[TriLUG] Choosing a new home computer

[Ken Mink]

On 01/06/2014 12:53 PM, Chris Merrill wrote:
> On 1/6/2014 11:23 AM, Zac Durham wrote:
>> I have been looking at similar devices the past couple weeks. While I'm
>> excited to discover the cubox I'm equally concerned there are others, yet,
>> that I might be overlooking. Dewey, were there others you were looking at
>> before settling on the cubox? What were the deciding factors?
> I'm also curious to hear about other options. The cubox looks like it'll
> fit the bill for what I need - which is a light-duty mail / web / media
> server.
>
> But I'll also need a NAS-like device for storing media and as a backup
> target for our other PCs. Preferably with RAID and power-optimizing
> idle-drive-shutdown features.
>
>
>

I intend to put together a more comprehensive writeup, but I recently 
set up a small home storage network for my wife. She's a professional 
photographer and chews through storage pretty quickly.

I bought a bunch of Pogoplug V4 devices. They have GigE, 2 x USB3.0 and 
a single SATA3 dock and have minimal power requirements. I reloaded them 
with ArchLinux 
(http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv5/pogoplug-series-4) and put a 
1TB drive in the SATA dock. I then set them up as iSCSI targets. My main 
file server is acting as the initiator. It takes the resulting devices 
and creates a RAID5 array which has a filesytem and is exported to my 
wife's desktop.

The pogos are $20 each and the hd's I picked up $60 each. The RAID is 
handled by mdadm. I can add new devices as needed and expand the array. 
If one goes down, RAID5 keeps the filesystem alive. So far, it's been 
stable. The throughput is adequate. I have not benchmarked it. My wife 
uses it as archive storage, so it doesn't need to be fast. I do have 
them on a separate vlan from the result of the house.

Any ways, it was a cool little project and solved a problem I had nicely.

Ken