Iomega's New Unix (Optional) NAS Appliance

Tora writes: "Zip disk maker Iomega has released a sexy new 1U Network Attached Storage server with an option for either Unix or Microsoft Windows as the OS. Their previous NAS offering was Windows-only; it is nice to see both OS options available, although they do not yet have pricing up for the Windows version."

Comments

Ralph Malph Alpha is a fucking moron!

[cyborg_monkey]

nt.

Re:Ralph Malph Alpha is a fucking moron!

[neal n bob]

why - because he bent you over and made you take it like a linux user?

Re:Ralph Malph Alpha is a fucking moron!

[cyborg_monkey]

I think you are mistaken, but that's ok, you are a fucking moron too.

Re:Ralph Malph Alpha is a fucking moron!

[Tasty Beef Jerky]

Surely you can't be serious!

Re:Ralph Malph Alpha is a fucking moron!

[Ralph Malph Alpha]

I agree with this post. But next time post it from one of your other inherited troll accounts, I miss getting all that attention from all those lovely small-penised suitors!!

Thank you for your support, pseudo_cybonkey!!!! -"MOUTH"

!!

!!!!!

Re:Ralph Malph Alpha is a fucking moron!

[Ralph Malph Alpha]

I agree with this post.

Reason - because I bent psuedo_monkey over and made him take it like a linux user.

WORD UP, WHACK OFF, PEACE OUT, HOMES.

Re:Ralph Malph Alpha is a fucking moron!

[cyborg_monkey]

Hey pussy! How are you doing? FYI, I only have one account.... come into #giz sometime, we can discuss this further...

Re:Ralph Malph Alpha is a fucking moron!

[Ralph Malph Alpha]

What's a #giz, I am confuse!!! I will not ejaculate into there, I dont know where it's been!

Oh now I get it, you are a fellow geekizoid scrote. Ifn's ya didn't knows it already imposter massa, cyborg monkey threw his arms up and quit over there too. It figgas, nigga.

Love ya boy! Take a double dose of meds tonight, your twitching is getting worse.

K00L

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, I'd love to get a beowolf cluster of these!!

Iomega..

[PopeAlien]

Mmm. Boy I hope these aren't susceptible to the click of death. Ah yes, the reliability of the zip disk..

Re:Iomega..

[DocSnyder]

The "click of death" was very bad for Iomega. About six years ago I had a Jaz drive with six disks. As soon as the first became unusable, the Jaz took all the other ones with it, which became probably my worst data loss. If anyone of my coworkers asked me if I would recommend a Iomega NAS device, that is, any Iomega device, what would you really expect me to say, regardless of whether it might be the greatest device ever?

Re:Iomega..

[PopeAlien]

Which is exactly why I find it strange that this comment was moderated a 'troll' or 'offtopic'.. This is a factual statement about a MAJOR problem some Iomega products had. In reality I hope and expect that experience has made Iomega a lot more attentive to reliablity problems. I guess we'll find out.

Re:Iomega..

[Mondrames]

The first three links returned are either dead or non applicable - here's a good one
CLICK OF DEATH

Re:Iomega..

[Cally]

And whatever happened to SparQ? I bought an excellent 1Gb drive with some free carts thrown in, about a month before the entire firm went bust. (approx) three years later, it's still my primary backup device - yet it cost about the same price as 10 or 100Mb Jaz drives... and we're still using them (Jaz) at work(!) I guess it's just another VHS/Beta situation...

Re:Iomega..

[Peter La Casse]

Which is exactly why I find it strange that this comment was moderated a 'troll' or 'offtopic'.. This is a factual statement about a MAJOR problem some Iomega products had. In reality I hope and expect that experience has made Iomega a lot more attentive to reliablity problems. I guess we'll find out.

Well, I was one of the people who modified it "troll" (obviously that will go away now that I'm posting this message.) What I really wanted to modify it was "irrelevant," which is close to "offtopic," except that I figured that it could be an attempt to get people to talk about something irrelevant, which would make it a troll.

All of this is based on my opinion that the idea that this product could suffer from the "click of death" is absurd. This a completely different product, and I highly doubt that iomega puts zip or jaz disks in it.

If the original claim had been "I hope it don't suffer from quality control problems such as the click of death" the situation would have been completely different. Maybe I'm splitting hairs, but I hate to see ignorance displayed, and if the post had ended up being modded to oblivion, the poster (oops, looks like that's you) would have been saved some embarrassment.

Re:Iomega..

[kbonin]

I'm afraid I must disagree.

The "click of death" issue IS related to the iomega NAS appliance, in that it came from the same company, and said companies response to what came to be known as a serious design or manufacturing flaw turned many people away from trusting an iomega product in a critical role again.

Wouldn't you like to know, before purchasing a product from a company, that a previous product marketed for similar needs suffered a terrible defect? And even if the technology of the new product is dissimilar to that of the previous, wouldn't you like to know that companies customer service policy included such features as pretending the flaw didn't exist, refusing to issue RMA's on the defect, etc. ad nauseum?

Re:Iomega..

[shepd]

>wouldn't you like to know that companies customer service policy included such features as pretending the flaw didn't exist, refusing to issue RMA's on the defect, etc. ad nauseum?

Don't forget having to call long distance and stay on hold for 105 minutes to get an RMA number (if you were lucky enough to convince them to do it). I may as well have trashed my drive. My phone bill was about the same price as it ($300 at the time).

Re:Iomega..

[nathanm]

And whatever happened to SparQ?

You mean Syquest, the maker of the SparQ and other removable storage. Iomega bought their intellectual property shortly after they went bankrupt. Mostly so nobody could use the technology to start a potential competitor IMHO. I hope they at least incorporate some of Syquest's technology into their products, as it was better than Iomega's at the time. I eventually caved in and bought a Zip drive, since most of my friends and the computers at work and school all had Zip drives.

Re:Iomega..

