:smack: Gigabit/gigabyte … gigabit/gigabyte … gigabit/gigabyte …
Obnoxious thing is, there’s even an active thread about the difference right now!
An NAS box was step one — that’s the NAS200. But long story aside, I love it and would recommend it. But it’s not terribly fast, and after a slight hiccup with it (Linksys has great support—they RMAd it right away) I got a bit leery of not having access to the whole OS. Plus, in trying to figure out how to put one of the drives in an external enclosure, I had to look at Linux, had to look a little closer…little closer…closer.
I know there will be some tradeoffs for going out on my own, but I think in the long run it will be worth it. Heck, just the massive drop in Web/MySQL testing time will be worth it.
Oh, the wireless access point is only for reaching far areas of the house and working in the garden. Speed isn’t as essential there, since, well, we’ll be in the garden. But day-to-day working on gigabit will be good.
The Atom looks good, but if I can get an Asus P5KPL-CM for $65 and a Celeron 430 Conroe for $40 (and assuming their Linux-friendly), and a GB of RAM for about $30, I’ll be in the same ballpark price-wise but I’ll have a few more slot options.
It sounds like there is no clear answer to the RAID question—on a gigabit network with just two machines and relatively small files, will there be a noticeable (and significant) difference in speed. I’ll probably answer that myself in a short while: I’ve built and configured then reformatted the test box four or five times now to practice familiarity with the OS; I’ll likely do the same with the “real” box (need to be in a certain comfort zone before putting the business on it). Given that, I can build it with RAID, run a bunch of timing tests, rebuild it with rsync, do the same, and compare the two. Mrs. Dvl will also be a good for this, since at the time she won’t know the configuration—that’ll really help with the noticeable bit.