A consequence of re-ripping my CD collection to Apple Lossless (to support my Sonos habit) is that I recently ran out of network accessible disk space. The disk space being used to this point was an adopted second hand 250GB disk which was unlovingly housed in my 13-year old Dell Pentium II ‘server’ machine.
As a slight aside, with the advent of multi-core processors, it’s good to know that a relic of a chip such as this can still be put into useful service; until a year or so ago, this machine was still handling most of my email and web proxy traffic.
A decision had to be made; to continue hobbling along on this (somewhat) archaic setup or to invest in some new hardware. The case housing my old server didn’t have any additional drive slots, it was after all a desktop machine circa 1998 and I didn’t really want to invest in bigger IDE disks at this stage anyway although admittedly I could have investigated a PCI SATA controller card (this wouldn’t have got away from the lack of space in the case though). I needed new storage and the question was should I buy or build a new server or look to a dedicated Network Attached Storage (NAS) device.
The longer I thought about it, the more requirements came out of the woodwork:
- Reliable fault-tolerant network attached disk storage
- Easy to backup/restore if necessary
- Low Power Consumption
- Extensible – for future expansion
- Low hassle-quotient
- Be able to handle:
- Sonos (lossless) and iPod (lossy) music storage
- Video – PS3 Streaming
- Photos – PS3 Streaming
- Possible future Apple TV support
- Network Time Machine backup – currently one iMac but possibly additional wireless laptops as family needs dictate
- Other unknowns – I ‘ideally’ would be able to support a local ‘pseudo-development’ server for DB2 and as a Jazz server. This is much lower priority as I’m also looking at whether Amazon EC2 could be used to provision occasional development facilities.
Throughout this process my head said ‘buy’, my heart said ‘build’…..
