[X4U] Using a Quicksilver G4 as a NAS?

[Neil]

Thanks for your thoughtful reply Neil .  My responses follow yours  
below.  As I said to David, I'm still looking for recommendations on  
an 8-bay USB enclosure and a 4 or 8 port SATA controller, SATA hard  
drives, and an OS (maybe FreeNAS?).

On Jan 2, 2009, at 8:49 AM, Neil Laubenthal wrote:
> You still need to run an OS on the Quicksilver and it will end up  
> using more electrical power and making more noise than a NAS.

I pay around 10 cents per Kw/hour for electricity.  Even if the G4  
uses 100w more than a USB enclosure when it is asleep (and I think the  
real difference is probably much less), that would be about one cent  
per hour.  That isn't a significant factor to me.

As far a noise, I could easily run an Ethernet cable to another room  
where the noise wouldn't be an issue at all.  Some people say the  
Drobo is noisy too, and it would be in the same room.

> One thing you might look at is the Drobo . . . this is a nice little  
> box that connects via either FW or USB to another computer . . . or,  
> through adding an optional interface . . . directly to ethernet. It  
> holds up to 4 SATA drives in any combination and automatically RAIDs  
> them together. When it gets full; you simply pull one of it's  
> smaller capacity drives and replace with a larger drive and the RAID  
> rebuilds itself.  It uses what they call "BeyondRAID" . . . but it's  
> a lot of marketing speak for an automatically configuring RAID setup  
> based on the size drives installed. Max capacity is 6 TB today  
> (using 1.5 TB drives) although it says it goes up to 16 TB with  
> larger drives . . . because we know they are coming. I've actually  
> been thinking about one of these myself . . . I've got a couple of  
> 250 GB SATA drives with plenty of useful life left in my old G4 file  
> server that I could start populating it with. It works fine for TM  
> destination as a local drive . . . but it's unclear whether the  
> ethernet shared version does. The DroboShare ethernet option is  
> essentially a Linux front end . . . and since networked Time Machine  
> drives get stored as a .dmg file instead of the usual Finder  
> readable but using hardlinks option . . .I would suspect it works  
> fine for that . . . unless there is something in Time Machine that  
> only allows you to select Apple approved network shares (i.e. a  
> share on another Leopard machine or a Time Capsule).

I looked into the Drobo.  First of all, it would cost $1,000 to get 8  
bays.  It would involve two cases and five cables (including the hub  
and power).  It would cost $1,250 for 8 bays plus the Ethernet  
option.  If a Drobo case dies (I have heard of that happening), the  
data would be unavailable until I got another Drobo case.  That could  
take a week or two.  In any other enclosure, when I remove a drive to  
install a larger one, the old drive can be kept as a back-up of  
whatever is being store on it, but not if it was in a Drobo.