Running out of HD space (again)

[Harrison]

Time to revive an old classic! Who remembers the original "Running out of HD space" thread I started on the old forum? Followed by the original revival and continuation of it on this forum a couple of years ago here. That was only the 204'th topic on this board too! And it was the largest combined thread on the forum at the time by some margin.

So here we go again...

And yes, I've run out of HD space again!

My main system with 2.5TB is almost full, my two NAS' are full, my download server is full, by emulation system is nearly full, and the other PC's drives are nearly full too! Ahhh!

Time to buy some more and upgrade some of the existing HDs to larger ones.

Dilemma now is what to buy and what to upgrade. The Linkstation can't easily be upgraded, so that will either mean buying a bigger NAS (I would get a more modular one if I did buy another one so drives could be added/upgraded/replaced), or I could try to replace the existing drive in the Linkstation with a 1TB drive.

I think added an extra 1TB drive to the download server should fix the issue there, and a 1TB drive in the emulation system. So... all in all that might be 3 1TB drives. Or if 500GB drives still work out cheaper I might opt for those instead.

And as the description says. It's never worth building up a huge upload credit on private trackers if you keep running out of HD space and can't utilise it to download anything.

[Stephen Coates]

I will be honest.

I also am running out of space and soon will need new HDs.

[Demon Cleaner]

I'm quite fine with my spare space, but I only update my main sets, and as they don't grow a lot, but even get smaller sometimes (like the latest ScummVM set), I still have some space left, ok, not for another 50GB set, but so far I'm fine.

And the whole thing is mirrored 2 times (data on 3 disks = the same). So I also have some backups, because losing a disk with a lot of sets is VERY annoying.

Do you use your NAS for torrents too? And if so, how fast is it when copying thousands of files? Is the Linkstation 1x1TB or 2x500GB?

I'm still unsure about the whole NAS stuff, as my Terastation was a total failure, at least for small files, and also Zyriax sent his Drobo back because it was too slow, the speeds they mentioned were absolutely overstated.

I guess NAS & torrents = No Love

[Buleste]

At the moment I'm backing up some of my older stuff onto DVD and then deleting it to free up some space. Now rather than a full HDD I have a full bedroom of DVD's.

[svebbe]

Mmm.. Can relate to this issue to , also I hate having to have files/media all over so If I need a specific file I need to start one PC or find a harddrive I put somewere.

On my "to do" list is a buying and building of my new Server VMware station, on it I want a secure Linux router system, a windows mce system and a FreeNAS system.
This to be able to get all my media on one computer but still beeing able to access everything from everywere in the world with all my clientstations such as my cellphone, xbox, xbox360 psp wii ds and so on..

Probably need a extra linux system in the computer to be able to get some VPN solution thingi.

And for the moment Im looking on a 2 quad core xeon processors, 8gig ram, and about 4TB in storage capacity. With this I could set up my complete network sulotion with VMware. Just need to find a bag of cash

[Harrison]

Hi svebbe and welcome to classicamiga

I've played around with FreeNAS a bit and it is great. And if I decided to build a new NAS then I will definitely be looking into using it instead of a prebuilt NAS solution. The system spec you have in mind sounds great, and using VMware you could easily use virtulisation to run a few different virtual servers on a system like that without really seeing much performance hit.

I've been thinking more at the other end of the scale, to build a server/NAS that is near silent by utilising one of the mini-itx Intex Atom 330 dual core based moterboards. These are near silent and have SATA so a group of SATA HDs can easily be run from it in standalone or RAID configuration. And being a server the built in graphics and audio is fine for that purpose, and the maximum of 2GB ram should be OK for the needs of the server. I also want to make it headless with remote access, so I can just log into it from any other machine on the network to reboot or manage it, and FreeNAS would be good for that.

[Harrison]

Is the Linkstation 1x1TB or 2x500GB?

My current Linkstation is a single drive 500GB one. I know that there are people who have hacked the firmware to give the Buffalo NAS drives more features, and allow for larger HDs so I'm going to investigate this as it would be cool to just be able to upgrade the existing system rather than buy an over priced additional one. I mainly use it for my music collection as it can just sit in the corner on all the time without making too much noise and stream music to any device or system I wish. And the collection is getting quite large, with the MP3 collection currently taking up about 420GB of the current HD. (I can't resist downloading complete discographies for all the groups I like ).

Do you use your NAS for torrents too? And if so, how fast is it when copying thousands of files?... I'm still unsure about the whole NAS stuff, as my Terastation was a total failure, at least for small files, and also Zyriax sent his Drobo back because it was too slow, the speeds they mentioned were absolutely overstated.

I guess NAS & torrents = No Love

I did when I first got it as it seemed like quite a cool idea, but it was a bit slow to copy the downloaded files off from the NAS to free up room for the next torrents. A NAS isn't really ideal for storing files that need to be copies and moved around a lot. It's better to use for files you want to have available from any location on your network. such as music or videos. However rom collections on a NAS is a great idea for accessing them to play from any system. However I use my emulation system for this and just boot that up when needed, and have all my rom collections shared on there.

There are also a couple of new NAS systems that have both gigabit network and local USB2 posts, and you can directly connect them to a PC to upload or download files quickly. Could be a good solution for file copying.

[svebbe]

Hi svebbe and welcome to classicamiga

Thx and Hi

My server for this would be located in a closet or a seperet room with a neat 19" rack configuration.
First thing to break in a computer if it goes warm for a long period of time is the harddrives, so personaly I can have it make some noise as long as I know that the noise is to keep it cold. The silencer in my case is to put it far away from where I'll be hanging around

Whats my point again, well yea, if you want to make it silent, don't cheap out on the cooling system. Becouse as you are probably well aware of harddrives generate a great deal of heat, this have to be dealt with even if you have a mini-itx Intex Atom 330 as a system board.

And yea FreeNAS is awesome, and VMware to for that matter VMware have greatly reduced my electric bill.

[Harrison]

I would still mount the system in a case that has a 120mm fan at both the front and rear of the case, so the air flow though the case would be more than enough to cool it. And with just an Atom CPU the heat shouldn't be anything like even a standard PC these days. It should mean the 120mm fans can be slowed down too.

[svebbe]

Yea you are right. Good flow thro the computer helps alot, clever casing and two 120mm fans should do the trick.