As my collection of media grew, I started to run out of disk space (My mini only has 80GB). First, I added a USB drive to it. Then two. Then, I created a RAID array out of USB drives using an OSX RAID stripe. But, that is dangerous, because if any drive fails, you lose all the data. So I added more USB drives, and created a second stripe, to use for time machine. I currently have USB and Firewire drives connected to my Mini at the moment, due to this escellation.

It has finally gotten to the point where it really makes more sense to just build myself a multi-terrabyte file server, with proper RAID built into it. Further, while I’m at it, I want to add some additional capabilities as well. Ideally, this is something that will live on the network, and give me the following:

• Centrally store all my media files (music, movies, photos) which can be accessed from any computer in my house
• Provide a “time machine” backup location for my macs
• serve centralized home directories for any linux, mac, windows PC’s in my home
• Act as an LDAP authentication server, for single sign on in my home (yes, my home will then be enterprise-ready)
• Possibly serve a wiki and/or calendering/groupware system which my wife and I can use to sync our phones/mail clients/address book/calandar stuff (that would be nice)

Some or all of this may or may not come from the same software package. In fact, going the enterprise route, here is the solution I intend to implement:

Build an innexpensive file server based on the openfiler project. I’ve already put the order through for the components. Without drives, the whole solution, including a 12-bay hot-swap sata rack-mount case (and taxes and shipping), is about $600 for a Phenom 3-core CPU system w/ 4GB RAM. For drives, I can reuse a lot of the disks I already have running over USB (they are SATA inside), although I purchased an additional TB sata drive. Juggling the data while I’m setting up the new server will be tricky, but I should just be able to do it with the capacity I currently have.

Once the fileserver is set up, openfiler can export data as AFS, CIFS, or NFS to my mac Mini. Moreover, access will probably be [significantly] faster over gigabit ethernet than it was running RAID over USB2.

Then, I’ll install vmware on the openfiler server, and set up a virtual machine possibly running a linux distribution (TBD) to support local authentication for AD and LDAP.

With any luck, the system will be up and running by the end of the week. It’s pretty amazing that I can put together what is a business-class file server myself for under $1,000, even including storage.