I hope no one flames me for a few noob questions (and a bit of rant) but here goes.
After finally (more or less) settling on setting up a homebrewed NAS similar to the recent DIY unit written about here, I was hoping someone familar with this build could answer a few questions for me. Firstly, I should probably mention I'm probably not going to use "old dusty" for this build as the unit will be housing SOHO data. So that in itself will ratchet my budget up a notch.
Sooo, I noticed with the DIY unit described that on the TG NAS charts the file read and write performance at 1Gb/s tanked badly on files larger than 128mb files.
Any guesses on what that could be attributed to? Perhaps the PATA RAID card running on a legacy PCI? I ask so if a hardware RAID upgrade would resolve this, I can get past this little problem. Or perhaps it has something to do with not using jumbo frames. Whatever it is, my application will have some large files so i'd need to address this somehow.
Also, now that some time has passed since the DIY article was written I was wondering , how much field use has this build seen?
IE: Bill Meade in his recent Media vault mv2040 article spent a considerable portion of the article on the HP backup interface and its functionality (or partial lack of). How much hunting would be necessarry to give the Ubuntu OS a somewhat comparable interface (read user friendly interface). Conversely, how much hunting would be necessarry to give a Windows interface (win2ks or perhaps xp) a somewhat comparable interface, web access and all.
I've spent an inordinate amount of time just to get this far with the hardware. I'm not complaining mind you. But discovering that the Manu's out there are still peddling hardware fit for 2000 or 2001 at a $1200-$2k per box price point took some time. No one speaks much about how comparatively slow their latest and greatest hardware is. Even my trusted local nework contractor was more than willing to have me spend crazy money for him to buy and setup an Intel ss4000 NAS. What a disapointment that would have been.
It seems the Pro-sumer/SOHO NAS box hardware out today is still somwhat adolecent and it's probably gonna take a year or two more before what's being sold is really mature. Basic file sharing doesn't seem to be a problem, but the prospect of dealing with potential backup software problems today in exchange for the DIY's speedy file transfer rates isnt making me grin much.
Anyone who cares to share personal experiences and preferences with apps, be it windows based or Linux based please help a guy out...
My last question also relates to the functionality of the backup software being used. How thoroughly has the Ubuntu backup interface been tested and does it actually allow for friendly file restoring and easy data transfer to DVD or tape?
(Being green with Ubuntu one of my thoughts is I might be better using MS for the OS to save this business owner some time figureing out a new OS).
