Posted by Thomas Wed, 03 Aug 2005 01:16:25 +0000
Since I’ve been looking into buying an Avel Linkplayer2, I have found out that you can get the Linksys NSLU2 to act as a media server for the Linkplayer. That way I could have my external connected to it, to serve as a normal fileserver as well as serve up content for the linkplayer, without having to run their software on a linux box nor have to connect the drive directly to the linkplayer. Fun stuff.
The weird thing is that in thinking about this I have a craving to fab essentially the same thing as the NSLU2, but with 1394b and gigE. How nice would that be? You could have raid 5 over 800Mbit firewire, with hotswapability due to CHEAP ata drives in firewire enclosures. ATA drives are freaking dirt cheap nowadays after rebates. You would even gain some reliability if you used different drive vendors as they would be less prone to crash at the same time. Everything would have its own dc power supply. No noisy fans or high current draw.
Maybe I should take up pcb fab as a hobby?
that’s funny, i was thinking about asking you (in the midst of reading this) about how much it might cost to contract you out to get a whole system of this stuff running. i think you should get one of these worked out for you, and then make a webpage of costs of different parts so that we could special order what we want ;)
when i have money (soon?) i’d love to get something like this rolling, but i doubt i would ever have the time (or expertise) to take on a project of that magnitude.
so, i’d say go for it. it would be really badass. and even if you don’t market it, i still wanna see it (or hear about it) just cause that’s gotta be one of the coolest ideas.
oh yea, zdnet rated the linksys media link a 6 outta 10 and didn’t say awesome things about it. i think the firewire/gigE idea just makes it awesome.
oh, and what would you use instead of the linksys media link? just a linux box to run the linkplayer and file server?
(i don’t know if i understand everything perfectly, but oh well…)