Finally NAS

After some long searching I found the best solution to reactivate old HP’s Vectra e-pc (PIII 866MHz 256MB). As a standard one disk PC it is nothing special, but because of usage power supply as notebook it was perfect for home server. I changed fan. I was tryiing with astlinux on CF, but there is kind of bug that after long time system stucks.

I tried also 5GB hard drive with CF interface (is it Microdrive?) with Centos 5 and Asterisk for my VoIP. It died too.

It is better to separate home file server from home ip-pbx.

I visited freenas.org for curiosity and realised that there has been prepared FreeNAS distro for flash. Easy, friendly and works fine. It is perfect for small, quiet, home NAS. That e-pc can work only with 2 PATA drives and I use both one for 2.5″ 60GB drive and IDE-CF flash drive with FreeNAS.

If this configuration will be OK as home server I will try another useful ideas:

• system booted from USB – even version 1.1 will be enough
• another real hard disk – maybe 3.5″ 500MB or more – big question regarding generated noise
• print server – should be easy
• UPnP server for my Samsung DLNA compatible LCD TV

All that looks promising with read/write throughput between 48Mb/s and 64Mb/s on 100Mb/s LAN. In my opinion good enough for test before going to 1Gb LAN to transport HD movies.