I’d a very complicated problem related to storing data, I have a bad story also about losing my work files. So I decided to unify my storage into a single (24/7) online storage server - but low cost -.

I had some old hardware in my closet and I decided to use them as effecient as possible, so I started with a Manli Motherboard and a P3 Processor (1.2 GHz) with 1 20GB Harddisk and 2 160GB SATA Harddisks.

I had a problem regarding the SATA harddisks as I don’t have SATA controller in my Motherboard, so I searched in the hardware market and I found a PCI SATA Controller based on VIA VT6421 chipset which was perfectly compatible with Linux 2.6 kernel. At then I started assembling things together and I bought a good ventilated chassis to make things comfortable for the hardware inside.

I have used the IDE 20GB Disk as the system harddisk and installed Fedora core 6 i386 on it and then I had a large free space remaining on the disk. I used this disk to mirror the fedora updates repos and I wrote a small script to rsync the fedora updates mirror every 2 days on 3:30AM automatically using Vixie Cron.

#!/bin/bash
if rsync -avrt rsync://distro.ibiblio.org/fedora-linux-core/updates/6/i386/ \
–exclude=debug/ –exclude=repodata/ –exclude=*debuginfo* –exclude=*i18* \
–exclude=*langpack* /fedora-6/updates/
then
createrepo /fedora-6/updates/
fi

The remaining 2 160GB SATA Disks were connected and configured as RAID 1 (Mirror) to get a high redundancy and availability possible having a total storage area of 160GB. I think I’ll buy another 160GB disk and I’ll switch into RAID 5 to get 320GB of total storage.

The machine is headless and I’m using VNC to control everything, It’s used also as a DNS caching and forwarding server to my computers and download machine

The last thing is to see how to access my files in an effecient and a speedy way, I used a NFS server optimized to get the best performance on LAN, I can get transfer rates up to 9Mbytes/Sec and Samba server with authentication to have access from windows machines.

The performance is really nice although the machine is pretty old and has only 256MB of memory but Linux is working great with outstanding performance and excellent stability. I’ve achieved disk reads of 53.5 Mbyte/Sec with buffered reading on the RAID 1 array.
Soon I’ll buy a real IP address to bind with this machine to have it accessible through the internet for remote files access. I’ll show you some of pictures about it