Hello all,
First, my utmost thanks to those of you -- you know who you are! -- who have been helping me out -- I will endeavor to "pay it forward" by doing my best for people looking for help in areas I have a little expertise in!
With respect to the utility of running a filer at home, I do agree that it's overkill, if not totally senseless. I suppose one attraction *is*, as Chris Lamb suggested, that it is "cool as hell" -- well, "cool" perhaps is not the right word (I suspect I could heat my place with these things, if I could stand the noise -- as it is they are banished to the attic), but I'm sure you all understand :-)
It's also, as benr pointed out, a way to learn -- while I'm not sure I'm ever going to need to administer netapps in real life (I'm a biologist), it never hurts to learn something new.
Mainly, though, I really would like to have some reliable storage that's designed to be up 24x7. I'm so sick of cheap IDE drives dying on me :-( Now, I suppose I could do as Edwardv suggests and build a 900 gig RAID box for a thousand or so (although that's more than I have lying around, whereas the NetApp equipment was given to me for free). But what would be the fun in that?
I hope that the drive failure rate, once I get it up and running, will not be too brutal. I will be taking Alan McLachlan's advice and leaving as many disks as possible as spares...
Adam mikkamakka@hotmail.com
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