Adding more storage for mythbuntu (and other uses)

Since my mythbuntu box is old and does not have onboard SATA support, I deciced to build a storage server with new hardware and record from the mythbuntu box to an NFS share on the storage server.

The hardware of choice was an Intel Atom motherboard, D945GCLF2D, due to the low processing power required. It has a 1.6GHz dual core processor, but is very quiet due to no fan on the processor (although the chipset has one!). Since I don't want to have problems later on, and RAM is so cheap nowadays I decided to get the max 2GB that the board supports, even though it is a huge overkill.

For storage I got 2 500GB SATA drives, which is going to be used in a RAID mirroring configuration to provide some form of protection from failure. Since I don't have hardware RAID capability, I needed another disk to install the base OS on, because the RAID volume would not be available until after boot. I also wanted a cost effective (read cheap!) solution, so I opted to get a USB drive to install the base OS on, since the motherboard supports USB booting. This meant I did not have to get an optical drive, which was only going to be used once for installation.

The software of choice for the storage server is FreeNAS, a free Network Attached Storage server based on FreeBSD. It has software RAID capability, and can exposes the storage in lots of different ways. It can also notify you via email in case something goes wrong with your server, so you can really hide the box in a corner and almost forget about it. Administration is via a web interface once you have it up and running and connected to a network.

I installed the embedded image from the downloaded ISO onto a USB drive using physdiskwrite, booted the new box with it, configured the disks, and shared the RAID volume via NFS. The next step was mounting the NFS share from my mythbuntu box, which was trivial as well, I only had to install the nfs-common package.

Initially I had a stability issue on mythbuntu with the NFS share, it kept hanging up after a period of inactivity, but installing all available updates seems to have cured that problem, I'm happily watching a recording as I'm typing this.