Linux as an media server

[joflow]

Hi,

I thinking of setting up an linux file server in the future to serve music, video, recorded TV to my other PCs (one HTPC either MythTV or Windows Media Center and one general purpose Windows XP machine). I have a couple of noob questions though.

1. What is the largest harddrive linux will recognize? I figure 500 GB drives will be out by the time I get ready to do this. 4x500gb = 2 TB sounds pretty good to me but will linux be able to recognize all of the space?

2. Dealing with a file server this large..should I consider using some form of RAID set-up? How do I set up an drive array with linux? Any good resources? Which RAID setup is the best for this situation? RAID-0 through 5?

3. Will Samba play nice with Windows Vista when its first released or should I expect some down time until a update to samba is released?

[Roxoff]

1. 500GB disks will be pretty expensive, you may find it easier to buy much cheaper 200-250MB ones, and install them seperately. You can use the 'ln -s' command to provide links from your root system to the big space, e.g.

have 2x250MB disks on /mnt/bigdisk1 and /mnt/bigdisk2

Set up your Samba shares on /opt/samba and do stuff like this:

cd /opt/samba
ln -s /mnt/bigdisk1 music
ln -s /mnt/bigdisk2 video

you can get much finer grained control by using a heirarchial directory structure with links out from that to directories on your main disks. This approach allows you to add new disks as you need without the headaches of needing to copy stuff all over the place, you just mount up the new space, and create links in your existing filesystem.

2. Using raid may help if you want high uptime and ease of backups, but you're probably going to be better off in this situation using your SATA or IDE ports for hanging non-raid disks off for the space.

3. It'll probably be ok, the smb filesystem has to work flawlessly with existing windows 2000 and XP systems. But then, who knows what Bill Gates is planning with his 'New, Upgraded' smb filesystem.