[rescue] FW: WTT: 1.5G of PC2700 for 1G of PC100

[Joshua Boyd]

On Mon, May 05, 2008 at 02:28:20PM -0400, William Enestvedt wrote:

>    Fair point. But what I have are several IDE drives and this PC. :7)
> But that leads into this:

How many ide drives are you actually trying to use?

> >
> > Anyway, have you looked at any of the various off the self linux
> > NAS devices?  There are several fairly affordable models that
> > shouldn't take much power, and should support GigE nicely.
> >
>    Bluntly, I haven't looked much past the prices I saw, most north of
> $200, and I'm operating on a budget of under $100 plus any parts I can
> scrounge at home or here at work. So I gotta ask, what's "affordable" to
> you? (Knowing something about your life changes from the past few years
> [which reminds me: did I see you write "wife"? Congratulations!], I
> think I'm where you were financially, about a year ago -- only with me
> it's the latest kid.)

Yes, the 5 year aniversary is coming up in under 2 weeks.

Affordable obviously varies.

BTW, while I too am looking to do a new home server in the near future,
I don't want it to be an appliance, I don't want it to be Linux, and I
don't actually want to spend $600.  Perhaps $400, hopefully less.

>    I like the idea of flashing one of these "simple" devices and turning
> loose more of the Linux inside. I have seen the Linksys devices (too
> big, too expensiove), and I saw the now-cancelled "Slug" (SLU-2?). What
> else is out there that you had in mind when you wrote? Beside giving
> "cheap nas linux" to Google, I mean?
> 
>    I have an IPX plus a really nice external SCSI case (conatining and
> IDE-to-SCSI converter board), which is my last resort. *gulp*

I don't recommend the IPX idea.

I'm assuming that you are using a P3, based on the mention of 800mhz
CPU.  Wikipedia suggests that that CPU is somewhere around 25 watts,
which isn't too bad (assuming it only a single CPU system).  

Since you mention older IDE drives, I would recommend getting that
down to 1 OS drive and 1 data drive or 2 data drives mirrored.  You
don't mention you target amount of disk space.  I would assume it is as
much as possible.  

I would recommend that you use whatever seems to be the coolest IDE
drive for the OS drive.  I would then recommend that you start with a
PCI SATA controller.  That should be about $15.   Since you mention the
IPX, I'm assuming that one data drive is OK with you.  So, spend another
$60 or so on a 250 gig SATA drive for sata.  

After that, my next consideration (but this would cause you to go past
$100) would be a new low power motherboard and a high efficiency PSU.  I
would imagine the pair would be about $150, and I think that HDs are
likely to be the low hanging fruit.

I'm thinking to use Solaris/SPARC with mirrored SCSI boot drives and
mirrored SATA drives (on a SAS controller) for data.  I have one SATA
drive and the gige card so far.  I need to get around to finishing
purchasing the rest of the parts.