DescentBB

I'm looking into maybe changing my \"server\" setup. So I just need some input and advise.

What I have is a rather old P4 running some IDE drives which I use over a network as my central storage. Etc My Music, My Video, My Documents etc - five in total - are all on separate partitions/or drives (seeing as I had limited resource and space back when I set it up I had to partition some of the hdd's to accommodate my setup) which is each mapped as a network drive. Now so far this setup works like a charm for me but the other day a memory stick (PC133 yea like I said rather old) died and I was able to salvage a replacement out of some spare machines that I still have around.

The other thing is, besides being a file server this pc isn't used for anything else and running a full setup takes some space in the room (17\" CTR, k/b, mouse etc - its all spare components and stuff that I had and put to use) plus I think the power consumption of a PC might be higher than a NAS (this isn't an issue but might be a bonus thou).

And my main reason is I'd like to upgrade my storage space a bit on my drives.

What I was considering at looking at was to maybe get a NAS drive to replace the whole PC setup. PC's IDE's are full and the pc have no SATA.

Now my questions are:

1) Is it worth while to go with a NAS that takes SATA hdd's or should I stick to a IDE one? My network is still running on a 10/100base network as the network cards aren't faster than that which are in the pc's.
So will the sata drives over the network be bottle necked and should I stick to the IDE's because then I can maybe re-use some of the current drives or should I go with sata? The other thing is I've seen sata drives are a bit cheaper than IDE's over here. Basicly this means to ways

a) Get some IDE NAS drives re-use the bigger drives and get an extra one or two HDD's to fill up the storage space, or
b) Get a single SATA NAS with maybe a 1/2TB HDD, which brings me to my next question.

2) Can the hdd in a NAS be partitioned and be picked up over the LAN as separate drives? I know I can just create folders for each of the above-mentioned \"drives\" but I would rather wish to create a separate partition for each network folder, this is of course if I go with a large HDD in one NAS or should I rather go with a couple of NAS drives with smaller HDD's in them?

3) or should I just stick with my current setup and get bigger IDE HDD's and try to rearrange the room

Thanks in advance

1) IDE and SATA has absolutely NOTHING to do with NAS. If you are sharing the data over a network then it doesn't matter which you pick, same speed/same thing according to the network.

2)Probably not. I haven't looked at any NAS lately but you definately can't partition the sub 100$ ones and I wouldn't even bother buying ANY NAS that is less than 100$ (without drives) as in my experience they are all crap. If you want a good one, look at spending 300$ at least.

3) My suggestion is to stick with what you have. If you have lots of HDDs laying around like I do it is easier to use an actual computer and then you can use both sata and ide with the right hardware. If you have lots of small hard drives you can add them all into one logical volume so they all look like one drive to the computer.

By the way, you said this computer just shares the drives on the network, then why do you even have a keyboard/mouse/crt plugged into it? You don't need any of that plugged in as long as that computer doesn't have a retarded bios that demands it be plugged in to boot.

My actual setup right now to share all my movies/shows/anime/photos/music to my ps3 and other computers in the house is just an old p4 laptop with some external usb drives plugged into it. Using that lvm I linked above it is really easy to add or take away space when needed to make the volume larger or smaller. Works quite well and takes up a lot less space than a huge desktop computer converted to server. Only thing next on my todo list is to purchase a huge 1tb drive and mirror the data in case I lose it on a drive failure.

From the looks of what you have, You could really benefit from using logical volumes to make a huge drive out of all those little ones then you wouldn't have to worry about rearranging all the space around to make everything fit.

1) Thought as much

2) Think that is also a bit over the budget I had in mind

3) Might as well just stick to what I have!

You do bring a more logical approach to my current problem regarding the storage space. The link you gave was for the Linix counterpart. The pc I have is running XP so JBOD seems to be what I should rather look at. Any suggestions or am I missing how this one logical volume works.

I think my initial logic to have separate partitions was should something on one partition go funky the others would be safe. But I can now only see the logic in that as far as the OS partition goes. On the rest if the drive fails all partitions fails so if you have no backups you're screwed in any case.

Currently if I go the above route I think I should merge my 40gb and 80gb drives repartition the 20gb to the max for the OS as I have setup a 5gb partition for the one volume (documents and stuff) and move it to the merged disks.

If I do this I would have myself a 120gb storage drive and about 40gb free storage space on all the network drives and not just some of them This would help in buying some time before I really do need to get a new HDD but by then I might have upgrade my main rig and promote my current one to the task up \"server\" for the mere fact it can take SATA drives (cheaper and easier to find bigger sizes in them than IDE) and already have 2 HDD's a 120gb and a 250gb with two SATA slots to spare, currently the HDD's are almost fully occupied.

Oh on the k/b, screen etc issue I'll have to check if this pc can boot without the k/b (I do believe so) I did initially have a second purpose for the server in mind but that never materialize and I also believe it never will making it a waste to have everything hooked up.

Sometimes you just need a fresh perspective on things from others to realize there are better ways to go about things!

XP Pro's equivalent is called dynamic disks.

I have no experience with logical volumes in windows but I know it supports it. Look up what fliptw posted. Anyone know if windows lets you do it without buying something else?

Regarding a headless/keyboardless server.. I currently have a win2000 box set up as a print and torrent server. Just install something like vnc server which will let you see the desktop over the network then you don't even need to be physically at that machine to do anything on it. Only time you will ever need to plug a monitor back in is if it fails to boot up or the network changes in a manner that computer isn't connected properly any more.

Thx fliptw I'll look into it as I'm running XP Pro on my 3 desktop pc's (this includes the server). I also have a laptop with vista basic, I think, that I link up at times.

So the question is if I run dynamic disks to create one volume (spanned or what they like to call it, just did a quick scan on it so far) and I setup my folders on the volume instead of partitions for each mapped drive I currently have then I'd be able to run the server as it is running now just without the size limit per network drive but a combined free space.

Also will the vista laptop be able to see this drive over the network. Sorry to sound like a n00b but I'm learning on the go about this

The VNC thing is also something I'll look into Xamindar. What are the security risks regarding this? Asking because when I googled it there was a few hits that read something like \"how to hack a system running vnc\" etc. Is it possible to have this setup to only run on the local network and not the internet. I don't require the ability to be able to gain access of my server or other pc's over the internet, just yet.

And again at just a quick glance vnc works something down the line of installing it then running/setting up a vnc server for the \"server\" (I'm guessing I can also set it up on the secondary machine) and then I just run the viewer service on which ever box I'm at to access the pc's that have the vnc server setup on?

I'll try to go read up on this myself but will most likely only have time to go into this over the weekend(s).

Thx

if you are running xp pro, you have access to remote desktop, just add a password to your account and enabled remote access on the system control panel.

VNC is fine on the local network, your router will block internet traffic trying to get into it by default unless you specifically allow it in.