Well I uploaded and re-imaged first a HP t5710 thin client which has 512MB flash drive. It took 106 sec to upload the image and 204 secs to download the image to it. I was at first a little disappointed with the rates until I thought about the performance of the T5710 flash drive itself.

Next I uploaded an image from the wife’s desktop 640MB drive running Vista of which she is using about 225MB. The image upload speed with the Pogoplug/WD Elements system yielded a average transfer rate of 941 MiB/min or about 15.68 MiB/sec; so it took about 4 hours to upload the image.

After I ran these tests, I remembered that one of the switches between the Fog server and these two system is only 100M not gigabit so there maybe even better performance when using all gigabit network end to end.

This may not be a screaming eagle, but it is not bad either, for a minimal Pogoplug/USB drive system; which costs $112 (Drive=$89, USB Stick $8 and Pogoplug $15) I have a 2TB Fog server which consumes low power. I am a happy camper!!! Thank you folks for your wonderful work!!!

On most recent version of Debian Squeeze 6.04 you must change the TFTP_DIRECTORY path located in /etc/default/tftpd-hpa from “/images” to “/tftpboot” 18 Feb 2013

Thanks for the reply! I had a hunch that would be the case with regard to HD performance. I have a fog server up and running now on a pogoplug running debian squeezy. I tried to get it working on Arch Linux but that was just going to be a big an effort to write an install and deal with systemd. After I got fog up and running using a 16GB usb thumb drive (Kingston SE9). I then mounted a 2TB WD usb drive and formated it ext3 as my image folder. Everything seems to be working fine so far. I will report back after I create some images and restore them, on the performance.

I like having a fog server I don’t mind dedicating to a single task due to it’s $25 + cost of what ever usb HD is used, price and low power consumption.

I understand that most folks who use FOG are operating in an environment using many many client computers and thus are interested in a fairly high performance FOG server to perform their tasks as efficiently as possible.

In today’s world home and small office systems are often in the half dozen or computer range but could benefit from a centralized backup system which FOG seems ideal for. A cron scheduled task might be used to call a script which would cause image uploads from the clients at regular intervals and maintain some fixed number of images for backup purposes.

A very inexpensive system might use USB hard drives for the repository and while their use would severely impact performance it would appear that they could be used, if one sacrifices speed. If one is willing to accept the speed reduction imposed by the use of USB hard drives then it would seem that the server need not be sophisticated either and thus even an arm processor system might be used as the FOG server.

I have built several LAMP stacks on pogoplug devices which can be bought for under $20 and when combined with a USB drive of suitable size seems like it should work as a minimal FOG server.

Has anyone ever tried this or is there something flawed in my thinking which would make this a very bad idea?