So … when aruBro passed, he left me some 2500 or so CDs and I already have a bunch of my own ripped music files, some video files and a whopping number of ebooks, so I want to build the household a file server so that we can just store our media on a file server and access it from any of our computing devices.
Back in the day, some 8 or so years ago I can remember seeing a tower case that took up to 12 hard drives and used a standard motherboard and suchlike. Can someone make some suggestions or point me to someone that can build me something and maybe an online tutorial on running a file server for the household? And for a reasonable cost, of course =)
Also, would it be possible to have a private version of a yahoo group - there is a set of the yahoo groups that I am a member of that would love to find a place to host our files for access to members - could it be run on this file server?
Last time I did something like that, I installed freenas and it (the software) was free. So was the recycled Frankenstein hardware, except for new high-capacity hard disks.
By the way, do you really need 12 drives rather than 4 or 6 or 8? For 2500 CDs you may not absolutely need 12, and may be able to get away with cheaper/lower electricity/easier to find hardware.
Storage used to be expensive. Now, its cheap as hell. I carry around in my pocket a 16 gig thumbdrive. I bought it 10 years ago for about 90 dollars. Nowadays, you can get it for three.
Get a 5 TB hard drive, hire a neighbor kid for $10/hour to come over and burn all your CD’s to the hard drive, and be done with it.
You could buy a desktop like that directly from Dell, from their website.
With lossless compression a CD is roughly 300Mb. So 2500 = 750Gb. It is getting hard to buy hard disks that small. Even using a SSD is perfectly reasonable. A 1TB SSD is pretty much a commodity item.
You could build a standalone music server using a tool like Volumio with a single board computer (such as a Rasberry Pi, Vim or the like) add a 1TB SSD, and you would have your entire collection on a server that will fit in a jacket pocket, and for a few hundred a most. Video is the killer. If you want to store video you are suddenly talking much more storage.
But the bottom line is that storage is cheap. An all of house server with immense storage is pretty easy. Depends upon your computer skills a bit. Personally I would be building a small Linux box, and if I wanted to use a heap of old free disks, use ZFS to build the file system. The downside with using a pile of old disks versus a new big one is question marks over lifetime. I have been bitten by disk failures enough times to be uneasy about such things. Using ZFS can provide a lot of resilience. But SSDs are so cos competitive that if you are thinking about buying new I would go that route. Silent, low power, tiny.
The worst thing about 2500 CDs is the sheer effort needed to rip them.
As an alternative to building a file server, you might look at NAS (network attached storage) options. I have a Synology DS416 that’s a couple of years old now, it has 4 3TB drives configured as a RAID 5 array. I use it for backup, but the unit has a built-in file server capability that is easy to configure, allowing you to define shares and user accounts to control who gets access to what. A
You might want to consider buying an network attached storage (NAS) device for this purpose. I have been using a Synology DS614 loaded with 4 3 terabyte drives configured as a RAID 5 array for a couple of years now as a back-up device. This configuration gives me 9 terabytes of storage. The unit comes with a file server built-in, allowing you to create shares and user accounts to control who gets access to what. The total cost (Canadian dollars, 2 years back) was about $1100. The unit has two gigabyte speed ethernet ports to share the load if multiple users are accessing the data.
Back on the software side, the aforementioned freenas has many, many plugins that you can just click on to install, so if you wanted to share your files via something just like Dropbox, you select that one, etc. Not sure how Yahoo does it, but I’m sure one or more of the plug-ins will do what you want.
Your ISPs Terms Of Service likely prohibits sharing files through their service.
For example, Comcast TOS:
"TECHNICAL RESTRICTIONS
use or run dedicated, stand-alone equipment or servers from the Premises that provide network content or any other services to anyone outside of your Premises local area network (“Premises LAN”), also commonly referred to as public services or servers. Examples of prohibited equipment and servers include, but are not limited to, email, web hosting, file sharing, and proxy services and servers;"
And of course, music, videos and anything with a copyright that isn’t your group’s is a no-go.
Anyway, I did not get the impression the OP wanted to run a public service (like commercial Dropbox or The Pirate Bay), rather that, e.g., she wanted to share a cat picture to readers of this thread, but it would be hosted on an instance of ownCloud on her private server instead of on Dropbox. Definitely not the same as a file storage dump open to the general public, for which the ISP will want you to pay business rates.
I guess I wasn’t clear in my post that I was referencing this:
“Also, would it be possible to have a private version of a yahoo group - there is a set of the yahoo groups that I am a member of that would love to find a place to host our files for access to members - could it be run on this file server?”
In which case a file sharing site like Mega or Dropbox would be appropriate or maybe a private FTP (do people still use FTP?) hosted on a server.
Edit: Or a private torrent, which would ease individual server requirements.
What you seek for your music is called a NAS - Network Attached Storage. Synology are a decent brand if you want an off the shelf solution. You want pairs of drives inside the NAS configured in RAID 10 for resilience and a backup drive.
An alternative is to get something like the HP Microserver - the Gen 8, not the Gen 10 - and install Windows Server Essentials on it.
Note that a basic media server doesn’t have to be very powerful.* And for music it can get pretty basic.
E.g., go down to a local 2nd hand computer shop and buy a $50-$75 computer (make sure it has ~Windows 7+ installed on it). Add a modest HD (SSD is a complete waste of money here), etc. You can even just borrow keyboard, mouse and monitor off your current computer and set it up. Once it’s up and on the network, it won’t need those.
Windows SMB shares are near-universally supported.
Note that DIY NAS is cheap and requires a bit of knowledge about all this but it won’t be any better (and could possibly worse) than what is given above. Buying an out-of-the-box NAS costs real money and is often overkill for residential use, even accounting for other features like backups and such. In this case you will be paying for power you don’t need.
Yeah, you could host files on such a server. But note that ISPs generally blocks all the standard HTTP, FTP, etc. ports since they don’t want you doing this. So you’d have to use nonstandard ports which a lot of people don’t understand how to use.
But you do not want to do this. All sorts of Very Bad Things can happen so I strongly suggest you just drop it. (Esp. if you aren’t fully aware of what the VBTs are.)
If you’re encoding videos on-the-fly to match the capabilities of a player, then that’s going to require a Real Computer.
Or go for lossy compression - even at 256 kbps, 2500 CDs will take up less than 400GB. That’s one SD card these days.
Also consider, if you are looking into a NAS and redundant hard drives + backup, it can easily add up to >$500 of equipment. $500 will buy you 2 TB of cloud storage for about 5 years. If we are talking about a couple terabytes of data, and if you have the bandwidth, and if you value your time (time spent setting up and maintaining the NAS, backing it up, etc), cloud storage can be a more economical solution.
What do you mean by that? I’m sure data centers that house cloud storage have redundant storage.
Also, most cloud storage sites work by synchronizing with a specified folder on your computer. So that’s an additional “backup” that you can access even when the network is down.
Even using a SSD is perfectly reasonable. A 1TB SSD is pretty much a commodity item.