A long overdue update: FreeNAS Project is complete. The box has been running for over a month now, I think. Thanks to all the people who’ve donated!
Final Specs:
Pentium 4 Processor
Asus something motherboard
1GB DDR
1TB Seagate SATA
500GB Seagate SATA
Acer 250W PSU
Gigabit NIC
Running a Windows Home Server on it to share all my media to all devices in the house. Due to running a Pentium 4 processor, I originally thought that it would have a tremendous amount of power usage. As it turns out, it’s no more power hungry than a laptop charger–okay, that’s a little extreme..
It consumes as much power as a home computer that’s always on but no one uses. The server has a really small amount of load! It would have been better to go for a celeron processor or maybe even underclock the processor so it uses less power but I really wasn’t in a capacity to do so. Being limited to donated parts and having a motherboard that doesn’t support any modification is the problem.
Transfer rate hovers at around 35~40MB/s. I suspect that this transfer speed is highly influenced by the relatively non-performance oriented Seagate Hard Drives. That and the aging architecture of my motherboard.
Theoretically, the PCI channel has enough bandwidth for the SATA card so I doubt it’s the cause of the lower transfer speeds.
Anyway, I’m really happy with the results I’ve gotten and the reliability of the setup.
Shows you that there are still some mighty kind people out there. Yes sir–true story.
Home Server instead of a *nix operating system? awww booo! That isn’t l33t enough!
Glad to see that the project was a success.
Technically, the original project upon complete was in a *nix environment. I was OpenFiler and it was doing well. However, since the household members had multiple computers running the same OS, there were multiple copies of the same files. WHS has single instance storage feature so common files are shared instead saving me crap loads of space. Plenty l33t enough don’t you think?
What kind of files were duplicates? Seems like that can be easily fixed via sym links.
System files, multiple picture copies, multiple movie copies. I’ve readily made the NAS available to everyone but still seems that USB-thingy is still the way to go for sharing thus multiple copies. Also, after the DSLR is used, I’d save the pics to the computer no knowing that my wife had already done the same to it on her log in. Now, multiply that by about 4 computers. How would you fix that with symlinks? I’d be interested to know, I’m actually bummed that in the end $150 was shelled out to get it practical for our household.
So permissions and network folders for Windows clients? … sounds like a Samba solution.