Upon request, here is some more information on how my file server is coming along. Last week I ordered a a Seagate 1TB HDD (of the latest revision, released a short time ago). It would have been preferable to buy all eight at once, but I lacked the money to buy them all at once, and I need the file server to be up and running.
The choice of brand of hard drives was difficult. Because of differences in platter density (and thus overall size), you can’t mix and match brands. Being the stupidly pedantic person I am, it’s not something I would have done anyway. I first considered Seagate, but the adventures (read: complete data loss) that a few other people at work have had with Seagate 1TB hard drives somewhat put me off. Western Digital was also an option, mostly because they have lower power requirements. This means two things: lower heat (and thus less noise), and a lower overall power requirement. For a server that is going to be on most (if not all) of the time, both these factors are quite important to consider. In the end though, I went with Seagate. I’ve never had any problems with them in my past, and I am hoping that they have fixed their problems with faulty control boards.
Only having one hard drives to begin with means I can’t begin with a RAID 5 array. I currently have my controller set to use my single drive as a JBOD disk. This obviously isn’t optimal, as my RAID controller will have to do an online upgrade of the RAID array. Apparently, this is in the feature set, so I thought I’d take advantage of it. I’ll let you know how it goes. I paid enough for it (Highpoint RocketRaid 2320 for ~$360AUD) that I trust it.
At this stage, it was time to configure my (non-) RAID array, FTP, and Samba. Configuring FTP was fine, the RAID array was tolerable (involved recompiling kernel with a few patches, etc), but Samba was a complete pain in the rear end. In the end, then, I went with Windows Vista Business. I was erring on buying a copy before to use on the server, and problems with Samba and so on just drove me over the edge.
This also allowed me to go back to my original RAID setup. After switching the cables over, I created a RAID 0 (fast stripe) on my JMicron controller for the two 80GB drives. This gives me an extremely fast Vista installation to 160GB of space. After installing the Highpoint management software, I then had my file server up and running, to a degree.
Final configuration involved installing AVG, setting up remote desktop (so I can administer changes from my laptop without having to attach a screen), installing Service Pack 1 for Vista, and disabling a few unnecessary services that slow down network transfer speeds (see this guide). After all that, I now have a decent, centralised place to store all my data. The only complaint is the noise produced by my gigabit switch (of course I had to buy a fan-cooled model).
Pictures coming soon (when I can be bothered finding a working camera).