[BillyM]

I had a number of criteria (that often-times conflicted, making this project all the harder) that had to be met when I was putting together my media server, and I will list them in terms of importance to me.

1.)  Redundancy, Having lost everything ONCE, I vowed never again.  I dont like having solid media backups, ie DVD's and CD's.  They get scratched, lost, take time to restore etc, so this had to support raid, mirror raid, preferrably support for raid5 for future upgrades.  Right now I only have two 120gb drives (after redundant raid, leaves me with 120gb of useable space)  I live on ASUS boards, never let me down, and in memory of my old A&V133 (best original athlon board EVER) I picked up a server-version with a built in promise raid controller.  Hating promise controllers, I simply utilize it for its extra ata133 slots, software can take care of the raid-ing.  A 1.4tbird and 512mb of ram were lying around.  The tbird was underclocked to 1ghz, and core voltage reduced by 35%.  This should bring the temp output down into early celeron range, allowing lower fan speeds.  (see #3)

2.)  Speed,  I'm a young guy, grown up in the digital age.  I dont like to wait for ANYTHING.  If it can be made faster, it must be.  Wireless is out of the question.  Enter Gigabit!  My main rig has it built in, switch and card we necessary.  $70 later I've got a switch (circled far left), and 20$ later I've got a card (circled far right).  $15 later I've got dedicated cat6 (gray cables) running to the server and main rig.  Transfer should not be bottlenecked due to network now...  Before I mirrored the drives, I striped them and achieved 27mB/s, so the drives are definately the slowest part, but redundancy is key.

3.)  Shhhh,  When I walk into the room, I dont want to hear hard-drive or fan noise...  Period.  The server must shuttup after 5-10min of inactivity.  The bios allowed that setting, but shutting down the system drive is never a good idea in my books.  Enter compact-flash card.  If you look on the picture, circled, next to the hard-drives and above the fan is the CF-IDE adapter.  Fully bootable, limited only by the size of your CF card.  In my case, 256mb.  The fan (circled dead-center)is a flower-design full coper with a low-speed fan, made even lower-speed by a inline resistor.  1400rpm and you cant hear it over your own breathing.

4.)  Easy to manipulate software.  I dont want to install another windows OS.  I love them to death, best things in the world for getting shit done, having any piece of software right at your fingertips.  ...but damn, keeping up with updates and checking up on it constantly, not worth it man.  I want something small (under 256mb) and simple.  Enter DARMA NAS (network attached storage).  Installed in less than 5 minutes.  Configured in less than 10 minutes, and boots in less than 2 minutes (and that's off a slow-ass compact flash card).  Once you set up the users (make it the same as your windows machine login and it wont bother you for a password) you access it just as if it were a shared resource on the network, drag and drop files, do whatever you please.  Their free version only allows 2 connections at a time, but for me, that's not a problem.  One computer streaming at all times, and the rest of the computers... I'm only one person, only working on one at a time, so I dont need any more than that.

Here's a picture of the overall setup.


Here is a picture of the remote configuration screen.


Here is the transfer result, after meeting all my criteria.  


....you hear that?  Nope.  *success!*

--BillyM

[Brad]

With 2 IDE drives in a software raid, there is no way you'll saturate a 100mb Ethernet link (much less the GB you have in place)

I really like your ideas on keeping it quiet - looks like you've achieved your goal there.

Redundancy or backup is important (both is better)
It's a matter of deciding how important the data is to you and how quickly you want to recover from different disaster situations.

[JoshK]

Thanks for sharing!

Your journey is a bit like mine, with a few differences based on location of server (I don't need silence in my basement).  Anyway, thanks for pointing out Darma.  I had not seen this application in my searching.

I chose linux, because I wanted to play around with MythTV some too, but may build some dedicated for that, don't know yet.  

I too just bought a gigabit switch and set of cards and redundancy is a huge priority for me too.

[BillyM]

With 2 IDE drives in a software raid, there is no way you'll saturate a 100mb Ethernet link (much less the GB you have in place).

I'm afraid so.  Running a business-series 100mbit switch and well known intel100 cards, I was maxing at TRUE MEASURED 12-14mB/s on the same setup.  Moving to the gigabit allowed me to run TRUE MEASURED 27mB/s

You dont NEED it for two drives mirrored, as im only hitting TRUE MEASURED 17-18mB/s, so the loss will be minimal, but I truly plan to move to 4 drives (raid 5) shortly, and it will be back in the mid-high 20's transfer speed, of which 100mbit will never keep up with.

The only downside to the DARMA software is that it doesn't have an ability to tell you remotely which drive is bad.  I had to hook the monitor back up and watch the boot sequence and see it was having trouble on bus0 intead of bus1.  Pulled the drive and it still works perfectly... though I've got it backed up onto my main rig as well, just in-case.  Going to trade this drive out on warranty and pick up to more next chance I get.

--BillyM

[Brad]

Are you going to do RAID5 in hardware or software?

With single or mirrored 15k RPM SCSI drive in our servers, we don't consistently saturate a 100meg link.  
Once we get to a RAID 5 array, it's a different story.  More spindles = saturate the link.