My old fileserver is on its way out, and has been for a while. It's the same box we used to play Tribes2 on back at S4R (when we had it down at the Verio datacenter, stuffed sideways into an empty cabinet in the corner by itself so that nobody would see the little beige mid-tower case poking out). It's had a long happy life with its Red Hat 6.2 install and served us well. That 80GB of RAID1 storage has lasted about 5 years; we hit 98% full just last week as I was copying music over to it. But its time has come. Goodbye, tiny Athlon 600.

One of the fans in it somewhere has been getting progressively louder, and if you try to transfer too much over the network, it locks up. Actually, I think that it locks up every couple days, and just happens to when I'm trying to back stuff up off my PC. Clearly it has hardware issues beyond pure age and something new is needed. Disk corruption kinda goes against the entire grain of storing files redundantly, you know?

For a long time now, I've been meaning to go pick up a 3Ware RAID card and a brace of hard disks and build a new box. Even downloaded a copy of CentOS for the OS. So when Tracy and I were at Fry's last night buying a fridge for our new house, I figured I'd saunter on over to the computer hardware aisle and see what they had in the way of RAID stuff. And I sure do love the smell of new electronics.

I find a decent card, and the cart has a stack of 4 cheapo hard drives in it, I'm totalling up how much it's all going to be, what I'll have to tell Tracy, and a sale sign catches my eye. They had a deal on a self-contained NAS box, that day only. I'd never heard of the the company, Buffalo, nor the product, the TeraStation. I'd seen consumer-grade NAS appliances before, and had always dismissed them. They were either very expensive (three or fours times more for what I could build on my own using whitebox PC parts), or lacking in features (what the hell good is a network storage device that doesn't offer any sort of failure protection?! One disk? Or two in non-redundant RAID0 Mode? Useless!). But the TeraStation actually looked kinda cool.

So I start totalling up what I got: $1,050 and change in materials, one long weekend fussing with screwdrivers and setting up filesystems and accounts (and a machine I have to minimally admin). The TeraStation is on sale for $640, and has $125 in rebates. Hmmm, compelling. Then I look at the TeraStation's box in detail to see what features it's got. Users and groups permissions on a per-share level, 4 USB 2.0 ports, super quiet operation, gigabit ethernet, XFS filesystem ("So it runs Linux... I wonder if I can get ssh and NFS support on there..."), UPS support for automatic shutdowns, web-based management, backup software for PCs, and hardware RAID 1, 10, 5 or JBOD with 4 160GB disks.

Let's see here... that's half a terabyte in RAID5 mode. In an appliance-style box (with das blinkenlights!). That I don't have to fuck with all the time. Comes with a print server, too? Sold. All that other shit goes back on the shelf...

I would have liked to have gotten the next model up, but it wasn't on sale, and they weren't in stock anyway. It would have been $400 more, and would have netted me another 400GB; it's a buck a gigabyte either way. Turns out that if you get another terastation, you can sync the two up. And seeing as how it took 5 years to fill 80GB, I'll get at least 3 years out of six times that amount of space. Who knows, maybe in 3 years I'll get the screwdriver out and stuff four 1TB disks in the thing.

Anyway, setting it up was a breeze, and I've got some stuff moving on over to it right now. I just wish I hadn't packed away all of my networking stuff. All I have here in the temp apartment is the crappy hub I used for the Tivo back at the old house. It takes a while to move 75 gigabytes of data at 10 megabits per second. About 16 hours, in fact. I think it's time to get with the 21st century and move on up to gigabit ethernet.

The only thing that it's missing is disk quotas and logging. I'd like to be able to say "this is the junk share, anyone can write to it, but it's only 100MB in size". You can't do that. But since it's only me and Tracy on the thing, I don't care too much about that. Having some sort of remote logging, so that you could see what went wrong and when or get stats on disk usage, would have been nice. That's not really a show stopper either.

It was a good buy, I think. Expensive, but worth it. And seeing as how we opted not to get the fridge with the TV built into it, it was virtually free!

UPDATE: I should have moved to gigabit ethernet a long, long time ago. Wow.