Central Disk storage

Posted by: Stuart M on 21 March 2006

In a refurb the house is now wired with cat6 and coax with at least 2 cat6 ports and 1 coax in each room.

Central patch panel http://www.cyberselect.co.uk/product/312 with a 1GB switch going off to the router.

Decided it would be best to have 1 big PC, several small silent PC's via 1GB Ethernet to access central storage that I could sit next to the patch panel.

Ideally looking for a 'home' expandable Raid storage unit with 1GB ethernet with say 1TB of storage to start. Anyone out there done this or have any recomendations ?

S

Posted on: 21 March 2006 by Guido Fawkes

I've used various Network Attached Storage solutions at work - the most reasonable one I've used is the Xserve RAID. The Apple server supports OSX, Unix, Linux, Netware and Windoze - though I've only used it with OSX and Unix (Solaris).

Dell do cheaper NAS devices, but I found the Apple solution preferable. However, if you use Windoze then you may find the Dell kit does the trick.

Of course you could just use a Linux based file server and if you run Linux on your PCs you can use NFS and simply mount the remote drives on the client PCs. I don't know if Windoze supports the Network File System. I guess you can do the same with a Windoze server and whatever Microsoft uses (LAN Manager?), but I've never tried it.