Recent storage technology (perpendicular recording) brings hard drives into new regions of capacity. Have a look at the Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 750GB SATA II model and you might realize that this baby allows you to build real big file servers at ease. As the drive comes at 335 Euro (august 2006) it is still more expensive than using 250GB drives, but the big plus is, that you don't need that much drives to build a really large file server that satisfies your ever growing capacity needs for quite a while.

Building large file servers on a budget, where you mainly put a bunch of big cheap IDE disks together and get storage in the terabytes is something more and more people think about and finally do. If you have a closer look you might see, that you face some challanges if you pass the 2 TB landmark, at least when you are on a tight budget and look for some throughput, which becomes more and more important as the storage size increases. At the end you don't want to have a verly huge storage that needs days or weeks to be transferred to or from.

The file server is a standard linux PC with a lot of harddrives. Based on a regular CS-901 tower I did some modifications inside to get the needed harddrives installed. They are tied together as a software raid 5 array for data security reasons. Apart from this raid array the server has an additional harddrive that holds the linux and a DVD-ROM for software installation purposes. Actually, the server is running SuSE 8.2 which supports software raid very well.

The Squeezebox is Slim Devices latest development based on the initial SliMP3. It has better DACs, digital out, a graphical display of superior quality and supports 802.11g wireless networks as well as 100 mbit ethernet. I use the Squeezebox as a replacement for the Audiotron in my living room. The server software that comes along with the unit runs great on linux, wich makes it an ideal fit to my media network infrastructure.