[KOD[Redfox

Hey guys, hows it going?

I'm thinking of converting my old PC into a file server/NAS for the network. It's components so far are;

-AMD 3000+ s754
-A socket 754 mobo with 2 ram slots and an AGP slot no SATA slots
-X1600 Pro 512MB AGP (I'l probably switch that with 9200SE for heat and power reasons)
-Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS
-160Gb IDE hard drive

I was thnking of getting the antec 300 as it would be a cheap case that will provide enough HDD slots and hold a microATX board with an ATX 1.0 PSU yeah?

I would also need a cheap controller card to provide me with 4 sata slots. Something like http://www.dabs.com/productview.aspx...avigationKey=0 . I am goin to put 4x1TB drives on it but 2 drives will hold the same data as the other two. The reason i would do this and not set up a RAID is because i want the drives in JBOD as cheap controller card only support software raid so i would like the data to be protected if the OS crashed.

I will put the OS on the 160Gb IDE drive. The thing is i can't decide between ubuntu with samba or reinstall XP. The problems i see with going the ubuntu route are the controller card not supporting linux and the fact that linux uses the ext3 file system so if somethign happened i wouldn't be able to take the drive out of the server and put it in my PC.

Any help or advice on this would be gretaly apprecited

Thanks,
Matt

DuckieHo

JBOD does make it easier to add/remove HDs to a single partition. However, there are issues with your proposed array:
1) JBOD risks data loss like RAID0 but without any performance gain.
2) Cheap SATA controllers may not support 2TB+ arrays
3) NTFS does not support 2TB+ (sorta)

__________________
To answer most of your questions: (1) a fridge cannot cool a PC (2) 64-bit OS for over 3.4GB (3) If a PCIe card fits, it should work (4) Resolution, not screen size (5) If you have a question, it is not news (6) Report, not respond to Spam (7) Single/Non-Modular Rail PSUs are not always better than Multi-Rail/Modular

stanrc

Even if you run Ubuntu you can format the drives to NTFS, I would make a few different partitions instead of just one big one. All the hardware looks good though.

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[KOD[Redfox

Thanks for the replies .

Sorry I think i might have misunderstood what JBOD is. What i think JBOD is is just all the disks listed. What I want is just to see the disks as seperate 1TB disks. I will then just manually add whatever i add to one disk to the other for redundancy. Basically a bit like 4 big external hard drives, with 2 a copy of the other 2.

Can linux support NTFS file system? Would linux pick up the drives in that controller?

Thanks,
Matt

DuckieHo

JBOD is "Just a Bunch Of Disks". It the bastard child of RAID. It is an array type where all the disks appear as one large virtual disk.

i.e. A JBOD of 80GB, 100GB, and 1TB will be a single 1180GB array.

__________________
To answer most of your questions: (1) a fridge cannot cool a PC (2) 64-bit OS for over 3.4GB (3) If a PCIe card fits, it should work (4) Resolution, not screen size (5) If you have a question, it is not news (6) Report, not respond to Spam (7) Single/Non-Modular Rail PSUs are not always better than Multi-Rail/Modular

stanrc

You want to do a mirror raid, that would copy everything across multiple drives so you have redundancy.

And yes Ubuntu can read/write to NTFS. You may need to install ntfs-3g though.

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[KOD[Redfox

Ah yes now that makes sense thanks for clearing that up.

I had thought about RAID 1 but the controller card will be software RAID and if its software RAID and the OS goes down, will the data still be secure? If you know any good controller cards for cheap off the top of your head that would be sweet.

An old ATX v1.0 PSU will fit in all new modern cases, the size and screw holes haven't changed?

Thanks again ,
Matt