home server question

[mikenothing]

hi everyone,

sorry if this is in the wrong section, i wasnt sure, admin please move if it isnt.

ok, so i want to change my home storage setup. i was thinking about a NAS, perhaps a qnap or something, i was attracted to the php and website stuff which i want to learn amongst other things. but as i began to learn more, i began to be put off.

i am thinking that these nas devices arent upgradable like a normal pc, or as futureproof, so i am leaning towards building a home server pc.

2.5 drives are kicking off these days and im not convinced that the 3.5 drive will stay ..... so im worried about spening tons on a qnap, to find newer drives wont fit. i dont want to buy a 2.5 nas, because its just not cost effective atm. not to mention potential future hardware and software issues that might be thrown up by closed box NAS.

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so anyways, im thinking of building a small, quiet pc to run my home server, i want these tasks :

host my website
host my media
stream music and vids on local
provide access to music and vids over the internet
provide remote desktop to home pcs over internet
backup my website and media in raid 5

is all this stuff possible ? ^^ and is it possible on a home server?

also, i want to run it on linux so i can learn how to create linux servers etc.

what do you guys think of this idea ? and can you point me to any help articles? i cant seem to find much ....

 

[benogil]

You can try here, hard forum under data storage, wegotserved. All great places. A caveat, you might want to look at the demigrator problem. It can be eliminated with the right hardware. Do your homework.

 

[HappyBison]

Just my 2 (I'll try to squeeze 3) cents:

2.5" drives are nice, but usually not as reliable and fast as 3.5" drives (unless you buy some special 2.5" server SAS drives which will not fit into 2.5" NAS home storage anyway).
3.5" drives also has more capacity (as of today 3.5" max is 2TB, while 2.5" max is 750GB (or 500GB if you need a decent speed), unless I missed something).

You need a storage now, right? Get one for 3.5" drives. When 2.5" will be wide-spread, fast and with good capacity (let's say 3-4-5 years or more), then you can get a better NAS storage.
On another hand, 2.5" may be always behind. Who knows..

 

[thiggins]

It's not necessarily true that 2.5" drives will be slower than 3.5" in NAS applications. See
Is A 2.5" NAS For You?

 

[HappyBison]

thiggins,
You are right, but it's kind of hard to compare those different devices designed for different purposes. So there is no definite answer like "yes" or "no" here.
So it all depends on what you need it for. I'm getting about 100MB/sec read on my Seagate 2.5" 7200rpm drive (non-RAID).

On another hand, when you use your drives on a network, your network server (samba, ftp, etc) could be a bottle neck after all.