It's upgrade time

[Ghoulish Delight]

Currently descending on our address are various shipments from various vendors via various shipping companies all comprising the next-generation home network at the GD/CP residence. I'm so freaking excited.

We had been hoping to make the jump back into Mac-dom and bet an iBook of some sort. But I'm finally frightened enough of losing our data (we have an external backup drive running over USB 1.0 that's way too slow to be used regularly and I'm way too forgetful to be responsible about making use of it) that it made much more sense to take the same amount of money and buy a mid-range Dell laptop and build myself a RAID-5 backup server.

This is what happens when you work in the enterprise storage industry.

Anyway, so here's the tale of the tape:

Laptop - primary daily use system
*Dell Inspiron 1721, Dual core AMD Turion, 2.0Ghz
*2GB RAM
*17" glossy widescreen (1920x1200)
*Built-in 802.11n (prelim spec, of course)
*(skipped the spiffy $50 paint job)
$1500

File server - Will serve network volumes to be backed up on RAID-5
I'm building this from the ground up to be low power and hopefully fault-tolerant
* Mid-tower case with low 370W power supply
* AMD dual core Athlon 4200 (2.2Ghz, only 65W)
* 2GB ram
* Gigabyte Socket AM2 mother board with Gig-E and built in RAID-5
* 3x400GB Maxtor SATA drives for RAID-5 volume
* 1x160GB Maxtor SATA drive for system OS and network volume
* 1x300GB USB 2.0 external drive for further network volume
* Simple CD-burner/DVD-rom combo drive + floppy (for driver install)
* A few other accessories
A STEAL at $940 delivered, including Windows Vista Ultimate

Included in the price of the laptop is a Wireless-N router

The plan is to have the server be an always-on solution (thus the low power focus) serve a couple network drives (the smaller SATA and the big external USB, 400GB+) to the laptop to store vital files (namely photos and music) while creating some sort of automated backup policy to write it to the RAID-5 volume (should have ~800GB of backup space). I'll have to play with Vista's built-in shadow-copy functionality to see if it'll suffice, or there's some pretty good freeware backup solutions out there.

I'm so excited. Both that I will finally feel some level of comfort about how safe and retrievable my data is (nothing's fool-proof, but automated backup onto a fault-tolerant volume is a good place to start), and because I get to build the server from scratch.

I can already hear the cries of, "Vista?! Go Linux, man!" Eh, I've got my reasons to stick with Windows, chief among them being ease of dealing with RAID drivers and ease of sharing network volumes without dealing with Samba (*shudder*).