Dad wants one, I'm sure it has lots of good reasons, the main one is that we have currently 5 500 Gb external disks that does the needed shared storage. A server that is 24/7 connected and ready for read/write would be so much better and easier for the whole family.
Thanks for answering and helping me here, dad say thanks
Now to answer the other questions:
blixel said:
Hmm... do you just want network attached storage? Or are you more interested in taking on a project and spending a bunch of time tinkering and tweaking with OS installation and set up?
The idea of having "just" a NAS is what made us think of buying/building a server. But with the amount of music we have I also wanted a DLNA server so that our phones, PS3 console and computers could listen to it.
So in fact the difference between
buying and
building a server. But it's not a thing we want ASAP, and I have a 2 month summer break so that gives me (and him, because he always gets 2 weeks off of work) time to have fun building one. We wanted to do that too because at first it seemed that the pros of building a server yourself was the same as building a PC yourself. So cheaper, more control, etc., but it seems that it is not the case. And I think setting up the OS will be the easiest part, and me thinking of the 99% of server using Linux made me think that having it running on our own seems right and natural.
Urwumpe said:
I have a cheap Medion NAS here, for 150 Euro, no high performance for apps, but still even at full power, it consumes less with 10W than the five LED lights for my living room...
Well, as I said above it might be at first be running for storage only, but sooner or later it will have apps running on the background, again because that makes it way easier for the family.
Fabri91 said:
Thanks for telling me about this OS. I'll take a look.
garyw said:
Try to avoid RAID 5. It's unreliable and will eat your data.
Ohh, why? So, should we use RAID 1+0? ZFS seems to eat huge amounts of memory, so that might not be something we will be turning to.
paddy2 said:
I know a Linux server can offer a whole range of tasks but which one or ones would you pay for and which are you doing just because it is free?
Like I said above, knowing that Linux is a OS largely used in servers made me think of it naturally as we were planning it. But these are also largely web servers, which is not our case, but is really known and appreciated to have a large range of avaliable tasks. I also said I wanted a DLNA server too, and this is likely to be supported by Linux. But the server needs to be recognized from Windows' Residential Groups, as this is currently by that way all our computers are connected.
But the first step is "Why are you spending this 500 euros, what problem needs solving?"
We are not
spending 500€, we have at best 500€ available to buy/build something. If a NAS at 150€ is enough then we will pay 150€. What this will solved is said above on this post: Data storage and its availability, media access, and likely more in the future.
meson800 said:
the Ubuntu server distro is a beast The server utilization is only around ~20% CPU and ~38% memory usage normally. The only time I saw highish CPU and memory usage (around 50% CPU and ~85% ram) was when I had several clients connected over SSH programming/compiling while streaming media off of the server. And there are even more efficient distros than Ubuntu server!
This is a point towards my first idea of installing Linux.
TL;DR:
Server will be used for data storage, DLNA server, and more as we find other ideas. I'd prefer building one because we have time, it will be fun I'm sure, a cool project to take part of.
