5punk

i recently had an idea...

that idea was to build a cheep server and wack some RAIDed disks in it for my music, films, work, ect. and access it through NFS

leaving my computer a smaller faster drive, raptor maybe, just for OS, games and apps.

would this be a good idea?

would a 10/100 netwould be ok, or would gigabit be more advisable, what kind or RAM and CPU should i be looking at?

cheers, alex

depends if you have enough spare money and computer parts really.

pretty much any cpu (1ghz is the minimum really) and 512mb-1gb of ram will be fine.

raid is still questionable, you won't gain much in most cases, apart from less space or more risk.

10/100 is fine, gigabit is nicer, but it'll cost a bit more. only go for gigabit if you intend to do movie streaming and both computers are pretty fast. (on slower machines, gigabit goes pretty slowly because they can't handle the data fast enough)

I'm in the middle of doing something similar, and the spec it's got atm is thus:

800MHz Duron processor
768MB SD RAM
160GB 7200rpm Seagate drive
3 X 10/100 LAN cards

plus other bits and pieces (motherboard, case, etc) I'm told that should work fine for what I want (file storage and internet router).

i was thinking of raiding for security, mirror or simmilar

makes sense in that respect, but i'd only personally do it for really important stuff, which generally i backup on a pen drive

Yes. Mirroring only really protects against hardware failure - it's no substitute for backups. If you manage to corrupt your data - the corruption just gets mirrored.

A 100Mb connection is probably more than sufficient for (say) streaming video data to a single client.

the costs mounting folks

for a pretty high performance setup i'm looking at:

SATA/RAID card
another 160gig drive
2x gigabit lan cards
and a raptor for my OS and games


for a reasonable setup i'm looking at:

SATA card, or onboard
a raptor for OS and games


both need other gubbins such as a computer to put them in too, and i don't enterely trust my current 160gig drive