Terastation torrent box and media server
Got 4 x 500GB disks for my broken Terastation this week and managed to fit all its pieces back together to get it working again. The disks I got were Seagate Barracuda 7200 11ms which should be fast and reliable. With RAID 5 configured (following 12 hour disk check) there’s now roughly 1.4TB of space and of course the safeguard of RAID 5 being that any one of the 4 x 500GB disks could fail and all my data would still be perfectly safe. I did consider using 750GB disks but read somewhere that the operating system wouldn’t take anything larger than 500GB. However, as there are 4 x IDE ports potentially it would be possible to just get some new cables and add another 4 x IDE disks as slaves, meaning a potential 2.8TB :). To do this though would require rigging up some kind of external caddies to house the new disks and also cutting a seriously large hole in the TS to get the cables out. And it would also need an additional power source.
As soon as the TS was back online I got round to hacking it. The following links were extremely useful in doing this…
- gain root access by flashing modified firmware
- install essential and useful packages - in order… busybox, libraries update, samba 3.0.25 (gains nice performance boost), openSSH (to gain SSH access, then disable telnet) and Joe editor
- ctorrent/ctcs binaries - thanks to Herbert Marcus for excellent info and binaries (ctcs is a web interface that lets you monitor active torrents and manage the ctorrent client)
- complete guide on configuring ctorrent and ctcs - how to auto run the services and a script that starts any torrents dropped into a specific folder automatically
- TwonkyVision media server - UPNP server for music, movies, pictures etc.
So now my TS is serving as a (very quiet) torrent box and media server :).
