John R Pierce wrote:
Rudi Ahlers wrote:
Hi all
I want to look at setting up a simple / cheap SAN / NAS server using normal PIV motherboard, 2GB (or even more) RAM, Core 2 Duo CPU (probably a Intel 6700 / 6750 / 6800) & some SATA HDD's (4 or 6x 320GB - 750GB). My budget is limited, so I can't afford a pre-built NAS device.
Can this be done with CentOS? I've been looking FreeNAS (which is built on FreeBSD), and it look like a great project, but since the hardware support in FreeBSD is limit, I'd rather use Linux for it.
Has anyone done this? If so, please share a bit in your experiences :)
you might look at openfiler, too. same idea as opennas, only its linux based. web management interface, supports NFS and CIFS/SMB sharing, etc etc.
IMHO, a storage server really /should/ have ECC memory to minimize the potential for data corruption by random memory errors. this, however, requires a server chipset, as 99% of desktop stuff doesn't support ECC at all.
you are, btw, way overspecing the cpu. a storage server would be fine with a much slower processor than any of those.
What kind of processing does the NAS server really do? I mean, it won't do actual calculations / DB access / etc, those will all be done by the host OS / server, right?
For the price difference, the bigger CPU is a better investment, which could also be reused for something else (xen server?) if this doesn't work out. Unfortunately, the only ECC capable motherboards I can get my hands on will be XEON, which is much more expensive than a normal desktop type motherboard. And the CPU's will cost more.