[XCSSA] Recommendations for a SAMBA/NAS device?

[X-otic Computer Systems of San Antonio]

On Wednesday 20 May 2009, X-otic Computer Systems of San Antonio wrote:
> Hello everyone.
>
> I'm trying to solve a major power issue at the house and am hoping
> that someone can shed some of their energy managment insight.
>[...]
>The problem is 
> that four of those drives are SATA 750GB drives and are hanging off of
[...]
> My thinking is that a low-powered machine, like an embedded system
> would do it nicely,
[...]
> What do you guys recommend? What are your experiences with home-NAS
> solutions?  What issues did you encounter and what did you do to fix
> them?

I think that your thinking is off.. Using a low power embedded motherboard is 
barely going to touch your power consumption when 85% of your NAS power is 
being consumed by the spinning drives (not the motherboard).

I don't mean to sound harsh.. but what you need to do is to look in to using  
a "real RAID card" with battery backed up cache, write back cache, and power 
control so that when he array is not being written to.. the drives can be 
spun down.  Then when a write happens.. it writes to the cache and goes on 
while the RAID card wakes up the drives and spins them up.  Some reads can 
even stay cached.

Some OTS home-NAS systems do this now.  But nicer RAID cards that can handle 
this type of stuff are the nicer LSI, Adaptec and 3Ware IIRC SATA and SAS 
cards.

There are a couple of folks on list who have built such systems...

Tweeks