Home Network

I currently am using my old PIII machine stored in my closet as a file and print server. It's plenty of power for what I need, but it doesn't support SATA and other modern protocols, so I can't load it up with disk space.

Total cost of upgrades will be about $225 ($200 for drives, which I got on sale at NewEgg, and $25 for the controller). This is nonoptimal in terms of speed -- the point of these Caviar Black drives is that they're super fast -- but it's cost-effective and fine for my needs. A new NAS would have cost at least $250 not including the drives.

Virtualized Setup

By mid-2009, I was running seriously short of disk space. Because my server is old (PIII) and doesn't support SATA, I couldn't simply add new drives. I tried installing a PCI SATA controller (which cost about $25 plus about $20 for the various cable adapters), but it would not support large drives.

The other alternatives were to:

• Purchase a home NAS (about $250).
• Purchase an external RAID enclosure (about $100). The downside of this was that, unless I invested in an eSATA card, it would been connected via USB 2.0, which is an order of magnitude slower than even old SATA controllers.
• Justin Lin suggested that I virtualize my workstation (Dell Inspiron 531) and consolidate my file server there. It's a 64-bit Athlon, well-suited for virtualization. This has the added advantage of saving on power.

I decided to go with Justin's suggestion and virtualize my workstation. I bought two Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB drives for $200 total. Issues:

• The specs claim that my machine only supports 500 GB drives. I upgraded the BIOS, which I hope will expand the capacity, but I haven't confirmed that. I discussed the issue with a guy at Central Computers in San Francisco, and he suggested the 500 GB "limit" was merely a stated limit back when those were the largest drives available. The drives seem to be working just fine.
• I would have to upgrade the RAM. This is a minor issue.
• Justin suggested using VMware instead of Xen. VMware Workstation costs $180 (Justin thought it was free). VMware ESXi is free, and it ideally is the better solution, because it runs barebones (no host operating system), which in theory frees up resources. However, because it's designed as an enterprise solution, it has poor hardware support. After doing some additional research, I decided to go with VirtualBox for virtualization.

I'm going to run OpenFiler as the file server.

I installed the drives, turned WDTLER on, and installed Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) off the alternate installer, which allowed me to install and configure Linux Software RAID.

Boxee

Mom and Dad's old Dell Dimension 4550 has a TV-out.