[jandrese]

IMHO, the Click of Death was overrated. At least in my school it seemed the only people who got it were the people who abused their drives (dropping them, cramming those zip disks in there with 20 foot-pounds of force, etc...). The real reason the Zip drive is a footnote in history is the cost of the media. $10 for 100MB (which I believe is still the going rate) is way way too expensive to replace $0.30 floppy disks, even if they do hold more per dollar. I got a Zip drive thinking the media would come down to $1 or $2 a pop and people would use them like floppy disks. Most people don't mind if they loose a floppy or two trading files because they are so cheap, but a $10 zip disk is another matter entirely. Now my Zip drive gathers dust in the corner, fully obsolete by ethernet, broadband, and CD-Burner technologies. It is rather sobering to think that you can buy 25 (or in some cases 50!) CDs for the cost of a single zip disk.

Re:Iomega..

[Anonymous Coward]

The jaz drive problem was, as I understand it limited to those manufactured during a limited period at a particular factory in Malaysia. I purchased these and there was a chain reaction. The bad cartridges could be used for backup, but when time came to restore the backups they were unreadable. Unfortunately, without my realizing it, these cartridges had destroyed my drive so that any other cartridges placed in it were similarly destroyed (earlier backups with previously unaffected cartridges). Realizing the drive was bad, I proceeded to try the older, (previously unaffected cartridges that had just been destroyed by the recently destroyed drive) in other jaz drives until finally everythin was destroyed and my data was gone.

Iomega was good at replacing everything (thousands of dollars worth) but the data was gone.

I knew my own experience, but thought it was an unfortunate isolated incident specific to that factory. I didn't know of the zip drive problem.

Thinking the jaz drive problem was a once in a lifetime unfortunate event I went ahead and started using clidk disks in my laptops. Lo and behold the same problem occurred again. Now if I had known about the zip drive problem at the time, having experienced my own jaz cartridge disaster, I probably wouldn't have used the click disks -- at least not without checking to see if they had anything incommon with the previous zip and jaz construction.

The problems with the zip, jaz and click drives may turn out to be unrelated to this new technology, but they certainly are not necessarily irrelevant. The new technology may be completely different, but that is something to be determined and I am very glad I now know about the earlier problems and know what to look for before considering the new storage solution.

There are things that the zip, jaz and click drives have in common and Iomega has produced other products that I have not heard of anyone having problems with. I may very well even go with the new product. But to call the above irrelevant?

Re:Iomega..

[Wolfrider]

The SparQ was an absolute piece of crap. If you ever saw the inside of the disks (barely protected platter behind a simple strip of rubber with several CENTIMETERS space below it for the drive heads) you'd know they were an accident waiting to happen. I I ran my first Linux distro on a Sparq 1Gig, and it totally failed within about 3 months, maybe less. Frustrating as hell.

Good.

[llamalicious]

I'm sick of being tied into a MS-centric NAS box.
You're paying royalties to Microsoft through the NAS manufacturer, since you're technically getting an custom OEM version of Windows 2000 to run the machine. Saving a little cash just makes it even sweeter.
Sorry Bill, I don't want to have to line your pocket on _every_ product I purchase. :)

Re:Good.

[iononmori]

now only if they added netapp like snapshots I am there. I have searched and searched, I have to say nothing compares to a netapp. just my .02c

Re:Good.

[jelle]

AFAIK, 'snapshot' is just a filesystem mirror. Nothing a little perl script can't fix.

Re:Good.

[Libor Vanek]

My company is producing NAS server based on Linux (RH 7.2) supporting all kinds of Windows, Apples an UN*X. I can't imagine doing such a stuff with with Windows. E.g. Maxtor's NAS has 1 GB (yes, GIGABYTE!) RAM - our system runs @128 MB with 90 MB used for caching... Should I tell more? (maybe that our EU price for 1.6 TB RAID5 is 6 k$ ;))))

Re:Good.

[Libor Vanek]

I forget to say the main thing - Maxtor is using Windows 2000 as their NAS OS.

Re:Good.

[Wesley Felter]

Nope; NetApp implements snapshots using copy-on-write, so they consume less disk space, take effectively no time to create, and are atomic with respect to filesystem operations (so there won't be any problems if you're accessing the filesystem while the snapshot is in progress). Check out their File System Design for an NFS File Server Appliance white paper for the technical details if you're interested.

Re:Good.

[NetJunkie]

Why can't you imagine it? Our Compaq NAS box running Windows does all that. Yes, it has 1GB of RAM but that's just for file caching. Contrary to Slashdot belief Windows itself doesn't need even close to that.

RAM is cheap, who cares.

Re:Good.

[diabloii]

Other choices are EMC IP4700 and Celerra products for midrange to enterprise level NAS storage.

Re:Good.

[Libor Vanek]

Because I'm project manager/main programmer. Imagine - whole NAS was done just by 2 men/1.5 year and it has more features then any NAS on the market for 50-300%(!) less price...

I can't imagine how dificult (read expensive) must be doing (from programmers point of view - not from users!) some things in Windows (e.g. changing NAS IP addres by web browser, updating new kernel/OS services just by uploading 1 file etc...)

And that I don't speak about licencing (AFAIK it's forbidden to run email/WWW/SQL server on such a server - small companies don't want to have X servers for X services).

Re:Good.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.tricord.com/appliance/aggregation

Re:Good.

[RustyTaco]

Nope; NetApp implements snapshots using copy-on-write, so they consume less disk space, take effectively no time to create, and are atomic with respect to filesystem operations

You mean like the Linux LVM's snapshots? They are at the block level, not the filesystem level, but with a little care and a filesystem driver that doesn't try to write to the snapshot even though it's read-only(ext3, probably reiser) then you're just a small shell script away from that functionality.

I've actually been meaning to set this up as a cron job at work so I can have 2-5days of "live" backups.

