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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > NAS/Storage Megathread: What is this "File Deletion" You Speak of
 
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stuph
Aug 31, 2004

donkey punching my way to the top
I just need a cheap PCI (not PCIe) SATA (or SATA2) card with 2 ports to throw into a WHS box for now - what's the cheapest thing out there I can get that's not going to crap itself if I look at it funny? Network speeds really don't bother me that much, I'm mostly just streaming music and video across the network - at this point, backups are incremental and don't really take up much space at all. I just need more SATA ports.

VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV - the 4-port guy is perfect. Thanks much!

stuph fucked around with this message at 04:25 on Mar 25, 2008

* # ¿ Mar 25, 2008 03:03
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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 12:17
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stuph
Aug 31, 2004

donkey punching my way to the top

AlienAardvark posted:

I'm curious about something and was wondering if anyone with WHS experience can answer this. If I have two machines running WHS and I want to take a drive from one machine with all of my files on it and move it to the other machine, do I have to format it for the second machine to recognize it? Will the second machine just add the new drive to the Storage Manager and leave the data intact?

While I haven't tried it, I can't think of a reason it wouldn't treat that drive exactly like a drive you pulled from any other computer. I think all of the WHS-specific files that are created are specific to that instance of WHS.

* # ¿ Jun 22, 2008 04:09
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stuph
Aug 31, 2004

donkey punching my way to the top

grunthaas posted:

Ive just read through the whole thread, and I dont think I saw an answer to this: Whats the best way to make use of all the old random hardware that we have lying around?

Im in possession of multiple drives of varying capacities from the last few years, which while not particularly useful on their own do add up to quite a lot of storage. I also have several old systems that work perfectly well but arent very useful.

Currently I have an Athlon XP system with 5 PATA data drives totaling about 1.2TB, all different sizes and manufactures. Its running ubuntu on another 60GB drive with each data drive mounted and shared separately. Ive got another 300GB drive that Id like to add to the mix and while I could just slap it in, mount and share it, that doesnt seem like the most elegant solution.

What I would like is to have all of the drives act as one big volume with some level of fault tolerance and the ability to add and remove drives to the volume. RAID 5 doesnt seem to fit the bill due to the different drive sizes, and if I understand it correctly RAID Z is going to have similar issues. The data on the drives is replaceable and I dont want to buy new hardware if at all necessary. The machine is ugly and noisy but it lives in a cupboard, runs torrents and serves files so I dont care. Any ideas where I should be looking to setup my ideal system or am I better off sticking with separate mounts & shares?

This is the exact reason I went with Windows Home Server. I couldn't find a free solution that would act this way. With WHS I pick which folders I want duplicated (so my Music, Documents and Pictures are all duplicated while internet video isn't) and it takes care of it from there. I just bought a new TB drive and told WHS to remove one of the drives - it moved all of the files onto another drive, I pulled the old one and put in the new one. 5 minutes later I've got it added to the storage pool and am ready to go with 700GB more than before. The next time I'm running out of space I'll do the same thing with the 300GB drive I have - move it out and buy the largest size drive out there that I can afford at the time. No need to worry about same-sized drives for Raid-5 purposes. It just works. I love it - but it's about a $130 outlay for the software.

* # ¿ Oct 24, 2008 18:42
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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > NAS/Storage Megathread: What is this "File Deletion" You Speak of