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TehDanMan
Guerilla Ontologist
Joined: 01 Jul 2003
Posts: 13143
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File Server
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For the last couple years, I've not really done much with my personal computer equipment. Near as I can figure it comes down to two issues. The first and I think strongest reason for not screwing around with anything technical at home has been that I'm getting my tech-bone massaged plenty at work. The other, has been that I've not had a whole lot of money with trying to pay off all dept and saving as much as I can toward buying a house.
I recently paid off my only credit card. So, I'm celebrating with something useful to me. I'm building a file server. This way I don't have 5 HDDs in that tiny slightly larger than a shuttle of a case. It will also put my iTunes Music and Movie Library in one easily accessible place. I also have some personal stuff that I'd like to consolidate; digital versions of important documents like bills and taxes.
The management software I will be using is FreeNAS. FreeNAS is a FreeBSD based distribution. I've chosen this because it does absolutely everything I need and a whole lot more. That and it has a super sweet GUI.
I bought a couple 500g Seagate HDDs from a friend that had them come in from Seagate after being refurbed. I figured out my current personal storage needs and they came well within 500g. Because some of the things I need to store are very important I will be mirroring and encrypting a special partition on the 500g HDDs. I will also be rsyncing the really important stuff to a geographically dissimilar location.
Eventually I will move some of the drives from my desktop into this system, as I will be upgrading to a couple terabyte drives in a 0+1 array.
The case I will be using is 3u Rackmount case I got for couple beers. I have 2 more if someone wants one. I'll give you the one without a key, but I'd like $10 for the one with a lock & key.
The motherboard as you can see isn't new to be certain, but it should more than fill the need. I got it from Mike for cheap. I actually think I still owe him $20. This motherboard is awesome because it has 8 sata ports on it. They are only SATAI but I'm not concerned with the little bit of throughput that won't make a difference for my needs. There are 4 PCI Slots, 1 PCIe 16x slot, 1 PCIe 1x slot and 1 PCIe 2x slot. 6 USB port headers on the motherboard and 4 external USB ports. 2 IDE ports. 4 DDR ports. Dual LAN. External firewire. The motherboard is an MSI K8N Neo4.
The processor is an AMD 64 3500.
The PSU is a cooler master 550 Watt Modular PSU I bought back when I worked at PC Club. This thing actually used to throw 20 amp breakers if anything else was on that circuit.
I need to go through the BS ram at work and snag like 4 gig, because I might as well have 4 gig.
Video Card: The motherboard does't have onboard, and it can be any cheap old video card. If someone has one that they aren't using and would like to donate/trade/sell I'd like to hear about it. I have a couple of 7100GS Nvidia Cards. One has 4 bad caps and one good one. The other has only one bad cap. Both of these cards still work, but I wouldn't use either of them long term without swapping the one good cap from one card to the card with only one bad cap. That is what I plan to do, unless someone wants to give me a card or sell one cheap enough. PCI or PCIe is fine. _________________ Blargle Flarg Bergah Merg
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Thu Jan 07, 2010 3:02 pm
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