Building a Linux NAS

Brian McGrew Brian at doubledimension.com
Thu Sep 30 14:39:33 UTC 2004


Good morning:

I've been unable to find any information on exactly what I want to do so maybe you guys can help!  Our company is kind of small and we can't afford megabucks to buy a Dell NAS or SAN do I want to build my own.

I'm looking at taking a Linux box that I have here, a P4 1.6GHz with 2GB of RAM, putting it in like an 8U rack mount case with 2x40GB drives mirrored for the system and then cramming as many (I'm hoping like eight or more) 250GB SATA drives in it for the NAS.

My questions to you guys are:

1)  Is this a feasible approach to take or should I go buy a NAS at any cost?
2)  Can someone make a recommendation of a nice 6U or 8U rack case to look for?
3)  I was planning on using 2x40GB on the onboard IDE controller for the system drive.  Is this alright or should I have a Promise RAID controller?
4)  What about a SATA controller (or even ATA133) that will support eight drives?  What about two controllers that support four drives, would this work?
5)  What software for setup and management should I be looking at?  I've used Webmin but have never really had good luck with Samna.  I need to share files via NFS, SMB and maybe AFP.  

TIA for all the help!

-brian

Brian D. McGrew        { brian at doubledimension.com || brian at visionpro.com }
---
> YOU!  Off my planet!




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