Network-attached storage

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ingeon

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Looking to remove my hard drives from my PC at home and started looking at
NAS servers, but I need advice.

I basically want it to :

- Be like my router with web interface etc. (windows/linux/mac/PS3 accessible and set permissions for drives and folders for specific machines/MAC address)
- At least 4 SATA II HDD (varied sizes 1TB/1.5TB/2TB/spare)
- Gigabit Ethernet
- No RAID needed
- Basic power and cooling
- UPnP

Want an affordable solution.
I priced some NAS stuff and they are either expensive or ripping us off.


Found netgear nice comparison but with my DGN2000 router issues not a fan at the moment.
Physical dimensions 200 H x 132 W x 222 D mm.
I also scanned the hole NAS vs DAS vs SAN but doesn`t help so I thought I`ll ask here.
 
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Why not buy a Cheap PC with enough sata ports and install FREENAS which is free.
We use it at work - 8 x 2TB drives for our backups.
Nice web interface.
 
yup. gots 12 TB's at home on a FreeNAS box w/ gigabit ethernet. Works like a charm with everything (i.e. DLNA, Samba, Airport, etc) and its mother.
 
Another +1 for FreeNAS

"The best things in life are free..."
 
Running without RAID isn't the best idea IMHO and really your only choice is going to be FreeNAS if you don't want to run RAID.

Otherwise go for NexentaStor and run RAIDz (essentially RAID 5 but much better).

You could get a FreeNAS/NexentaStor system up and running for ~R2.5k excluding hard-drives or around R3.5k if you want a nice case and really good cooling and so forth. Either option will be upgradeable to 6 hard-drives (with possibility of adding extra SATA cards). Speeds might be limited on Realtek NIC however, running an Intel NIC (R300 for one) you should get 60-70mbytes/s in FreeNAS when copying to/from a Samba share (Windows share) or around 70-80mbytes/s using FTP.

EDIT: Btw. I've got quite a lot of experience with FreeNAS (FreeBSD, GEOM based software RAID, JBOD or RAIDz), NexentaStor (OpenSolaris, RAIDz based NAS), OpenFiler (Linux, proprietary software RAID or JBOD) and EON (OpenSolaris, RAIDz based NAS, no web-gui)

Of those I'd say my favorites are FreeNAS and EON. After that NexentaStor. Openfiler is slow no matter what you do and it's webGUI is unfathomable (still better than Windows 2008 R2 based "NAS").
 
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imported a Synology DS1010+ straight from Taiwan, was a 1/3 of the price as sold local (5K vs 18K) - but then again it's an all-in-one-beast of a machine.
 
I too am thinking of going for a NAS because I need something to stream movies and other stuff to my media player by my TV.

Essentially all I need is a NAS with say 2 free bays, no RAID needed and maybe nice looking.

Is there anything sub R2,5k like this?
 
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Cruelty said:
Esquire sell this : http://www.freecom.com/Products/External-Hard-Drives/Network-Hard-Drives/Dual-Drive-Network-Center

Takes 2 drives, supports RAID 0,1 and JBOD. Gigabit LAN. Web interface. Got a bittorrent client as well in it. Last I checked they were R800 (ex VAT) without drives.

EDIT: Here you go : http://shop.esquire.co.za/ProductDescription.aspx?id=931932 no stock ATM tho.
Click to expand...

Thats is perfect, even price. Wished they had 4 drive one`s though. Zapsonline Freecom

I also peaked at this one Budget NAS release from QNAP but not necessarily budget once purchased in the RSA
 
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Ok guys forgive me. But I'm new to this scene. Can a NAS work alone? I've seen routers that have a USB port so you can access media off the external drive you've plugged in the wireless router. So how's this different from NAS?
 
Ok, I thought you get stand alone NAS's. Back to my question. What would be the distinction between plugging a NAS in your router's LAN port, and plugging in an ordinary external hard drive into a router's USB port (network storage)?
 
Khanya said:
Ok, I thought you get stand alone NAS's. Back to my question. What would be the distinction between plugging a NAS in your router's LAN port, and plugging in an ordinary external hard drive into a router's USB port (network storage)?
Click to expand...

Depends which router. But even a very powerful router, like on running DD-Wrt or OpenWRT (the most powerful options) would have significant draw backs.

Some of those draw backs:
No RAID/redundancy (RAID 1 should be possible with OpenWRT but it will be very very slow)
Low speed (even dedicated low cost "NAS" boxes suffer from this, eg Drobo, etc.). On a router it would be around 5mb/s up to 10mb/s. Drobo and such are around 30mb/s
Few options, no smart monitoring, no UPS support, few protocols supported (Most of the time you will only have Samba and maybe FTP)
Few or no upgrade options (Can't add extra drives or few, can't increase memory for caching, list goes on)
Tied to a single operating system (eg. what you have now is what you have)

A R3K x86 based FreeNAS NAS would essentially have the following specifications:
60mb/s Read/Write
Can support any amount of drives, it all depends on what kind of hardware you bought (R3k system would generally only support up to 6 drives out of the box with possibility of upgrading to 38 or so drives).
Supports the following protocols: Samba/CIFS (Common Internet File System)/FTP/Torrent/AFP (Apple Filing Protocol)/NFS (Network File System)/Rsync/Unison/iTunes/DAAP(Digital Audio Access Protocol)/HTTP/LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol)
Supports S.M.A.R.T (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology, monitors disk health) and can email you when a disk is failing or has failed. It can also run S.M.A.R.T short, extended and conveyance tests (the kind of tests that the utilities from Seagate/Western Digital/Samsung runs) and email you the results. Any of these tests can be run according to a scheduled or run immediately.
Supports Uninterrupted Power Supply (shutdown the system when it goes on a UPS or if the UPS is failing it can email you)
Supports Encryption (AES/Blowfish/Camellia/3DES)
Supports JBOD (just a bunch of drives)/RAID 0,1,5,6 and ANY nested levels (0+1,6+1, etc.), and nested levels on top of nested levels (1+0 on top of 5+0 for example)/RAID-z
You can install other NAS operating systems (NexentaStor/EON/OpenFiler/Windows Server), each of which sports different features and supports various other things.

So compare that to any NAS you might buy and see which meets your needs.

If you are going to be using 1 or 2 drives, rather go for a router. The pre-bought "NAS" solutions are all very expensive and any PC based solution would blow it away completely. Anandtech compared a Enterprise level NAS (promise based NAS which costs R100 000) to a PC based solution, the PC destroyed the "enterprise" level NAS completely.

Look here for a list of pre-built NAS solutions and corresponding performance to see what to expect: http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/component/option,com_nas/Itemid,190
 
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I agree that FreeNAS works like a dream. I have it running @ home on RAID 10 using a pretty awesome (IMHO) Adaptec 5805 RAID card (overkill I know seeing that it is enterprise class). It houses 8 x 1,5TB drives and is all hooked up to a Netgear GS716T ProSafe gigbit switch.

I housed all of this in a CoolerMaster HAF 932 with a Thermaltake Toughpower 750W power supply.

FreeNAS does OS duty very well and works without issue with the RAID config / hardware.

It did cost a packet - especially the HDD's and the RAID card but have never had an issue.
 
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