Curse You, Commodity Hardware
A few months back I wanted a home server to do several things:
- Be a RAIDed file server with a bunch of big disks in it.
- Run VMware virtual machines.
- Run a BitTorrent client all the time.
- Serve up the occassional MP3 or archive to friends over the intarwebs.
I went to a local computer show and walked out in a matter of minutes with a deceptively plain beige box housing a fairly beefy AMD 64 sytem. Until last week it dutifully performed the aforementioned tasks, all running on the Fedora distribution of Linux.
But last week I got it into my head that I’d migrate my home storage to Sun’s ZFS, a next-generation file system designed to protect data and easily expand to new cheap disks. I consolidated all my media onto one drive, set that aside, and installed a recent build of Solaris 10 Express. The install went smoothly and before long I’d turned a couple of big IDE drives into a ZFS storage pool.
Yesterday I bought an enclosure for the set-aside drive and got my MacBook Pro talking to it so I could copy my media over to the new storage pool. But when I went to boot up my server, trouble. The BIOS got through the memory check and the IDE device scan and then stopped. No error codes, no beeping, no rebooting. It just stopped.
I spent my evening trying various configurations of the IDE device chain before deciding that life was too short and putting the damn thing on Craigslist. Even if I could find the magic configuration that got the machine working (as it had happily for months before) I’d be paranoid about it schizing out again. Sigh.
It’s not a big loss, though. It was my intention to purchase a Mac mini as a home media center and that box can happily handle the additional above tasks. I may compliment it with a NAS solution like the Buffalo TerraStation or just buy several big honkin’ disks and let OS X handle RAID in software, despite the reportedly abysmal performance. Either way using a Mac and/or an integrated storage solution beats the living hell out of troubleshooting commodity PC hardware any day of the week.
If I can paraphrase an old adage about Linux: PCs are only cheap if your time is worthless.