMS]

I think RAID is a very important consideration, especially if you're going to use it for photos and home videos. These are too important to lose, and with videos, home or otherwise, difficult if not impossible to backup.

RAID is great but still need to backup and you also really need to get at least a couple of those USB hard disks so you can store those backups in a different place from your system...

[dgeezer]

Yep i agree I have a NAS box nothing like the one in the link but it serves (Pun intended) my needs. I have a NSLU2 with a hacked firmware.

I've got one of these too with a 500GB drive attached. Works great as storage for video I want to keep. It runs Debian. I can't say that I learned a lot about linux setting this up. It's mostly just cookbook and follow the directions. http://www.cyrius.com/debian/nslu2/ However for a total cost of $210.00 it's hard to beat. It also runs a torrent client to catch that occasional documentary I missed.

It does fill the bill as being low power and silent.

[wtg]

RAID is great but still need to backup and you also really need to get at least a couple of those USB hard disks so you can store those backups in a different place from your system...

Agreed, but people rarely do them and backups aren't really practical for movie collections. Definitely need them for your home video and pictures, but a RAID 5 setup gives you at least one cost-effective backup of your movies. Won't help you with a lightning strike or home fire, but at least the inevitable failed harddrive won't result in lost data.

[herbs]

I've got one of these too with a 500GB drive attached. Works great as storage for video I want to keep. It runs Debian. I can't say that I learned a lot about linux setting this up. It's mostly just cookbook and follow the directions. http://www.cyrius.com/debian/nslu2/ However for a total cost of $210.00 it's hard to beat. It also runs a torrent client to catch that occasional documentary I missed.

It does fill the bill as being low power and silent.

Is your one the 133mhz or 266mhz cpu?, as there is an easy way to de-underclock the cpu if its stuck at 133mhz. It took me about 2 mins to pull of the case and remove the resister with a pair of tweezers.

[dgeezer]

I have not tried this, however it sounds easy enough. I will probably give this a shot on my machine. I haven't really noticed it being slow but it's really hard to tell since I can't really compare it's performance to anything.

I really enjoy working on this little box since it reminds me of when I first started messing with pc's and DOS. Does yours run Debian or one of the other distros?

[ACTCMS]

Agreed, but people rarely do them and backups aren't really practical for movie collections. Definitely need them for your home video and pictures, but a RAID 5 setup gives you at least one cost-effective backup of your movies. Won't help you with a lightning strike or home fire, but at least the inevitable failed harddrive won't result in lost data.

I agree with you 100% - I just mention backups at every opportunity in the hope I can nag people into taking them.

[bdgbill]

bdgbill,

I have minimal experience with Linux but recently setup two ubuntu webservers that are running amazingly. They have not had a minute of down time since their inception and I can remotely do everything. Ubuntu really made everything easy (i didn't get myth setup right either). The systems are super stable and actually see windows shares way before other windows computers do.

So it should be possible to setup an Ubuntu box with 4 500 gig harddrives running raid to appear as one drive. This one (1TB) drive could be mapped to my GBPVR box and used as the recordings directory.

This is tempting and I have almost everything I need (except the drives and raid card).

[Ted the Penguin]

you could even have 1.5TB if you use RAID 5

[NumberFive]

Or you could wait for Windows Home Server to come out and have a hassle free server making experience.

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Home_Server