- RustyTaco

Re:Good.

[jelle]

Copy-on-write files, that's a nice feature I've already been waiting for for other reasons in Linux filesystems. Maybe one day I'll feel strong enough again to poke around in the kernel.

I can see how that would really, really speedup a snapshot too.

this would make a great Pogging surface...

[pogmeister]

and it works with Unix too? That is probably the coolest thing next to this.

I still do not understand why people are so enamored in Linux, it isnt like it has ANY innovations.

pogmeister

I'm confused

[Hemos (editor)]

Iomega's New Unix (Optional) NAS Appliance

But I was told that Unix is like a dark, moldy basement and I need to find a way out through Windows. :-(

Slashdot v2.0

14.

[GafTheHorseInTears]

We have unlearned something. We have be come more modest in every way. We no longer derive man from the "spirit," from the "god- head"; we have dropped him back among the beasts. We regard him as the strongest of the beasts because he is the craftiest; one of the results thereof is his intellectuality. On the other hand, we guard ourselves against a conceit which would assert itself even here: that man is the great second thought in the process of organic evolution. He is, in truth, anything but the crown of creation: beside him stand many other animals, all at similar stages of development... And even when we say that we say a bit too much, for man, relatively speaking, is the most botched of all the animals and the sickliest, and he has wandered the most dangerously from his instincts--though for all that, to be sure, he remains the most interesting!--As regards the lower animals, it was Descartes who first had the really admirable daring to describe them as machina; the whole of our physiology is directed toward proving the truth of this doctrine. Moreover, it is illogical to set man apart, as Descartes did: what we know of man today is limited precisely by the extent to which we have regarded him, too, as a machine. Formerly we accorded to man, as his inheritance from some higher order of beings, what was called "free will"; now we have taken even this will from him, for the term no longer describes anything that we can understand. The old word "will" now connotes only a sort of result, an individual reaction, that follows inevitably upon a series of partly discordant and partly harmonious stimuli--the will no longer "acts," or "moves." . . . Formerly it was thought that man's consciousness, his "spirit," offered evidence of his high origin, his divinity. That he might be perfected, he was advised, tortoise-like, to draw his senses in, to have no traffic with earthly things, to shuffle off his mortal coil--then only the important part of him, the "pure spirit," would remain. Here again we have thought out the thing better: to us consciousness, or "the spirit," appears as a symptom of a relative imperfection of the organism, as an experiment, a groping, a misunderstanding, as an affliction which uses up nervous force unnecessarily--we deny that anything can be done perfectly so long as it is done consciously. The "pure spirit" is a piece of pure stupidity: take away the nervous system and the senses, the so-called "mortal shell," and the rest is miscalculation--that is all!...

Do you think Iomega is sexy?!

[BoredGuy]

Zip disk maker Iomega has released a sexy new 1U Network Attached Storage server

Wow do you want to marry a sexy IU Network Attached Storage Server?

What about girl? :)

Stay away from Iomega

[Neil Watson]

The click of death has already been mentioned but a few years ago I bought 10 Iomega IDE tape drives for some workstations (the network was P2P and I was inexperienced). I had a %50 failure rate on the drives. They would snap the tapes as soon as you loaded them. I would RMA the drives get new ones and some of those would do the same thing.

Re:Stay away from Iomega

[stilwebm]

I had several friends warn me about Iomega, who had similar failure rates with their tape drives. Thinking the times had changed and that Iomega had surely learned from their past, I bought a Jaz 1GB drive. It died approximately every three months, usually taking a full 1GB of data with it. At work my production department bought 5 drives, and cartridges were almost always bad by their thrid use. A 2GB drive, which was supposed to be more reliable, only proved to eat more files than the 1GB version. To top off all of these problems, Iomega's customer support was quite unfriendly, always made you fax originaly receipts in as proof of date of purchase (for replacement drives that died too) and several times tried to deny warranty claims on their lifetime warranty for media. Best of all, the drives and media were always kept well within the environmental specs. Hopefully their NAS box uses another manufacturer's fully sealed, dustproof hard drive and interface boards. And don't put anything important on these boxes!

Re:Stay away from Iomega

[3Bees]

First the complaint(abreviated): I had a %50 failure rate on the drives
and then the sig:
It is easier to get forgiveness than permission.
:-)

Re:Stay away from Iomega

[linuxpc]

I bought Iomega Hipzip 1 year ago. I would never ever buy something from Iomega again. Easy as that :-(

Price for the MS-Version

[NWT]

they do not yet have pricing up for the Windows version

I know the price: too much!

If you're right, noone replies ...

Re:Price for the MS-Version

[Indras]

I know the price: too much!

Actually, I hear the price is approximately equal to eleventy billion dollars.

Note: Please don't mod down if you don't catch the SNL reference :o)

Re:Price for the MS-Version

[dohcvtec]

Yeah, but since it runs Windows you don't need those _expensive_experts_ :)

Re:Price for the MS-Version

[Anonymous Coward]

Based on my experience with "Micro$oft Winblows," my opinion will be that the Micro$oft Winblows version will be much more expensive and much less reliable.

Thank you, thank you.

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[Dada Troll]

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Re:5tr4|\|93 p0$+a?�?

[Anonymous Coward]

You have a typo on line 4. HoWEver should read h0w3ver.

Re:5tr4|\|93 p0$+a?�?

[Dada Troll]

+H@nK5 a l0t, 1 49reE 1T'5 +0O 5imPLe, 8U+ mE tHInK$ IT sh0Uld b3.:

|-|0\/\/3\/3r

+o 8e 4C+U@lly L3370!!1

|-|uhU|-|\/Hu|-|\/|-|!1

./ paid advertisement?

[ClarkEvans]

I guess the Article about SlashDot's new paid advertisement plan isn't a joke then.

Re:./ paid advertisement?

[Anonymous Coward]

Next, Cowboy Neal reviews the Burger King's triple-bacon cheeseburger!

