Missives from the 6th Floor

The price of entry - chassis with no disks - is around $600, and the smallest usable configuration (500GB raw, 250GB usable) is between $800 and $900. Disk prices are between $.035 and $.050 per GB at this point, so that $800 is pretty much just chassis plus cost of drives.

My target price is between $600 and $700 for twice as much usable (500GB) disk - based that on the cost of buying twice as much disk as I need and setting up a mirror.

I found an NSLU2 on ebay for $50, and it arrived the other day. It turns out that a couple of the replacement firmware options support more than two disks, so RAID 5 is at least theorietically an option.

If I end up continuing the experiment, my first step is to de-underclock it, and see what sort of read/write performance I can get out of it running software RAID. Since the vast majority of the machines in the house are on the (802.11G) Wireless LAN, I suspect that running at full speed, this little device would have little problem keeping up.

But the more I think about it, the less convinced I am that I actually need NAS. My machine is essentially always up, and can host not only the disk, but pretty much any service I care to have it host. Perhaps it's a solution looking for a problem.

I like the idea of just having a bunch of storage "out there" on the network, but I'm not sure I really need it - and I'm pretty sure that there are better things to spend close to a thousand dollars on.