"The Natural Philosopher" wrote in message
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On 06/02/16 17:00, bm wrote:
"Mike Tomlinson" wrote in message
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En el artÃ*culo , John
Rumm escribió:

I seem to be sinking under a pile of spare hard drives at the moment -
typically 2.5" 500GB ones.

My immediate thought is that, by the time you've bought the hardware
needed to achieve this (caddies, etc. especially, as you mention them)
it would be cheaper to buy a few big drives. Buy just three and you can
do RAID5 (=fault tolerance).

Look for a cheap NAS on fleabay, or stick then in a cheap case. Use a
separate small drive or SSD for the OS, then you can upgrade/maintain
that without affecting the data on the RAIDed disks. I take them out of
my Microserver when doing OS upgrades, etc. so no "accident" can befall
them.

Tis true, a 4 bay case is more expensive than buying a larger drive.
I'm wondering whether to use an old PC, bung in my drives, get something
like this -
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/4-Port-SAT...AOSwSdZWd0r Z
maybe I could use FreeNAS.


Linux will do some sort of RAID without need for a raid hardware solution.

So will Win.

But I question the value of RAID versus say a simple mirror the important
software on a nightly basis...

You do get rather more total storage capacity with
RAID tho its certainly not as simple if a drive dies.

I have to say I am running an ATOM server with a GB of RAM and its more
than fast enough for the trivial load file and web serving places on it.
Cases can be picked up for nothing., My PC supplier has tons of old cases,

Not many of them take all that many drives tho.

and would probably sling me a load of drive bay kits for peanuts.

They only cost peanuts from aliexpress anyway.

And an obsolete 10 year old XP style machine that has been junked for
being too old and slow is all you need. Tons of people have this stuff
lying around. Offer them a pint and its yours...

Not ideal power use wise tho.