Just be careful

[rebrane]

When it starts making a repetitive 'click' sound, you're pretty much screwed.

So does "UNIX based" mean Unix or Linux?

[geders]

I'm sure that would affect pricing if it was Unix or Linux based...

Re:So does "UNIX based" mean Unix or Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

BSD I would imagine, that is what quantum snap servers used. I don't think that the linux license will permit modifications w/o distributing the source. I wonder if they will be putting a web-based interface over the top of these things, to hide the OS from the user like quantum did. If that is the case, why distribute two different OS versions? Yes.. probably covered in the article which I am too lazy to read :|

It's too bad Iomega is dying anyway

[b.foster]

One of my college buddies took a job at Iomega after graduation because it was an up-and-coming company - back in its heydey, most new PCs came with a shiny Zip100 drive next to the floppy, and times were good. Iomega used to be one of the tech world's few great innovators - and the Jaz concept was pure genius, especially compared with the primitive Bernoulli boxes that Jaz superceded.

Unfortunately, times have been tough for Iomega. They haven't posted a profit for several years. On a related note, they haven't come up with a decent new product for several years. Instead of innovating, they tried to get into the business of producing cheap, commodity devices (like tape drives and CD writers) that nobody was interested in buying. Coupled with the Click of Death problems, this new strategy backfired and sent Iomega into the red - where they have remained ever since.

And that brings me to my story: I talked to my buddy on the phone a few weeks ago, and he said that morale is low at Iomega. The company has been slashing jobs and pay every quarter, and he has had to lay off many of his subordinates. He said that the NAS idea is a last-ditch effort to squeeze profits out of a dying industry, and that Iomega's business plan is to sell the NAS devices at a loss (to stay competitive with the big guys) and to sell overpriced support contracts to try to stay in business. For his sake I hope it works out, but for all intents and purposes Iomega is dead. But nobody said that mormons have any business sense anyway, so I don't blame them.

/B.

Re:It's too bad Iomega is dying anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember, oh, 5-6 years ago? Before the irrational exuberance of Amazon.com, DrKoop.com, and petfood.com, Iomega was the little stock that couldn't do wrong. The Motley Fool got famous hyping it.

Re:It's too bad Iomega is dying anyway

[Guns n' Roses Troll]

At least you didn't say "For all intensive purposes". I would of had to feed your balls to your mother.

Re:It's too bad Iomega is dying anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

> But nobody said that mormons have any business sense anyway, so I don't blame them.

What a pompous ass. Mormons are per capita the richest religion in the world -- their business sense is legendary.

That said, thanks for the story. I'm going to short Iomega stock.

Re:It's too bad Iomega is dying anyway

[OsamaBinLager]

Mormons? Hah. The Shi'i Muslims (Persians) and the Jews have them beat by a mile.

Mormons, per capita the richest religion? You crack me up.

Re:It's too bad Iomega is dying anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

Douh. Meant in the US (that's all that matters, right?) Google "religion+per capita+income+mormon". Worldwide, where did you get your data? I'm interested.

Point was the guy was talking outa his ass.

Re:It's too bad Iomega is dying anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

Did they sorta run WordPerfect into the ground, i.e. miss the Windows boat?

Re:It's too bad Iomega is dying anyway

[OsamaBinLager]

Out of my ass :) You realize any source I have is likely to be inflamatory and inaccurate,but here you are:

Persians have highest income rate and grad rate, blah blah. No evidence given, but what the hell :) (Persian chicks are hot too. God I love my girlfriend *G*)

Claims that Zoroastrians (Zoroastrianism is the original religion of Persia) have the highest per capita income in the world

OK I'm tired now, but all the links I found are like those above, total nonsense. I'm sorry, but I don't have the facts. Common sense tells you that Jews have the highest income, Persians are well known for their snobbery (god bless em) so they act as if they have the highest income, and peoples of British descent have the most combined power through centuries of exporting profits from colonies.

Server Apliances are good things.

[jellomizer]

While I find it really sad that this day and age that they need a Unix (Wich probably covers most Modern OS's Today (From Linux, Solaris, ... , OS X) ) and a Windows version (a group of OS's Made by one company). But Server Apliances are a good thing for companies. It allows a clean way to get your server information done without having more PCs and Servers around. Use a Cobol Server for Web Services, Use this Iomega device for sharing your network. And with a lot less work then with actuall servers at near the same cost (Unless you buy the cheapo PC stuff that you have to replace every month). Plus most of the time these Server Aplinces uses the correct tool (OS, Supporting Software, etc) for the right job. Alowing it to be more dependable and by not letting us mess with it and make it do more then it was designed, assures that it runs more securly then most servers. And gets people away from those Windows server farms and allows more open standards.

Re:Server Apliances are good things.

[cymen]

Why? Because it's cool? Server information done? I'm sorry but all of this is just to hook in the business people who can get these things budgeted quicker than the techies. The "benefit" that such devices provide is:
1) higher cost
2) lower performance
3) poor functionality
4) vendor lock
5) lost productivity trying to get the damn things functioning properly

Replacing PC servers with devices like these and Cobalt boxes is a joke both in cost and performance.... If you have a problem that results in your continously tinkering with servers maybe you should address it instead of buying your way out of a fixation :). I'll take a standard PC anyday while you fondle your beautiful Cobalt.

In the long run I can see that NAS devices will be beneficial but right now the cheap ones simply aren't mature enough to trust...

Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I missing something here?

I always thought the point of NAS was that it used standards like TCP/IP and a web interface specifically so it wasn't linked to one specific OS. I'd expect any NAS device to be useable with any platform that supports a browser and IP networking, so just how was the older NAS device Windows-only? Was it using NetBIOS or something?

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows only, as in the only OS that will run on the NAS device (outside of some hacking) is Windows, not that it only allows Windows computers to use it.

