If you really need to run RAID, go with software RAID in linux. It has been around for a long time, and will continue to be around for a long time and is the same in all versions of linux. If you try and use some form of hardware RAID you are stuck with that implementation, if the motherboard dies and you get a new one, it must have EXACTLY the same hardware RAID otherwise your array is down the tubes.
I had a RAID5 array with linux software RAID for many years, it worked perfectly with three different motherboards and 5 different versions of linux. BTW he reason I had a RAID array was so that a bunch of disks could be combined into one volume. Years ago my local computer store had a screaming good deal on 256G drives so I bought a whole bunch and set them up as RAID for a lot less than a single large disk would have cost. That array lasted for a long time until I finally decided to go with a single large drive instead of RAID. The drives are so cheap now I just manually do a clone onto a rotation of other equivalent drives, if there is ever a problem it is just swap the drive. I personally would go with Vortexbox, it is super simple to setup and can host pictures, videos etc as well as LMS. I'm actually using a FitPC2 (Atom based, tiny little box) with VB as my main server, it works great even though it is an atom system, and only takes 5 watts! If you are doing more, particularly video stuff, a faster board would probably be useful. As to VB or a regular linux distribution, VB is a fairly modern Fedora distro with LMS and various other servers pre installed. It is specifically designed as a headless server, all administration is done through a web page interface. Even if your hardware has a monitor it won't use it since it doesn't start X. Since it is at heart a Fedora distro you can easily add other packages that don't come with it using the standard package management tools. The advantage is that it comes outof the box setup as a headless server for pretty much anything you might want. The downside is you don't get a GUI screen. If you WANT to use that specific computer to control music playing with wizzy GUI interfaces you can't. You can't play video games on it, it is purely a server. But it is probably the easiest server out there to get up and running. I have probably done 30 different linux installations with many different versions, so I'm fairly up on linux, but I would still go with VB for a server, it just does that task so well and is so easy to setup and maintain. BTW you CAN setup RAID on VB, but it's not part of it's builtin web page administration system. You have to remotely login to a shell and run a few commands and then the array looks just like a normal disk that all the rest of the software is happy to work with. John S. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ JohnSwenson's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=5974 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=99871 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
