Johnson Posted March 17, 2012 Share Posted March 17, 2012 I use a HP Proliant N40l with UnRaid works very well. Also serves my media to my iPad,phone,bedroom,front room and also to a friend in Worthing. Bit of a learning curve setting up UnRaid but the info is well documented on their website Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
adamnreeves Posted March 17, 2012 Share Posted March 17, 2012 Just for a play about 5 years ago I set up two Linux servers as a cluster with automatic fail over and each had RAID-1. Used to host my own webserver and email. Lots of fun was had with this. Then I decided that my electric bill was too high. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Blatman Posted March 18, 2012 Share Posted March 18, 2012 N40L for me too... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
adamnreeves Posted March 18, 2012 Share Posted March 18, 2012 N40L for me too... Those look good. Must admit when Proliant was mentioned I didn't bother reading further. I used to configure and install Proliant servers for clients back when they were Compaq and they were much bigger and very expensive circa 1996 ish. Clusters running RAID-1 and RAID-5 for Oracle Database with fail over. They were massive probably fit 10 in a 1U now, haha. That's Moore's law for you. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Blatman Posted March 18, 2012 Share Posted March 18, 2012 I like mine, although mine is actually an older N36L. Same box but not as much ram. And the £100 cashback has been running for months on these. I paid 99 quid for mine after the cashback came through. I stream all my movies and music from it and have no issues with speed on the bog standard 5400rpm Samsung 2Tb HDD's and just 1Gb of RAM, although I am going to add some more RAM! I put a bracket in the optical drive bay and mounted the supplied 160Gb HDD (N40's come with 250Gb) in there to run the server, leaving all 4 bays in front free for storage, which is currently 4 x 2TB Samsung Spinpoints. Dropping files across the network is fast enough too, but I do have all Gigabit interfaces on my internal LAN. And FWIW it's running Ubuntu Server 10.4 LTS with a Gnome front end to save me from having to learn more CLI commands! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dibby Posted March 19, 2012 Share Posted March 19, 2012 Mark, safest and most controlled way would be to buy two removable hard drives and keep one off site, back up on the other and swap them over regularly. My main PC that syncs important documents and photos with the home theatre PC/ server over a gigabit network but I don't like the idea that I could still lose both PCs in a house fire/ power surge. Don't mind losing music and films but some of those photos can't be replaced. box.com had an offer on a while ago with 50GB of free storage so I'm currently backing up 38GB of photos onto it. Don't think it syncs with a specific folder like Dropbox does but with that amount of free online storage I'm not complaining. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dhutch Posted March 19, 2012 Share Posted March 19, 2012 Parents had an early buffalo NAS drive which did about five years without issue till upgraded to the current model amount 6months ago, which was find until they had some bloke into install some solarpanels which resulted in the power being turned on/off a lot including short bursts which put said drive into engineering mode (apprently not uncommon if turned off while its booting up) and a week later dad still hasnt managed to sort it, so while he's been busy and its not a prioraty, its clearly not just a case of bashing the reset button. Sounds like the data is safe, but a case of getting it back! In the meantime, there glad of the backup system, which mirrors the content twice weekly onto a second drive main desktop, with a monthly off-site backup being taken on one of two external drives. Critical documents not to be emailed off site are manually saved locally in a temp directory between midweek backups Photos are also left on the camera, untill of the next offsite backup is taken (and, as its got a 16gig card, often longer) Again, some would say OTT, but as much of that is family photos, never say never. Daniel Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dibby Posted March 19, 2012 Share Posted March 19, 2012 Again, some would say OTT, but as much of that is family photos, never say never. Too right. My best mate was shot and died in Afghanistan almost 2 years ago. All of a sudden all those drunken happy snaps from BBQs and nights out that you never really pay that much attention to become your most tresured memories. All the mates have spread the photos far and wide so if we lose a hard drive there are plenty of people with backups. There's nothing like an off-site backup. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CedricTheBrave Posted March 19, 2012 Share Posted March 19, 2012 If you do go for cloud make sure it is a big infrastructure vendor ! For example google infrastructure is awesome they are just huge and your data will be pretty safe. Some cloud suppliers are classed as tier one which means they do not have any backup themselves! Or disaster recovery ! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tex Posted March 20, 2012 Share Posted March 20, 2012 you can access NAS from outside anyway - just get to the net anywhere - you share the files in a folder - then go to website with passwords etc - easy as - i have it - works great Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
adamnreeves Posted March 20, 2012 Share Posted March 20, 2012 you can access NAS from outside anyway - just get to the net anywhere - you share the files in a folder - then go to website with passwords etc - easy as - i have it - works great hope that is more secure than it sounds. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
langy Posted March 21, 2012 Share Posted March 21, 2012 Have been reading this thread and it all seems a bit beyond my knowledge of computer wizardry, but I think it's about backing up of data. I have been looking at a way of backing up my photos and the like, just in case. I have a Macbook Pro and Apple sell there Time Capsule which I've been looking at. Any idea of the pro's / con's of this over a NAS or cloud option ? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dibby Posted March 21, 2012 Share Posted March 21, 2012 The pros and cons are all up there in previous posts. Apple are very good at selling people stuff. There are plenty of free cloud services out there - what does the Apple version do the others don't? I take it they are selling extra capacity - how many gigabytes of data storage do you need consdiering you can get 50GB free? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
langy Posted March 21, 2012 Share Posted March 21, 2012 The pros and cons are all up there in previous posts. Apple are very good at selling people stuff. There are plenty of free cloud services out there - what does the Apple version do the others don't? I take it they are selling extra capacity - how many gigabytes of data storage do you need consdiering you can get 50GB free? 50 GB of free data would do me for a lifetime. Will go back and re-read the thread. Don't know what the Apple thing does over AN Other, except put another £100 on the price Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mark Redpath - WSCC Membership Secretary Posted March 21, 2012 Author Share Posted March 21, 2012 Taken the plunge and have gone down the "cloud" route, Currys 1tb for £150 all in for five years. some of the suggestions are pretty good but a few are way off what the average guy will have a clue about, but will defo be using a separate hard drive as well as cloud for the really important stuff..... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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