OT: recommendations for networked drive?

[The Natural Philosopher]

Should be OK. Keep it dry. thats all. And try to keep it above zero. Most consumer s**te isn't ever tested to sub zero much,so it might go starry eyed on you.

I would recommend you try and at least go or 100Mbps tho: the homeplug stuff is a bits slow.

I definitely noticed a speed increase in the linux server here putting in a 100Mbps hub, and the one I built for a customer with a SATA drive in it is blindingly quick over 100Mbps.

I know the idea of a box with a mains plug, and an ethernet plug appeals. But beware. For every thing the box does for you, there is something it won't let you do.

DIY using BSD or Linux, means a fairly sharp learning curve, but the fact remains that you will always have access to its guts, and if anything STARTS to go wrong, you can get a bit of warning and strip the disk's data into a new one easily.

It takes me less than an afternoon to install and get such a box running..easy enough to talk you through it here if you wanted.

[Andy Hall]

Definitely.

However, it will probably accumulate dust and other grot, so will need to be cleaned

[Mike Barnes]

I made that assumption and it seems to be working out, despite it being a damp concrete garage. The equipment is housed in a hi-tech enclosure called a "cardboard box", so as not to attract attention if the garage were to get broken into.

[Dave Liquorice]

Depends on what you define as a "PC", some 4GHz P4 thing will be swallowing power at an alarming rate. For this file server box I'd look at a mini ITX motherboard with power consumption of 20 to 50W total.

[Andrew May]

The PC is running XP Pro but I notice this behaviour even when the PC is turned off.

Andrew

[Huge]

Better still, use FreeNAS

[Huge]

I have at least one drive (a 36Gb IBM of some kind) that moves the heads every

10 minutes all by itself - the noise drove me bonkers until I discovered what it was. So this kind of behaviour is not unknown.

[Huge]

Why not just run software RAID?

[The Natural Philosopher]

Because it has issues. I like to keep things simple.

[Rod]

If it is like mine it is way heavier than that. It is more like when a PC is doing an AV scan or indexing all its files.

(Many years ago, ICL mainframe discs used to crash of the heads were not moved for extended periods. When they did move, they hit a ridge of dust that had built up either side of the heads. Think Saturn's rings.)

[John Stumbles]

I'm not an expert on SMB/CIFS but it's intrinsically a lot more secure than standard NFS whose security model was described to me by our resident Unix guru as the server asking the client what access privileges it would like. I think NFSv4 may have tightened this up.

Anyway if either is behind a NAT box acting as a firewall it should be immune from attack from th'interweb, although when your windozy box inside your firewall gets pwned the server is probably dead meat too.

From this POV diying a server on a box running a secure OS is probably next best to actually running a secure OS on your desktops.

[Huge]

Blimey. Can't help you, then.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Many drives will autocalibrate periodically. If a unit is *nix based, it will also be flushing its caches periodically and writing the odd log file entry.

The days when disk activity only happened as a result of user input have LONG gone.

[Andy Hall]

The appliance is doing its own disk checking and periodic housekeeping. Keep in mind that it is probably running some kind of cut down Linux operating system environment.

[Andy Hall]

Don't worry. If it's a DDYS series, you won't have it for very much longer.

[Andy Hall]

Yes, even Windows does this. Whether it's for any useful reason is something else.

[Andy Hall]

Yes, it seems ideal.

Might make one myself except that I know I'd be tempted to want to modify it.....

[Andrew May]

Andy Hall wrote: > The appliance is doing its own disk checking and periodic housekeeping.

That I could understand but this is as Rod describes - more like a scan disk or virus check.

Andrew

[Rod]

I wondered about defrag or checkdsk types of activity. Seems to be worst when the drive has been off for a while. For the last few hours it has been almost quiescent - I have not noticed anything at all happening though it is running fine.

[Andy Hall]

Therein lies the mystery of an appliance.

You don't get to know what's happening inside, for certain