| View previous topic :: View next topic |
| Author |
Message |
OS Newbie
n00b
Joined: 26 Aug 2014
Posts: 70
|
 Posted: Thu Oct 09, 2014 1:53 am Post subject: |
 |
|
| causes wrote: | | I'm also interested in setting up my server computer to work as network storage. Currently i'm using just sshfs. I wish that the network storage would work just like locally mounted filesystems. Seems like i have to look into samba or NFS? |
Reference Jaglover's post of September 29th in this thread. What he describes is in a nutshell, what you want to do.
What I was sidling up to as an idea was to figure out how to make a common (to all platforms) storage area appear to each platform as though it were a native disk. But after considering it, I abandoned that idea, and decided that giving the users of each platform their own respective areas would suffice. That's just because I don't want to even bother to explore the issues pertaining to file attribute differences, etc. I can write (web-based) applications that are accessible to all the platforms, and eliminate the requirement from all of them to read and write from/to the disk themselves. |
|
| Back to top |
|
 |
OS Newbie
n00b
Joined: 26 Aug 2014
Posts: 70
|
| Posted: Fri Oct 10, 2014 12:57 am Post subject: |
|
|
| Spanik wrote: | Interesting thread, have been thinking about such a thing for some time. But something hasn't been touched and that is power consumption. Now what would be the most economical? I understand that in a commercial setting this would be second to reliability. But for home use power consumption is important (well, to me at least).
How would a Gentoo setup fare against a commercial NAS in that aspect? I'd prefer a Gentoo setup to a bought NAS for the learning experience. What would be the minimal requirements that result in low power with acceptable performance for such a file server? Let's say for 4 people with enough spread use. So not streaming 4 HD while at the same time doing other stuff, Gb ethernet available. |
It seems to me that one could implement a low-power system, based on say, a Beaglebone Black board or something, and then attach whatever disk drives would be required for storage. My guess would be that the disk drives would be the big power hogs. In fact, probably a laptop could serve as the computer. They're optimized for low power consumption. And you could put the largest 2.5-inch internal drive available, in it. That would probably suffice for most file server requirements. But what do I know? Maybe someone here has done some futzing around with this low-power server idea.
I'd like to play with this too, eventually. So if you get anywhere with it, come back and tell us all about it. I'm in the process of setting up a secondary electrical distribution system here. It'll be completely off-grid (not tied). I'll initially utilize micro-hydro generators, and later add solar panels. So the idea of using laptops as servers (and workstations, for that matter) appeals to me because I'd be able to feed them directly from my low-voltage power system, without the need to step up to 110V and then back down. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
1clue
Advocate
Joined: 05 Feb 2006
Posts: 2569
|
| Posted: Fri Oct 10, 2014 3:11 am Post subject: |
|
|
I don't know about beaglebone black, but I have 3 raspberry pi's. They would make horrible file servers. They have a single 100 mbps (not gigabit!) network card and they can't saturate it even with nothing else going on.
IMO when I drag something to a file server or vice versa, I want it done ASAP. If it takes too long you get your workstation falling asleep and losing the transfer, or any number of other things to interrupt and disrupt. If it's too slow nobody will use it.
These small boards don't have any hardware for simultaneous data transfer in any quantity, so I'm saying look before you buy.
That said, raspberry pi's make a really nice, really cheap stratum 1 time server when you add a GPS chip. Or if you want some network services up all the time, like a full-fledged DNS server for a small office, they're great for that. If I needed a Windows Domain controller for authentication on a small network I might try to set that up on a pi using samba.
From what I understand a beaglebone black is just about twice the size of a pi. I think for a file server you at least would want an atom or equivalent, stay away from arm processors IMO. I'd look for some sort of proof that you can run the disk at full speed and the network at full speed too. I'd also make sure you have a decent mechanism for high speed backups. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
OS Newbie
n00b
Joined: 26 Aug 2014
Posts: 70
|
| Posted: Fri Oct 10, 2014 5:50 am Post subject: |
|
|
| 1clue wrote: | I don't know about beaglebone black, but I have 3 raspberry pi's. They would make horrible file servers. They have a single 100 mbps (not gigabit!) network card and they can't saturate it even with nothing else going on.
IMO when I drag something to a file server or vice versa, I want it done ASAP. If it takes too long you get your workstation falling asleep and losing the transfer, or any number of other things to interrupt and disrupt. If it's too slow nobody will use it.
These small boards don't have any hardware for simultaneous data transfer in any quantity, so I'm saying look before you buy.
That said, raspberry pi's make a really nice, really cheap stratum 1 time server when you add a GPS chip. Or if you want some network services up all the time, like a full-fledged DNS server for a small office, they're great for that. If I needed a Windows Domain controller for authentication on a small network I might try to set that up on a pi using samba.
From what I understand a beaglebone black is just about twice the size of a pi. I think for a file server you at least would want an atom or equivalent, stay away from arm processors IMO. I'd look for some sort of proof that you can run the disk at full speed and the network at full speed too. I'd also make sure you have a decent mechanism for high speed backups. |
Okay, okay... I'm sorry I mentioned it. Let's discard the idea about using any such card. As soon as I thought about using a laptop instead, my thoughts moved completely over to that idea. I should have stated it in that way (or even just deleted the Beaglebone black part). That's not to say however, that I think it would be a problem to use one as a file server. I haven't done any benchmarking. But the last time I checked, there weren't any disk drives that had throat speeds capable of saturating the bandwidth of Fast Ethernet. Does anyone here know what the sustained data transfer rate is for his favorite drives? I just looked at lots of pages on the WD site, but could find a single spec on it. All they talk about is the 6GB transfer rate of the interface, the maximum (burst) data rate of the drive, etc.
In any case, this guy was interested in low power. And one quite probably has to make some trade-offs in performance to get power usage down significantly. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
|
|
You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot vote in polls in this forum
|
|
Networking & Security
