On Tue, 24 Nov 2009 20:01:14 +0000, John Williamson
wrote:

One other benefit of using a PC instead of a NAS device is that you gain
a spare computer for lightweight tasks. If you've no room for a monitor
and such, then use a KVM switch or you can log in remotely, once it's
been set up.

Right - I used to do it this way, and my fileserver would also run a
virtual machine that handled all the house mail/DNS/DHCP and so on.
Very useful.

Now that VM lives on the HTPC that runs the telly, and the fileserving
is handled by a ReadyNAS with 3Tb of disk. Power savings, mostly -
easily 100W dropped by doing that.

Cheers - Jaimie
--
"We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce
the Complete Works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know
this is not true." - Robert Wilensky, University of California