Phoenix Network Forums

Hello, I have that file server I listed in the pc specs section yesterday, but I'd like to ditch microcrap win2k3. Does anyone have any reccomendations for an OS that is good with multiple hdds? I don't want to have them set up as raid because I have found that if something happens to any of the disks, I tend to lose alot of data. I was thinking about having some kind of samba setup using symlinks to make everything look like it was all on one hdd. Anyway, any reccomendations for something better would be greatly appreciated.

raid5 and raid10 are fail-safe, if one disk fails, all data can be easily restored. you need only bios supporting it

chak this new storeg mechin

rambiga wrote:chak this new storeg mechin

That seems to be a non-related video surveillance camera manufacturer?

@TS:
You're somehow right, yet you seem to be only aware of the existance of RAID0 - also known as striping only. Your data will be scattered across two or more disks. If one disk fails, the pieces of your valuable files on the remaining disk(s) have become useless.

However, like Altmind points out, RAID5 and RAID10 (and RAID1) are 'failsafe' as they all make use of the mirroring concept, with the difference being in the use of parity and some variations are combined with the aforementioned striping. Every bit of data will be on two or more disks - if one fails, you can replace it and rebuild the array. For a great overview of the different RAID setups have a look at Wikipedia

As far as I'm aware both Windows and 'nix can handle RAID arrays just fine. Should you not have an onboard raid controller, there are PCI raid controllers out there.

Heh, I don't actually want to use raid because it uses alot of space for backups and so on that I would rather use to store files. I am a poor student, with almost no money and only about a tb worth of hdds and just that much in music and tvshows However, since I originally posted this question, I have found the bsd based freenas and the debian based ebox, at freenas.org and ebox-platform.com respectively. Again my problem is in mounting all the disks and getting all the shares up properly, but with this stuff to go on it should be relatively simple to make big shares full of symlinks to other hdds to make everything look like it's in one folder.

multi file server ... well which protocol do you want to use?
If you want to use FTP (or FTP over TLS) I can recommend drftpd (www.drftpd.org) it's Java based and you can even can make a FTP Cluster with that. It's not really a RAID. More information on the website.
Maybe this application helps you and it's not important which OS you are using

daddy2k wrote:multi file server ... well which protocol do you want to use?
If you want to use FTP (or FTP over TLS) I can recommend drftpd (www.drftpd.org) it's Java based and you can even can make a FTP Cluster with that. It's not really a RAID. More information on the website.
Maybe this application helps you and it's not important which OS you are using

Heh, thanks for that, I'll definitely give that a look see. I mainly wanted to use samba and nfs to do the filesharing, so now it only comes down to the mountpoints and the stupid filesystems hdds use that you have to specify in the *nix mount command.