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm still missing something here.

Why the fuck would I care what OS it is running?

It should be running QNX or some other thing embedded. It should not matter what OS it runs, just as it doesn't matter to me what 'brand' spark plugs my car has in it.

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, I see now. Thanks for that.

While looking through the specs, I also noticed that the UNIX-based boxes have the hot-swap drive advantage over the Windows boxes. That's a very nice incentive to buy one.

Re:Huh?

[caspper69]

While looking through the specs, I also noticed that the UNIX-based boxes have the hot-swap drive advantage over the Windows boxes. That's a very nice incentive to buy one.

If this is the case, then it's a design flaw. Sheesh, the two Compaq Proliant Servers we had a few years back (PII-333/256MB/18GB) had hot swappable SCSI drives. And that was running NT4 SP1 !! (Well, it eventually got to SP6).

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

? Parent is wrong. The actual OS the NAS is using is just Windows2000, stripped down to the bare necessities. Windows2000 powered NAS devices can be accessed by computers of any OS.

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Doh! You're right...

What I really meant to say was hot spare - that is to say it kicks in automatically if one drive fails. They all have hot swap drives (phew!), check it out here.

No GigaE? What a waste :)

[2nd Post!]

Hmm, Raid 5 in hardware, with speeds approaching, what, 40mbps? 60mbps? 80mbps?

Yet 100bT networking with a throughput of what, 10-12mbps? GigaE options would let them have 100-120mbps, at least...

Re:No GigaE? What a waste :)

[klieber]

You're right -- GigE would be a natural option for this device.

That's probably why they included it.

http://www.iomega.com/nas/p410_sys.html

Re:No GigaE? What a waste :)

[Verteiron]

There needs to be a +1 *Zing* mod for posts like that.

Re:No GigaE? What a waste :)

[GigsVT]

Good one, in seriousness though, the original poster was wrong in another respect, adding GigE, even with 9000 MTU, gives you nothing near 10X speed increase.

Maybe if you went in the source code and tweaked all your software, it would come closer, but we are talking maybe a 2-4X speed increase over 100Mbit, even using Jumbo Frames.

Re:No GigaE? What a waste :)

[2nd Post!]

Sorry, I clicked on tech specs:
http://www.iomega.com/nas/nas_tech2.html

It mentioned 10bT/100bT, and nowhere 1000bT. It didn't occur to me to scan through every variation to see that the highest end model *did* have 1000bT when the lower end ones did not.

And doesn't GigE give you more connections at the same bandwidth, rather than significantly higher bandwidth with only one connection?

Re:No GigaE? What a waste :)

[GigsVT]

And doesn't GigE give you more connections at the same bandwidth, rather than significantly higher bandwidth with only one connection?

No, it's one connection, it's just a whole lot less efficient, because programs were not designed to use GigE. You have to use Jumbo Frames (9000MTU) to even get any signifant improvement, and even then, unless you are willing to edit the source code of every app you run and change the way it handles socket buffers, to get a little more out of it.

Re:No GigaE? What a waste :)

[GigsVT]

I mean even then it's not a huge improvement. You will see maybe 300Mbit/s or so, depending on how the applications you are running were written.

Appletalk is supported so I assume...

[DebianDog]

Appletalk is supported so I assume that OSX is also supported via NFS? Anyone. I was not quite sure.

Re:Appletalk is supported so I assume...

[netringer]

You know what they say about ASSUMEing.
It may mean that you get to access that 60GB at 200Kbps over localtalk.

Affordable for home users??

[billmaly]

Let's face it, home users are going to start needing additional space outside of their desktop PC's in a few years. Music, video, and information will eventually overflow their older PC's, and many people won't want to buy a new PC, yet they'll want 24 hour access to their data.

Anyway...my point, and I do have one, is this: The company that can make an affordable ($200) NAS and make it SIMPLE for ANYONE to use, will succeed. THe cheapest out there (last time I checked) is @$400, and is a paltry 40GB. Sell 100 GB of storage for $200 or less, and people will buy it. I rolled my own NAS for not much more than the cost of a new HDD, but I have mad skillz that the average consumer doesn't (ability to scrounge and build a PC for close to nothing) :-).

Re:Affordable for home users??

[Wesley Felter]

Disk capacity is doubling every year, so I predict that home users will just migrate to newer disks or add external Firewire disks. NAS is overkill.

Re:Affordable for home users??

[billmaly]

NAS is overkill, until 2 or more PC's want to access the data that is stored. Copying identical data to all PC's in the home isn't all that practical, IMHO. Offloading that storage to the NAS in the basement and sharing it among all is a more elegant solution. Plus, it makes backing up files SOOO much simpler!

Re:Affordable for home users??

[Anonymous Coward]

La marijuana a des effets seulement temporaires sur le QI, selon une étude

Re:Affordable for home users??

[five dollar troll]

see, that's what I'm looking for as well...some free, possibly open-source package that is easy to install and works on old hardware. Something kind of like SmoothWall (well, okay, it's not open source), but tailored to operate as a NAS device or Snap Server.

Say what you will about the gangly mob of bastards who made SmoothWall, but it IS a good idea, and it worked well. I really wish there were more "network appliance"-type Open Source projects out there, instead of the current load of crap like slashcode.

Re:Affordable for home users??

[bofkentucky]

What happened to Global Distributed Microsoft Filestore we are all supposed to migrate to in the future? We won't need local disks just a $99 license for a bios flash every 6 months

Re:Affordable for home users??

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the upstairs spare bedroom.
Try locking up your machine a few times when the wife's at here machine working on some shared files. You'll get an NAS really fast.

Gives New Meaning...

[Myriad]

Wow, that certainly gives new meaning to The Ping of Death!

Re:Gives New Meaning...

