[rescue] Question about Iomega NAS Server

[Martin Wedel]

We bought a Iomega snapstore I believe it's called a few years ago to 
test for a project. 1U case, 4x80GB ide drives. Horribly slow, just real 
sad. It runs win2K server with a package called SAK (server appliance 
kit) which kills the local console and turns it into a web-gui'd device. 
Software raid5. Cracked it open to try to speed it up with a 3ware card 
(which didn't help, the drives themselves just sucked really bad). It's 
a celeron 650 on a cheapo mainboard. Just a bad unit all around.

Lately, I've been building our own storage boxes at work. I'm not sure 
what your budget is, but for about 6K, we build:
Dual xeon 2.8 HT 1MB cache (overkill for NAS, but I build this so that 
they can be used as app servers later in life, see my mention below)
Supermicro server board (DDR2 ECC, dual on-board gige, on-board SATA 
raid 0 or 1)
3GB ram
3Ware 9000 series SATA raid w/ 128MB cache 8 drive model
8x250GB raid edition WD drives
2x36GB WD Raptors built raid1 w/ onboard controller
rackmountpro.com 16Bay hot-swap case with 3 module HS power supply

We run Redhat ES on these and man they smoke. The case is around 1600, 
but VERY nice, and pre-cabled for the drives. Yield in raid5 with a 
hotspare is 1.3TB-ish. We have 4 of these boxes I built at work, 3 have 
run solidly for over a year so far, one for over 2 (obviously with 
slightly lower spec), and one is a fairly highly utilized win2K3 server 
with MSQL (Yeah I know, boo hiss) and all have room to add an extra 
3ware and drives due to the extra case bays. Obviously, you can trim a 
lot of money here by cutting down the proc to a single P4/AMD and you'd 
probably get by perfectly with 1GB of ram. You can also save a lot on 
drives if you forgo the 'raid edition' model on the storage drive and go 
with the 140$-ish 200GB SE 8mb cache drives.

-Martin