I love my TS-109 II
September 24, 2008 @ 22:32
I used to run the server powering this site from my home internet connection but when I moved to getting the worst ISP of all time free with my job then this rapidly ran out of favour. The connection was slow, the router liked spontaneously rebooting and the Pentium 3 running it was using a lot of power and struggling somewhat with still being kept alive.
Eventually I got a shiny KVM virtual machine (which reboots and only takes the web server down for three seconds!) supplied by a friend which is treating me well.
The only problem now was I wanted a something that I could keep as an always-on fileserver for backups and various things I wanted an always-on system for. After a bit of hunting I found the QNAP TurboStation 109 II which has a 500Mhz ARM chip, 256MB of RAM, a speedy gigabit ethernet port, SATA and eSATA, USB ports, runs Linux and uses 14.4W on load and 6W idle.
By default it runs some crazy QNAP distribution but there is a (rock solid in my use) beta of Debian available for it, which has been done by one of the former Debian project leaders and is all-in-all a pretty nice experience. I have it now doing my regular incremental backups using rdiff-backup and running a few other miscellaneous servers, including CUPS for my printer which works amazingly.
I’ve had absolutely no problems with either the hardware or running Debian on it and I really recommend it to anyone looking for a (relatively) low-cost, low-power and low-hassle system to run as a small file-server.
Posted in Software Development
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