Last Updated on July 11, 2017 by Dave Farquhar
I put together a plan to update my home computer setup over the course of the next 12-18 months. You don’t want to know what I’m using as my primary desktop right now. You just don’t.
One of the things on my to-do list is centralized storage. As the kids get older, I’m pretty sure I’m going to need that. I looked at a Drobo, but the price tag scares me off. So I’m weighing some alternatives.
FreeNAS with ZFS
Some people claim you can build a better Drobo for less by using FreeNAS with ZFS. It certainly is cheaper, even though you need roughly 1 GB of RAM per TB of shared storage. But any AMD64-capable motherboard bundle you can get inexpensively will do the job, and 4GB DDR3 modules cost $30 each, so you’re looking at less than $200 worth of hardware if you can recycle a case. If you have to buy everything, you’re still looking at less than $300. That compares favorably–if half the price is your idea of favorable–to a bare network-attached Drobo, at $600.
Drives of course start at $50-$60 each for 1 TB units and go up from there, depending on your storage needs.
FreeNAS with less
And if you don’t need ZFS, FreeNAS can get by on a lot less hardware–anything that can take a half gig of RAM and can boot off USB. If it lacks SATA, use a converter, or add a SATA card. The difficulty with older hardware is that if you have to buy a SATA card and a gigabit NIC, you’re more than halfway toward a new motherboard with both built-in.
Hitch a ride with a desktop PC
This option should save me space and power. There’s a computer in the basement. Lately it hasn’t been getting a lot of use, though at times it does. Since I don’t have any SATA-capable hardware collecting dust, I have to buy hardware no matter what. So I think I’d rather try to let the hardware do double duty,drop a new motherboard/CPU and memory into the basement PC, and use the onboard RAID to build an array of drives and share them out. The other computers can all be equipped with inexpensive small and fast SSDs and rely on that PC for storage over gigabit ethernet. I can shut it down when I don’t need it–shutdown -m \\downstairs will do the trick from a command line, if I end up running Windows on that PC–and I can power it up from anywhere in the house with wake-on-LAN via something like Magic Packet Sender.
I could do something fancier, but with four people in the house, I think it’s overkill. Some people run full-blown Windows domains in their homes, with file and even Exchange servers, and if you need experience running a network, that’s justifiable even if only two people are on it. Experience is everything for a budding sysadmin. But I do enough of that at work, and I’d rather mess with other things at home.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He started his career as a part-time computer technician in 1994, worked his way up to system administrator by 1997, and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He invests in real estate on the side and his hobbies include O gauge trains, baseball cards, and retro computers and video games. A University of Missouri graduate, he holds CISSP and Security+ certifications. He lives in St. Louis with his family.
I guess my solution was closest to the last one you mentioned. I have a server upstairs that does double/triple/quadruple duty. It does a lot of things most people need, so just pretend it’s just a server. I added a SATA card with 4 additional ports. I already had a spare tower, so I slapped four 1TB drives inside it. (There’s no mobo or anything in there; just drives.) Then I bought 4 3′ SATA cables, which run out of my server and into the other slave tower.
When you start putting that much data in one space, you’ve GOT to do backups. I run RAID5, which protects against single hard drive failure, but not the deletion of files. My main protection against that is, I only give my wife and kids read-only access to my mp3s, movies, and digital pictures. It may sound harsh, but that keeps them from accidentally deleting anything. I then have nightly backup jobs to back up my essentials (home directory, digital pictures, and mp3s) to a spare 2TB drive. I’ve tried several fancy backup programs, but ultimately I found a batch file calling robocopy does the trick pretty well (/MIR for the win).
I just added a StarTech RAID enclosure that supports 4 drives (up to 2TB each), hardware RAID (0/1/3/5/10), and USB/eSATA/Firewire. The box without drives was $249 — high if you already have a spare PC lying around, but not bad for a complete, self-contained drive storage solution.
“robocopy” from “robohara”?
Couldn’t help but notice the similarity. I understand the words are from different origins, but it still makes me smile.