[LUAU] Anyone use a Linksys NSLU2? USB hard disk drives are FOSS friendly?

[Jim Thompson]

1) IDE drives are slow (compared to fast SATA or SCSI drives)
2) RAID5 (or RAIDZ) can greatly improve throughput (esp read  
throughput for RAID5) compared to what your friend has done
3) Your friend is probably running no > than 100Mbps networking
4) that PII/PIII @ 750GHz uses a lot more power than an Xscale.    
Hawaii has some of the most expensive utility rates in the nation.
5) the SATA and GigE controllers on the box I listed are sitting on a  
PCI-X bus (64-bit wide, clocked @ 133MHz, .vs the 'normal' PCI bus 32  
bits @ 33MHz)

---

First, FreeNAS is cool.

Second, 1+2+3 = its nor surprising that he thinks its good enough.   
It is, for his purposes.   This is fine.

Third, #5 + RAID5/RAIDZ represents throughput that will never be  
attainable with your friend's hardware

Fourth, the cost to operate is higher with your friend's solution.   
(Its true that his cost of acquisition is lower.)

There is a difference between something like what your friend put  
together, and something that you would trust with data that  
represents real money.  (patient records, the RAW files at a  
professional photography studio, the raw data out of a digital HD  
camera with footage for the 6:00 news, legal data, any e-commerce  
database / website, etc.)

There is room for both, of course.

Jim

On Dec 27, 2006, at 7:00 AM, David Kiwerski wrote:

>
> Just a thought...
>
> A friend of mine set up his using a regular computer, 2 250Gb ide  
> drives and FreeNAS  (free for the download).   Said it took him  
> about 5 minutes to set it up.   That was about 6 months ago - he  
> just uses it as if it were another drive.   The computer doesn't  
> have to be very fast either.   I believe he said he had a Pentium  
> 750, or something along that line.
>
> Dave
>
>
> Jim Thompson wrote:
>>
>> Intel OEMs a box with a 400MHz 80219 Xscale controller and a SATA  
>> controller that will house up to 4 3.5" SATA drives.
>> It has 2xGigE + 2x USB 2.0 coming out of it, and .. it runs Linux,  
>> and supports CIFS/SMB and NFS out of the box.
>>
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