home server

[onepctech]

Dude,

Why would you want to spend your money buying a friggin server and parts for a server when all you need is storage space? This is what I would do.

Get one of those mybooks with 1TB of data in it.
They allow for ethernet connection up to 1000 mb/s
They have 2 500GB drives inside
I believe you can set it up for mirror
this way you dont have to worry about data loss
it will be a lot cheaper than building a server

 

[umakemebetter]

because a lot of people have evidence that the RAID 1 on it is faulty.
this review in particular made me LOL

"After finally getting this drive to work and using fire wire. I am comforted in the fact that it is working. But 2 months and thirteen days in, I find that it is making music. Making some new humming sound. As entertained as I am by this new found musical ability, I find that my drive will not open. So now two months of information, countless movies, my own artistic work is lost forever. Hopefully, I can send this drive in and my information is saved. It seems ridiculous to spend nearly $xxx on a terrible drive."

and no its not significantly cheaper. the build i had was $280, and it comes with the assurance that i built it and i chose good components for it.

 

[hascet]

If they are wireless you don't have to worry about gigabit connections wireless internet is not that fast.

 

[Remeniz]

all the comps are wireless.
so i'm planning on getting a 10/100/1000 card, is this good?

i chose an AMD Athlon 64 LE-1600 for the processor (it was the cheapest thing i could find), should do fine, right?
router is a belkin 54mbps wireless router, Cox 5mbps internet (its actually like 3.5mbps since i'm using a 54mbps wireless router, right? not that it matters)

i chose two 160GB Western Digital 7200RPM 3gbps drives with 16mb cache on both. (its mostly photos, so we dont need much). so i set these up with Raid 1 and everything i put onto one, gets put on to both?

Well I gotta say your going the right way about it.

The only thing is the network speed connection. I would've thought that the higher the speed the less it'll slow down as more computers access the information on the server.

Everything looks good though and as stated above RAID 1 or above is what you'll need.

RAID 0+1 gives you speed benefits of RAID 0 and the fault tolerance of RAID 1 but you would need 4 drives for this set up. RAID 5 uses 3 drives and gives you speed benefits together with fault tolerance and the space you would have is equal to 2 of the 3 drives.

Having said all that RAID 1 is ideal for you and everyone else.

 

[ssc456]

if your running a complete server software you may wonna build another but if your jus gonna run XP and enable file sharing the nhonestly jus pick up an old P3 or P4 for like $100 it really doesnt have to be high spec coz wireless speeds are like 54 Mbps very very max and even early P2 computers could access files at that kinda speeds

 

[disturbed13]

you could get a hard drive that connects to your router and use that

wot bout the backup ?

if he gets a 1 TB External HDD
it can be set up in RAID 1
so that would be 2 500 GB HDDs with the same info on it
just my thoughts

 

[Remeniz]

if he gets a 1 TB External HDD
it can be set up in RAID 1
so that would be 2 500 GB HDDs with the same info on it
just my thoughts

No.

In fact if it was 1 TB of RAID 1 Hard Drive space then that unit would need two 1TB drives inside to give you 1TB of RAID 1.

So if he the OP got a 1TB External HDD, as you say, once he's set up the RAID 1 the OP would only have 500GB to use.

 

[disturbed13]

im sorry
i think you misunderstood me
im saying that the box says 1 TB HDD
but its actually 2 500GB HDDs inside
that can be set up in RAID 1
but have another 500 GB of free space couldnt hurt anything either

 

[Celegorm]

I'm not sure if it's what you looking at, or even if it's over-kill or not but check out windows Home Server. It works great, backs up systems every night and in the case of a hard drive crash, just pop in a new HDD and the Restore CD, select a backup and press restore and the computer is back to how it was.

It does have native shared folders too, and puts an icon for that right on your desktop.