[Samba] About NAS versus Samba

[Gaiseric Vandal]

If you use raid you should either use a true hardware raid (e.g from LSI 
or Adaptec)  or true software raid.  The firmware raid (aka fake raid) 
included on some motherboards is just asking for trouble.    For the 
price of the true hardware raid card you might as well stick with 
software raid.

Hot swap bays for SATA disks that you can use with a tower PC fairly cheap.

http://www.supermicro.com/products/accessories/mobilerack/CSE-M35T-1.cfm


Don't cheap out of the disks though.    Get 7200 RPM  server or raid disks.

I set up something Solaris which gave me the benefits of ZFS.  If you 
don't need the zfs functionality I would stick with a linux distro that 
are comfortable with.

Supermicro (and other) also was a range for whitebox tower and servers 
that are cheaper than buying from Dell or HP.    Of course there is no 
customer support or extended warranty.




On 07/11/13 12:59, Scott Lovenberg wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 11, 2013 at 12:55 PM, Fernando Lozano
> <fernando at lozano.eti.br> wrote:
>
>> But you know, everyone buys NASes today, it's getting harder to explaing a
>> common PC would be better. Here a server box with a RAID controller and a
>> hot-swappable disk bays is way more expensive than an iomega NAS in a rack
>> form factory.
>>
> I've found the performance of those "cheap" NAS boxes (even the cheap
> ones are relatively expensive) to be sub-par.  Most of them max out at
> a few MB/second.  A reasonable set of hardware in a 2U with hot-swap
> drives will absolutely smoke a cheap NAS and the price/performance
> ratio is much better.  Plus, you can use ZFS/BTRFS/etc as your backing
> store if you'd like on your own dedicated box.
>
> --
> Peace and Blessings,
> -Scott.