[Tfug] $2K fileserver

[Stephen Hooper]

> Conclusion: for about $2K and one day of your time, you can put
> together a 2 TiB fileserver ( in my RAID5 configuration, 1.5 TiB of
> effective space ) with quality components.  I've been hearing about
> the falling cost of network storage devices, but I think you get
> "more bang for your buck" when you DYI.
>

Nice job :) I am jealous, and really want one of my own now...

Really like the drive cage, as you hopefully have offloaded some of
the work the processor would do for a "soft" RAID setup, and you get
the benefits of hotplugging your drives.

As far as "bang for your buck", I guess that depends... some things
you will never be able to do yourself (WAFL filesystem for example),
and your drives are very slow for certain applications.  For use as a
backup system, they are probably good, but you may experience some
pain if you were to try to extract that information within a limited
window (for example streaming to tape), or if you were going to expect
to use that as something that requires a lot of small read/write
access when "hot".

Some NAS devices alleviate those problems, but, of course that adds
cost in places you may not ever need.

I think that building it yourself, you do get a much more flexible
solution, but then again, the flexibility of a system is somewhat
diminished after you go into production, so that kind of washes.

In other words, I think it depends on your application.   From the
tone of your "voice", sounds like you have made the right choice for
yours :)