Whistling in the Dark

Now that I’ve moved muad-dib.us over to Go Daddy I’ve been thinking of what to do with my home server (which used to host my domain). I’ve decided to turn it into a NAS as well as a development/play box for things that I’d eventually like to add to this site. I had been planning to upgrade the hardware sometime soonish anyway so I just need to change the required specs.

• CPU/Motherboard: Before I wanted a fast CPU to handle a ton of SQL queries without breaking a sweat but is not super important any more. Now the important thing will be a lot of SATA connectors and possibly 1000baseT networking (could be added via PCIe card)
• RAM: 2GB. It’s so cheap that it just makes sense. I could add more but I’m not sure it would be needed.
• Hard Drives: I’m going to want at very least 1TB of space (if not much more) in a RAID5 set up. Hardware RAID would be preferable but good RAID cards that work with Linux (or *BSD, I’m not married into using Linux) are very expensive so I’ll probably go with softraid (lvm2 or whatever *BSD uses).
• Case: Prettiness is not important but cooling and space are.
• Backup: Here’s the hard part. How the hell do you back up that much data without going broke? An extra set of drives that are rsynced over nightly? I know I’ll have RAID5 but that is not a back up. It’s times like this that I miss when you could back up a whole system onto CD.
• Switches: Right now my network is 100baseT. Because the wiring itself is CAT5e it should handle gigabit speeds. I just need to swap the switches out.