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I'm looking at setting up a file server or NAS for my home/office.
At the moment I'm using an Apple Airport Extreme with two USB HD's plugged in for time machine backups and as a media/file server.
The system works well but the USB 2.0 is a real bottleneck as far as speed is concerned.
I'm looking for advice as to what hardware I should invest in to achieve the following :
- Relatively fast file serving for work files (approx 70GB now but will grow to 200GBish). These will also be backed up to cloud or another drive eventually.
- Media serving of up to 1TB of my Video backups for XBMC through my Apple TV.
- Backup two Macbook Pro Laptops regularly. One is 628GB Data, the other is 256GB Data.
My Available Equipment :
- 1.5TB WD Elements USB HD
- 500GB WD Elements USB HD
- 1TB Seagate 7200RPM 3.5" Sata
- 500GB Western Digital Caviar Black 500GB 7200RPM 3.5"
- 320GB Seagate 7200RPM 3.5" Sata
- Old desktop PC - AMD Athlon 64 X@ 5200+, 1GB Ram, Asus M2N board (raid 0,1,0+1,5)
- Apple Airport Extreme (Dual band, Gigabit, Wireless-N)
I'd like to reuse existing gear if I can. My budget would be around $500 max for new equipment at this stage.
Is it worth going down the route of Raid 1 or Raid 5 for my purposes? Uptime and performance will not be a huge concern and I can always get another External HD for backup purposes.
So far I'm thinking :
- Keep the external hard drives and Airport Extreme for backing up laptops.
- Use my 1TB drive for media
- Use my 500GB drive for work files
- Purchase either an additional external drive for backing up the server, or additional internal drives.
Any thoughts, opinions, recommendations would be very much appreciated.
Thanks.