[Guns n' Roses Troll]

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH OH LUNIX THAT SI TEH FUNNYEST EVAR!!!1!!!

lameness filter is lame. lameness filter is lame. lameness filter is lame. lameness filter is lame. lameness filter is lame. lameness filter is lame.

$4000 for 480GB seems a bit much.

[klieber]

It seems as though there should be an open-source software package that would allow you to take an old computer case, throw some disks, a NIC or three and a RAID card in there and have your own, poor-man's NAS device. All you'd need would be some sort of slimmed-down linux distro optimized to serve files and with some sort of web front end for configuring NIS/Samba shares.

With 160GB IDE drives running for about $225 and IDE RAID cards similarly cheap, this seems like a natural nitche for linux to be in. Sure, it's not enterprise-ready and won't be as scalable as a SCSI-based system, but it would be perfect for a massive PVR or small-business file server.

Anyone know of such a project?

Re:$4000 for 480GB seems a bit much.

[GigsVT]

Well, we did this.

Re:$4000 for 480GB seems a bit much.

[PapaZit]

Just make sure that you're not using ext2 and you either turn off cached writes or hook your NAS into an UPS.

Re:$4000 for 480GB seems a bit much.

[saintlupus]

It seems as though there should be an open-source software package that would allow you to take an old computer case, throw some disks, a NIC or three and a RAID card in there and have your own, poor-man's NAS device.

cd /usr/ports/net/samba
make && make install

--saint

Re:$4000 for 480GB seems a bit much.

[Corporate Troll]

You are right, that is one way....but then, I have a Mac running OS X and a server running OpenBSD. Both have Samba 2.2.2 installed and they never show up in "Network Neighborhood" of my Windows machines. Why? I have no clue... (and google searches didn't help much either) Shares are mountable though and computers can be found using "find computer".
For communication with the Mac and the OpenBSD machine I stick with FTP which suits most of my needs (and feels faster, but that could be just a feeling)

Re:$4000 for 480GB seems a bit much.

[jandrese]

Heck, if you want to be really cheap you don't even need those IDE RAID cards. I built a home brew 650GB NAC for a little under $1500 several months ago (10 80GB drives, RAID5 through vinum on FreeBSD). Beware that Promise (who seemed like a natural choice) only supports 1 of any card in any system. In reality you can put 2 ATA100 adapters in a system (and a third "misc" adapter, like the on-board ATA controller or something). I have them broken into two LUNs so I can use the slave positions for the second LUN without impacting the performace of the system.
There are several caveats:
1. Cooling: keep those HDs cool (not easy in a standard case, but it can be done, you may need to rig some sort of active cooling on the HDs, especially if they are in half height 3 1/2 bays).
2. Power: Jury rigging a second power supply might be a good idea. In any case buy good high power power supplies.
3. Connectivity: I didn't need super high speeds, so I just used a decent 10/100 Ethernet card.
4. Case: Cases large enough to hold that many drives are not common, but they aren't too hard to find.

It's really not as hard of a project as it originally appears. And $4000 for a 480GB device is really pretty cheap in the business market from what I understand.

How long?

[DickPhallus]

I'm sure this will work great, until it starts making a strange clicking noise...

A howto:

[Anonymous Coward]

Ive written a how to on how to use these things

It can work on over 20 OSes!

Heres the link

Re:A howto:

[Anonymous Coward]

Now that is the click of death!

FSTFUKP!

[Anonymous Coward]

First STFU Katz p...

What's that?
Oh.
errrr... sorry.

COD

[TimButterfield]

If the click of death happens in a data center and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?

Re:COD

[orpheus2000]

If the click of death happens in a data center and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?

No, but just wait til the admin comes back from lunch...

...I can hear the screams now!

Re:COD

[craw]

In a data center no one can hear you scream.

I would also be careful eating lunch.

Is Iomega's web server running on a Iomega NAS?

[DocSnyder]

I had the same effect with my rest-in-peace Jaz drive when it broke - the machine became slow and unreactive. Connection timed out... Or is the site simply /.ed? ;-)

Whats the compatibility with MS SQL

[xtermz]

MS haters just skip past this post....

Anyway, what is the compatibility of this thing with MS SQL server. last I checked, there was only like one or two NAS devices that could support SQL databases on them.

I'ld love to have a cheaper solution of having SQL database files on a network device, without sacrificing reliablity...

Does anybody do anything with SQL Server and a NAS device currently?

Re:Whats the compatibility with MS SQL

[smcavoy]

It's an IDE based system, would you want to run a DB on an IDE system, even if it's dedicated to just file serving?

Re:Whats the compatibility with MS SQL

[s4ltyd0g]

Over a network I wouldnt even what to do that with SCSI devices.

Re:Whats the compatibility with MS SQL

[Karl Cocknozzle]

As I recall, SQL Server simply pukes if you try to put the database on a network volume until version 7.0... Not sure about 2000, didn't get around to using it prior to my layoff.

Just to clarify: Do you want to have the database FILES sit on the NAS box or install SQL Server on the NAS box? One might be possible, but unwise. The other would be both impossible and unwise.

Re:Whats the compatibility with MS SQL

[Anonymous Coward]

Screw NAS and go SCSI over Ethernet with Falconstor. www.falconstor.com

P.S. Falconstor runs Linux

Re:Whats the compatibility with MS SQL

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're going to store your database on a dedicated fileserver, then why not just have the fileserver machine run the database engine? Run your Postgres or MySQL or MicrosoftSQL on the box that has the disks, and only use the network for queries and results.

Re:Whats the compatibility with MS SQL

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft hates NAS devices and hates both SQL Server and Exchange Server running on NAS or SAN devices. Why? They want you to buy as many Windows licenses as possible. A NAS box with massive storage in it makes them no money, while an Exchange cluster makes them a pretty penny.

Roll Your Own NAS Recipe

[UNIBLAB_PowerPC]

First, head to pricewatch.com.

