[Tfug] NAS again

[Bexley Hall]

Hi,

I've grown frustrated with my NAS "solutions", to date.

I keep lots of small-ish drives to address the sweet spot in
accessibility, reliability, power consumption and DESK SPACE!
500G-1TB in a box is a convenient size for me -- I can keep
all my service manuals on one NAS, texts on another, sources
on a third, etc.  (i.e., I rarely need to access more than
one box at a time -- and can afford to power the box up/down
as needed instead of keeping it spinning 24/7).

I think the NAS that I have been most "satisfied" with is an
old "SNAPserver".  Small, reasonably quiet, appears to treat
the drives well (thermally), etc.  But, as it is IDE, I'm
pretty much limited to 1TB, there.  (which is fine -- if I could
find several more of them)

The single (IDE) drive boxes that I've played with tend to be
too small for anything more than music archives, etc.  Esp if
I opt to mirror their content (having *two* power supplies,
two enclosures, etc. just gets wasteful, fast!).

A Linksys (SATA) box (NAS100? 200??) seems to crash pretty regularly.
I'm guessing a thermal problem as it's entirely plastic (so hard
to dissipate heat through the skin) and looks to have no real
air flow around the drives.

I tried repurposing a headless Dell box (PV725N?) but it tends
to need babysitting too often (I've got it running a BSD and it
doesn't always make it to multiuser... hangs fsck'ing a drive
or something -- which I can't easily determine because it has
no console!).  I may revisit this to try to better identify the
problem.

[It seems like all of these suffer from a CONVENIENT way of
powering them down in an orderly fashion -- and/or *quickly*
recovering from an unexpected shutdown/powerfailure]

A Sun Netra is the ideal form factor (a bit larger than a 1U
switch but not anywhere as large as a 1U server!) but it has 128G
(i.e., 24b) limits on the drive controllers.

So, I'm looking for an idea for *small* boxes that I can repurpose
as NAS devices.  IDE or SATA are OK in the drive sizes I have in mind.
I don't *need* a console -- if the box is reliable (some of that will
obviously depend on my software choice).

OTOH, I'm not really looking for performance, here.  In essence, I
want an "external disk" that I can access from anywhere -- not a
file server, etc.  My usage patterns are more like:  find what I'm
looking for, copy onto a local host, power-down the archive.  I.e.,
the worst case transfers are CD ISO's and those are only accessed
rarely -- most accesses are for things like ~10MB documents that
I'll read locally... and then discard (because they still persist
in the archive!)

I guess reading my own comments suggests I start looking on eBay
for more SNAPservers!  :-/

Thx,
--don