Network storage solution
I'm looking for the ideal way to share files across all the computers in my network, while freeing up some space on my hard drive. I have already basically ruled out the Netgear device that holds up to two hard drives, since I read that it does its own special formatting, rendering the drives unusable to anything but that device (without a format). I have 3 computers, and a network printer (which I love). The Network printer has USB and memory card slots, but I plugged in the iPod and I don't see any way to access the USB storage device through the network. I think this test basically rules out one of the huge, cheap USB 2.0 external drives. I wouldn't mind those if I could access them through the network, though.
Does anyone have any tips on a good network storage solution? My current frontrunner is a Western Digital 160 GB drive, but I can't find a store that carries it, so I'd have to go on mail order only.
Excuse me, I forgot. It's not innovation unless it involves another texture pass. - Tycho from Penny Arcade
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Find someone with an old, dying PC, and stick a hard drive in it?
Seriously an old P3 can run a light linux kernel and serve samba files all day long. You can usually find them free, literally, kicking around. Check freecycle?
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"Think of it as 'grinding SO rep in the Kitchen instance.' " - Montalban
Well, how much do you have to spend?
You can build your own 1TB RAID box for less than $700 now. That's five 250GB drives smooshed into a cheap Dell box. You can spend more on the motherboard/RAID controller, but 1TB for $700 is, in my opinion, a crazy good deal.
I've been looking at doing this and while I'm first going to be buying a new gaming rig, I just keep coming back to how much this would help to have. The media storage possibilities alone make that attractive to me. Plus, if you have the capability, you can just add drives as you can afford them, increasing the capacity. And while I don't think RAID is worth the effort for a gaming rig, for this sort of storage, it seems perfect.
If you want to go the cheapo route, you can pick up a Fantom 120GB Network Hard Drive from NewEgg for $78. At that price, you could almost pick up two of them for the same price as the first name brand network HD available there.
Everything can be debated, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's debatable.
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120gigs is pathetic and weak. Morbo will destroy you!
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What the hell is Samba?
Do you guys think this project would be exceedingly hard for a tech medium noob? It would be cool to be able to share music all over the house.
The man wears a bucket of KFC on his head. I wouldn't expect anything less. - Pred
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samba_%28software%29
They describe it best.
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What about FreeNAS?
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The democratization of the web ... has installed an illusion of a digital first amendment that protects speech no matter how poorly spelled or stupid. - Elysium
Wordsmythe is my hero. - rabbit
XBL: E Munnie
Smartass
Thanks Edwin =)
The man wears a bucket of KFC on his head. I wouldn't expect anything less. - Pred
Excuse me, I forgot. It's not innovation unless it involves another texture pass. - Tycho from Penny Arcade
Game journal - Infinite Ego
My Rock Band profile
I've got an external drive off of a Linksys wireless router, and it's kind of finicky. I haven't spent much time on it, though.
The democratization of the web ... has installed an illusion of a digital first amendment that protects speech no matter how poorly spelled or stupid. - Elysium
Wordsmythe is my hero. - rabbit
XBL: E Munnie
Wow, looks pretty cool. But I started reading the manual, and this little note concerned me:
Eek. That precludes sharing USB drives with Windows machines.
Samba really isn't very difficult; you just edit the configuration file to fill in your workgroup name, list any shares you want to create, and then run smbpasswd to create a Windows password for accounts that are allowed to connect that way. (the first time you run it for a given user account, do smbpasswd -c username; that means to create the password if it doesn't already exist.) That's about it.
The share syntax is a little complex, but it comes with several good examples. The most common method, that of just sharing the home directories of your Unix users, is all set up in the file but commented out... uncomment it and you're golden. (you might have to add a 'writable' keyword, the default might be read-only). There's a great deal of stuff you CAN change if you wish, but for basic usage you can ignore almost all of it. If you can edit a text file, you should be able to get it working with little trouble.
On the client end, it's usually easiest to map a network drive to the fileshare. Most programs will run fine that way, although they'll generally be slower than running from a local drive. You'll often want to put the stuff that needs to run fast on the local drive, and then bulk stuff out on the network. (and backups, of course.)
There's programs out there that help the two talk. I'll see if I can find them.
The democratization of the web ... has installed an illusion of a digital first amendment that protects speech no matter how poorly spelled or stupid. - Elysium
Wordsmythe is my hero. - rabbit
XBL: E Munnie
I love my Buffalo Linkstation 500gb NAS (Around $250), just plug it into your router and install some drivers and you're good to go. It also has support for sharing 2 attached USB devices across the network, of which I'm using an old 200gb external drive to back up to automatically.
I've also heard good things about the 1tb Western Digital "My Book" NAS for something like $499. Either way, the prices on these devices are falling nearly as fast as Flash Memory prices, so the longer you hold off, the better a deal you'll find.
"War, it's gods way of teaching Americans Geography.." -Jon Stewart
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I think Buffalo's NAS thingy-ma-bob goes for $500/1TB and also has WiFi in addition to Gigabit Ethernet.
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Yah - Buffalo Terastation I think...That's what I want.
Along the same lines as FreeNAS I use NASLite from Server Elements. I use their free version which boots off a single floppy. I have an old P-100 throw-away with a few big drives in it. This thing runs headless (no monitor, mouse, keyboard) 24/7 and serves up my entire music and video libraries across the house. I use it alot to stream video to XBMC. Works like a champ. The drives are directly accessible through Samba or even using the built-in web server.
There really isn't any Linux knowledge required to set this up (or FreeNAS for that matter). My only suggestion if anyone goes this route it to set it up on a UPS. I learned after several power outages that the drives get messed up by not being properly unmounted - which required remounting the drives in a Linux box and fixing the drive table each time. Nicer to keep it running through the occassional power outage.
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Wish I could get something like FreeNAS or NASLite with built in utorrent and peer guardian 2.
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After an evening of puttering, I got ubuntu and samba running happily on an old mini-itx machine. Yey!
Now all I need is a bigger drive...