Pick up two 160 GB drives for about $200 each, an Athlon 1.4 GHz mainboard combo for about $140, a full-tower case with redundant power supplies for about $200 (or a *U rack unit), an Intel 10/100 ethernet card for $20, and the rest of the pieces/parts can be had for less than $100 with frugal shopping. Total cost for twice the storage of Iomega's lowest-end offering (which is $2000): about $860. With the remaining money you're saving, pick up a solid tape drive and practice religious backups (or step up to SCSI). I'm sorry, but I'm tired of paying a premium for "brand name" crap. I have the feeling a lot of other folks on this list are, too. Heck, for the Windows guys, spend the remaining money on a full version of your favorite Redmond OS. Rinse, lather, repeat -- and be satisfied with the fruits of your labors.

Re:Roll Your Own NAS Recipe

[Milican]

Better than that... you can get an Asus Terminator barebones system that *really* cuts costs...

• ASUS Terminator $199
  
• 2x 160GB Drives $400
  
• 512MB of RAM $130
  
• Athlon 1.4GHz (Tbird) $104
  

Ethernet is onboard :)

JOhn

Re:Roll Your Own NAS Recipe

[Anonymous Coward]

Who do you call when it breaks? Yourself? That may be good enough for you, but for a multi-million dollar company it's not. They need somebody to blame/sue when things go wrong.

Re:Roll Your Own NAS Recipe

[Anonymous Coward]

Just so you know, the first thing thing your replacement will do is replace all of your frankenclones that you so wisely spent time screwing together with quality namebrand supported stuff.

Re:Roll Your Own NAS Recipe

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the first thing his replacement will do is throw away that heap of shitty little technical manuals that came with each component of his frankenclone garbage.

That won't clear up as much floor space or reduce power consumption as having custodial servies move the noisy hot pile of shit out to the dumpster, but it'll sure reduce clutter.

Re:Roll Your Own NAS Recipe

[Anonymous Coward]

Why doesn't the replacement just do his job and be the support person? What the hell is he being paid for, if he just replaces working stuff with more expensive working stuff? And when there's a problem, he spends his time on the phone to namebrand tech support, instead of just fixing the problem?

Oh, I get it: the replacement is a trained monkey MCSE who doesn't know how to think and do things.

Re:Roll Your Own NAS Recipe

[Anonymous Coward]

Because you clown 'supporting stuff' doesn't mean spending all your time fighting fires and replacing the broken crap the first clown installed to save a few bucks.

If you weren't a clown you'd know the support time is more valuable than the few extra bucks saved buying crap.

If you were smart you'd know the data being stored is waaay more valuable than the support time or hardware costs.

If you were an uber genius you'd know his job is more important to him than a few extra bucks outta some budget.

Re:Roll Your Own NAS Recipe

[shepd]

And if you were a double uber genius you'd realise that Iomega has been sued (and has lost) for being, in general, a shitty company to deal with. [They still owe me a free $5 tech support call from the last class action suit they lost. Judge was so mad he made 'em post the decision on their website.]

A triple uber genius would realise that a shitty company won't help you out when the crunch comes.

A quadruple uber genius would realise that if no ones there to help you with your propreitary box when it gets sick, your boss gets really mad.

The ultimate genius would realise that the boss wouldn't blame the purchasing decision on himself, his peers, or those above him. Instead the genius would realise that the blame would fall on him.

Sometimes a "frankenclone" is truly the best choice. As far as iOmega goes, a pen and paper is the best choice.

BTW: "Iomega sued" returns over 1,400 hits on Google, whereas their once strong competitor Syquest receives a paltry 334.

Re:Roll Your Own NAS Recipe

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL, are you going to call IOMEGA to fix your stuff? There are a few vendors that I would trust with an important server system, and IOMEGA isn't one of them. Any "multi-million dollar company" isn't going to be buying one of these things for anything important. Real file servers should be SCSI based, with at least 10k RPM spindle speeds.

Re:Roll Your Own NAS Recipe

[Anonymous Coward]

Geez, I had no idea that the entire server market was covered only by Iomega and the Rednecks on PriceWatch. Thanks for clearing that up for the rest of us!

Re:Roll Your Own NAS Recipe

[Anonymous Coward]

Please read the title of topic of discussion. Notice it says Iomega. Not "NAS in general avaliable from many different companies listed on PriceWatch".

If I were talking about other companies, I'd have chosen to do it where it belongs, assclown.

If you can't stay on topic, expect to be insulted.

flyingbuttmonkeys at 11 O'clock!!

[Thud457]

"Iomega's business plan is to sell the NAS devices at a loss"...

You might want to tell your buddy to remind them to get people to sign a contract if they're going that route!

My thoughts on this are like my thoughts on...

[3-State Bit]

...all embedded and/or otherwise non-interacting technology: you plug it in, you get the storage. Who cares what OS is on? As long as it doesn't crash.

Which is the key criterion: doesn't crash.
I'd rather be locked in than locked out.

Once bitten, twice shy

[Anonymous Coward]

After suffering reliability problem with Zip and Jaz drives, why would I want to risk buying another Iomega product? In this case, it's twice bitten, thrice shy.

This is the essential problem that Iomega faces--anybody who has bought their products in the past won't buy them in the future.

Re:Once bitten, twice shy

[Guns n' Roses Troll]

Great White is cool. White Snake too. 80s rock is the best.

Forget the Price...

[n2kra]

What about the cost? TCO

404 error

[IAgreeWithThisPost]

IAgreeWithThisPost has posted 404 comments

Hmmm...

[NetJunkie]

They are light on the details. What speed drives? What kind of internal controller? Anything in this box redundant or is all my storage gone when a power supply fails? Things like that are important, and they don't seem to mention it when I looked. I also question buying something like this from someone that makes nothing else even close.

