Building a NAS from an old PC

[SiTime]

Hello,

 

I was given an old pc which is functionally worse than the one I am currently using. Recently I have gotten into game development and was looking into what version control to use, and settled on perforce.

So I was thinking I'd set up a NAS server with a perforce repository setup on it.

So I was wondering where you think I should go from what I have.

Specs

4 gb ddr2 ram

AMD Phenom 9950 quad-core

NVidia 260

and an old 500 GB hdd

[FloRolf]

Do you want to do you game development on different machines? Because if not, just get more internal storage for your main pc? 

[SiTime]

My partner and myself will both be working on different machines. Also having redundancy would also be nice.

[Spotty]

42 minutes ago, SiTime said:

My partner and myself will both be working on different machines. Also having redundancy would also be nice.

You could still share directly between the two machines. Just set it up as a share folder within windows.

As far as redundancy goes, I wouldn't trust a used 500GB HDD that comes from a system old enough to have a Phenom 9950 processor in it for important backups... That HDD would probably last about 5 minutes before kicking the bucket.

For 500GB of storage, you'd be better off just buying a 1TB external HDD or even just another 1TB internal HDD for about $50. Not really worth it having a dedicated NAS for just 500GB IMO.

[SiTime]

I wasn't planning on using that old HDD, was just saying it was there for completeness purposes.

Also while it is true that the NAS may be overkill, the idea was I could use this as a learning process.

Does the shared folder have some form of redundancy?

[FloRolf]

9 minutes ago, SiTime said:

I wasn't planning on using that old HDD, was just saying it was there for completeness purposes.

Also while it is true that the NAS may be overkill, the idea was I could use this as a learning process.

Does the shared folder have some form of redundancy?

It's always as redundant as you do it. A NAS with 1 hard drive is also 0 redundant. If you add a couple more drives to your main pc and put them in raid6 it will be quite redundant. The best way however, is to do regular backups on independent, external drives. 

 

 

Edit: oh and please use the "Quote" - Function because otherwise @Spotty doesn't see you replied. 

[SiTime]

What I meant was does the shared folder follow some form of backup system, since it is connected to multiple devices. i.e. the machine that made the shared file's drive crashes, is the data still there or is it only stored locally on the one system.

[Spotty]

8 minutes ago, SiTime said:

Does the shared folder have some form of redundancy? 

Nope, no redundancy. It will just let the other person access the folder on your local machine. It won't alter or backup the files in any way.

 

Do you know what motherboard is in the old system? Some older systems like that may only have 2 SATA ports making its practicality as a NAS very limited. Also make sure it has Gigabit LAN.

 

How much data are you hoping to store on the NAS?

[Umberto]

Just use git and push to a remote repo. Gitlab has private repos for free. 

[SiTime]

Not sure what the motherboard is, but can confirm it has 6 sata ports and gigabit lan

[SiTime]

7 minutes ago, Umberto said:

Just use git and push to a remote repo. Gitlab has private repos for free. 

Git isn't super well sorted large binary files, and the free repository only allows for a relatively small LFS allowance.

[Ralphred]

6 minutes ago, Umberto said:

Just use git and push to a remote repo. Gitlab has private repos for free.

25 minutes ago, SiTime said:

I could use this as a learning process.

Make your own local git repo, there are plenty of "how to" around. If you don't want a fancy gui on the NAS itself, it's very little work.

[SiTime]

2 minutes ago, Ralphred said:

Make your own local git repo, there are plenty of "how to" around. If you don't want a fancy gui on the NAS itself, it's very little work.

Well yeah I could use git on a local repo, but I could also make a perforce repo which is better suited for this type of data.

[Ralphred]

End of the day, apart from storage drives, you have a good base for building a file server, the protocol/frontend you use to put and get those file is moot.

FTR, I was bored, so set-up a git server on a spare box next to my desk, from scratch, using Arch, since my last post.

Can't say I'm a massive fan of Arch, but it is quick to set-up, and git is much quicker to get going than svn with webdav ever was.