I haven’t been leaving my servers powered on for a while, now. Not having them available led me to purchase a Buffalo Linkstation Pro a while back. I’m really quite happy with Buffalo’s implementation — with just a little work on my part, I can SSH into the device and set up some additional services that aren’t already available. But, it comes with a print server, which gives me access to my USB printer over the network. But I’m still not able to run SqueezeCenter for my media. Yes, I could hack at my Linkstation some more and get it to run there but it doesn’t address any backup issues — sure, I can recreate the library by re-ripping all of my CDs but who wants to spend a couple of weeks doing that?
So, I’ve been considering purchasing or building a RAID NAS. QNAP has some really nice arrays that come equipped with MySQL, phpMyAdmin, NFS, DLNA and a number of other nice facilities but are pretty pricey ($300 for a 2-disk TS-209 II, $400 for a 4-disk TS-409 Pro Turbo and nearly $600 for a 5-disk TS-509 Pro, all without disks). They’re professional quality RAID devices, though, and come with excellent support … and SqueezeCenter should drop right onto them without a hitch.
But, I’m considering going a completely different route. The fit-PC Slim takes a different approach. It’s a small, low-power PC with wireless and USB on which you can run Linux or XP. So, I’m thinking I could buy one of those (for around $250, diskless), install my own 2.5″ ATA disk ($100, if I don’t like any of the ones I have laying around), install Linux, plug in a USB drive (another $100 if I don’t like what I already have) and, instead of RAID, run a cron job to rsync my precious filesystems.
Whatcha think?
(Yeah, Chad, I know, I really need to get comments fixed, don’t I? 🙂