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Low Cost Network Attached Storage?
leperjuice asks: "I've been looking at options for Network Attached Storage for my home network. I can't run a single machine as a file server, and a NAS box sounds like an ideal solution. The problem is that the products are targeted at the business market, and the only item that comes close to a SOHO level is Quantum's Snap Server and those are still somewhat pricy and non-upgradeable (you can't buy a new drive and slap it in). Are there network attached SCSI/IDE enclosures, for example? Or am I stuck with having to transform a crappy box into a server? "
Take a look at http://www.deepspacetech.com/Hard ware/systems.htm. They offer a dual P90 with 32MB RAM, 10BaseT, and narrow SCSI for $65, and that should have plenty of serving power for a home network.
Then all you need is a better SCSI card (for Ultra2, LVD, and the like), your hard drives, and possibly an ethernet card (if you want 100BaseT). Everything on it's supported by FreeBSD and Linux.
Then your cost is, say, $75 for a decent SCSI-3 controller, $225 for a 20GB SCSI-3 drive, and $65 for the system. If you prefer to go with an IDE system (which is unfortunately how I'm using one at home), your costs are even less.
I know you said you don't want to turn a crappy box into a server (an opinion I strongly agree with, after having two PeeCee systems die doing 24x7 IPMasq), but these were originally intended to be servers and workstations (a system built when P90's were fast with 32MB of RAM!?), and it shows in the quality of the components.
No, I'm not affiliated with the guys at DeepSpace, but I've bought a lot of PC and NeXT gear from them and been extremely happy.
--Matthew
I have a few ARM-based touchscreen webphones on the home network, but they don't have disk controller interfaces...
It seems Rebel/HCC has no plans to ever upgrade the NetWinder, but will keep selling the same thing at too-high prices until they finally have to give up. (They are doing plug-upgrades where possible, bigger HD's, etc, but they aren't doing anything else, and couldn't if they wanted to, since they lost their Linux hackers months ago.)
Sony:hardware::Microsoft:software
CompactFlash: IBM Microdrive, Flash, Ether, Modem, etc.
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
Actually, there are some very good reasons, starting with the fact that it just plain rubs me the wrong way to have a simple file server sucking up a few hundred watts on a 24/7 basis.
This is a perfect application for an embedded solution, but apparently, the market hasn't quite clued in yet (I'd think small businesses/SOHO would be all over these things, but only Snap and Linksys seem to have gained any traction at all.)
I just looked at the options for my own home, finally deciding it was much cheaper just to get one of these and move the storage function elsewhere than to spend a bunch of bucks on a new PC that will go stale faster than a bowl of crackers in the rain.
ZD did a pretty good review of these things recently (interestingly, many of them run Linux or another Unix deriviative): NAS Comparison Chart
To summarize the review, the Linksys GigaDrive wins bang/buck, but has the downside that they only support SMB. If you need NFS, the next best option is the NetGear Network Disk Drive, which will set you back another $150 for the same 20 GB (ouch!!). If you've got the money, you might consider the Snap, or even some of the other options not in the ZD review, like the file server version of Cobalt's Qube or Raq, or Rebel's NetWinder.
Unfortunately, no one does this well yet. I've wondered myself about the possibility of a box with a simple CPU, a little bit of RAM, and an Ethernet adapter and a disk, prefereably with a slot for another 3-1/2" disk for later expansion. (Axis is the closest to having something like this, but they're pretty expensive, too.)
Let me know if you find any better alternatives - I'm still deciding, since I don't really like any of the current options. (If Linksys would do NFS, I'd buy one tomorrow.)
Sony:hardware::Microsoft:software
CompactFlash: IBM Microdrive, Flash, Ether, Modem, etc.
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
A lot of these 'Ask /.' pieces never get on the front page... I guess it's a judgement call by the author (Taco, et. al.).
As for the real topic...
I'm not I understand leperjuice's aversion to certain options : "I can't run a single machine as a file server"... I've got a P-MMX 200 (runs up to 266 (and almost 300)) that is out of a box now, and I've got a solid MB for it that is great, except that the PS/2 port and serial ports died - not a problem for a CLI configured FS though 8^) I'm out of cases, and those came out after an upgrade, but really, the cost of building a 'low-end' box to do this, with a net card and IDE drive (or even a Promise IDE RAID setup) would be real cheap. The hardware I just described did my fileserving as well as my Masquerading for my cable modem, and never came close to running out of CPU (I've got a beefier box with 10krpm SCSI that cranks out media files, but that's for local manipulation).
I don't think that there's much reason, especially given cost, to use a 'cheap' NAS box when you could have All That And More(TM) for less cost, and it's more upgradable if you want to add more drives.
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Hmm, I just checked the power usage on my linux router / fs (with my UPS monitoring util)... less than 120 watts total usage (that's with a 7200 rpm drive in there). Of course, if I start the rc-5 client, this goes up some, but hey not too bad - certainly not hundreds. There's no extras in there (sound, etc), and if you can use power management for when you aren't doing stuff, it works rather well.
It comes to about $8 a month for electricity per month (according to my rates), and a quick figure would show one of the specific NAS boxes coming in the $3/5 range. So... if that extra $4/mo (say $10, just for kicks) is worse than the $1000+ price difference, lesser expandibility, configurability, etc then you've made the choice for you. It make more sense to me, personally, to have a more general purpose machine that also does this, and at almost no initial cost (a cheap case and decent hard drive, the rest are left-over parts). To each his own.
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
I've seen NAS boxes exactly as you describe. Nothing more than a couple of cheap UDMA IDE drives, a GX or Winchip processor at 200, and a network card. Some of them even come preloaded with *BSD/Linux (Network Appliance), which is cheap and easy to manage. Price tages are running about $1200 for a 70Gb unit. I once figured out I could replicate them for $400-600, depending on whether I used the tiny POS board with integrated Ethernet and custom case or a conventional baby AT.
.sig: Now legally binding!
The parts are mostly scrounged from pieces discarded during upgrades to my workstation, begged off of friends, and occasionally bought. (Like the Intel 10/100 Ethernet card and Promise PCI UltraIDE controller for the main server and the two 26GB and three 13GB hard drives used between the two boxes.)
The most expensive components were the hard drives, but you can now get 20GB+ hard drives for about a hundred bucks mail order. For the rest of the components, you can almost certainly find people who are willing to give up a piece here and a piece there from stuff lying around the same as most of the parts for my servers were. I would bet you could build a dedicated server with a good amount of hard drive space for just a couple of hundred dollars. (A friend of mine consistently claims he can build brand new K7 servers with buttloads of hard drive space for under $500, but I have no idea where he gets his prices.)
You don't need a lot of RAM and you don't need a lot of CPU - my 64MB P133 can easily keep up with at least half a dozen machines all talking NFS to its exported filesystems. The two most important things are: a) big disks, and big IDE is cheap and fairly speedy nowadays (although I still prefer SCSI), and b) fast network cards, and the Intel EEPro 10/100 cards are under $50 in the stores, forget about mail-order prices.
Because it's so cheap to do this sort of thing with the free OS's that it's been many a time I've contemplated putting together a $500 box with a mid-range CPU and a couple big-ass hard drives doing software RAID, build a little web-based interface to edit the
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