We use the Compaq TaskSmart 2400N NAS. Yes, it runs Win2K but it's rock solid and very good. It's built around a normal Compaq server so we already have spares. It can do up to 10TB in Cluster config. It uses all standard Compaq drives and parts which can be shared among other systems. Plus, you can manage it from Insight Manager. It also exports out to NFS for UNIX clients.

It seems anyone that needed 1/2 TB on a NAS would already have other servers and would be better served going with their vendor's answer, assuming they had a good one.

Iomewhat?

[tcc]

Those guys that have a buttload of dysfuntionnal 1GB JAZ drives?

Those same guys that brought the BUZ video editing card that ended up with no good drivers and being just another expensive scsi card since the video part wasn't working half decently? (yeah I got one)

Those same people that had loads of trouble with their portable cdr drives?

Those same people selling the infamous Click! and never took off and left you with an expensive useless piece of ....

Hell, at the price they sell their stuff, I'd still go with my solution: IDE based, for performance, 3ware board with loads of drives. You get linux/windows support. Medium storage, good performance, Adaptec board with 4 drives, and POS version, well if you thought about getting NAS (which is a tad too expensive in my opinion) you don't need to consider a POS solution :).

Anyways, with their track record, I'd go with a Maxtor NAS or any other company before Iomega, and even if there would be only Iomega in that market, I'd make my own solution with off the shelf parts before trusting my data to them, Did that mistake too many times already.

Re:Iomewhat?

[rtaylor]

Fool me once, shame on you.

Fool me 5 times, shame on me?

Re:Iomewhat?

[poot_rootbeer]

Those same guys that brought the BUZ video editing card that ended up with no good drivers and being just another expensive scsi card since the video part wasn't working half decently? (yeah I got one)

I hope you didn't try to hang a SCSI Zip drive off the card... those things had to be the ONLY device on the SCSI chain, or else they'd lose data (even more rapidly than Zip drives normally do).

The advent of cheap and plentiful CD-R technology couldn't have come soon enough. The most catastrophic data losses I've ever experienced are all thanks to Iomega's lousy products.

Re:Iomewhat?

[Russ Steffen]

You mean dual-host SCSI and Parallel port Zip Drive, the one that tried to talk both from the same connector. The SCSI-only version didn't have that problem, it had some others though.

Re:Iomewhat?

[PhotoGuy]

Anyways, with their track record, I'd go with a Maxtor NAS or any other company before Iomega, and even if there would be only Iomega in that market,

Maxtor NAS units are unreliable pieces of junk. We had three of them, and three of them are now non-functional. Of course, now that they changed from BSD to W2K, I'm sure they're *much* more reliable (shudder).

I'd make my own solution with off the shelf parts before trusting my data to them

Of all the lower cost solutions, I've found this to consistently be the best bet. A bit more work initially, but less work, and more control in the long run. When we contacted Maxtor for assistance in recovering data off of one of their pooched units, they informed us that the data isn't their responsibility, and offered no help. (Yes, we did have backups, and got relatively recent data off of that; but a tiny bit of help in recovery would have been better than just being told that the integrity of the data wasn't their problem.)

-me

Re:Iomewhat?

[fireboy1919]

Buz! is amazing...have you looked at the specs?
Cards with that quality are usually about $400...and while it does suck that they didn't write drivers, there are now drivers IN THE KERNEL which work great. You don't even have to patch.

So what's your complaint about it? You've been using Windows as your main OS, haven't you?

Reliability?

[simpl3x]

Maybe I'm drinking the NetApp coolaid, but what is the reliability of IDE drives in these situations? I have a Cobalt NasRaq, which was quite nice, but limited to 60 gigs. And while it has never failed, I would never use it as a primary file server. Anybody have any experience using stuff like this as opposed to the very expensive redundant nas products?

NAS Devices in general

[smcavoy]

I was looking at getting a NAS device for a new project. I ruled out IDE based, mainly for performance reasons. I looked at Dell's (Windows based) which are exactly the same as their servers except they cost (literally) thousands more, for less of a configuration. I was not about to go out and pay 3k for "managment" software (especially when every system that was going to access was Linux based, it seemed kind of odd). I ended up just getting a decked out system for less money, installed Linux on it and am some what happy. I would like to manage it like an appliance, complete with a web and/or java interface. I couldn't find a existing Linux distro for such a thing (striped down fit in like 20mb, or even CD based). If something like that existed, people could chose the HW they want (be it Pentium w/ 16mb of ram or Dual Athlon 1ghz with HW RAID), instead of being forced to pay thousands for pretty simple software.

Re:NAS Devices in general

[tweek]

Hehe we basically did the same thing.

We needed a large NAS for storing disk images for our training room. Basically an image of each MS OS with each browser available for that OS.

Myself and one of the other admins, built an IDE raid solution using the 3ware ide card and a bunch of hard drives. We now have a hotswap 160GB hardware raid storage device running nothing but linux and samba.

Oh yeah, it has an Intel DualPort server nic using the Intel drivers to bond the interfaces. Plug that into the cisco switch and I have a nice 160GB NAS for around 2k.

I've also set the RAID's fs to reiserfs because I didn't want this fucker to have to fsck if for some odd reason it went down. (It's only happened once). I'm thinking that wasn't the best choice since all the files we're working with are at a minimum 1GB.

especially with laptops! :)

[timothy]

I am slowly converting my disproportionate-to-my-skills collection of computers to laptops instead of ridiculous boxes (ridiculous to move, lift, find room for, etc) and awkward monitors.

In the tradeoffs that come with laptops, large hard drives are usually one of the sacrificed items. (Yeah, largish ones are available, especially largish in absolute terms, but in relative terms, 'real' hard drives are going to be larger, faster and cheaper for a while yet ...)

I tried importing video last night (first time for everything) onto my iBook, and watched alarmingly as the "available space" dropped inexorably ... glad I only had 5 minutes of Easter dinner to play with. I was jonesing for a 300GB RAID array transparently available to me, but Nope. Let's see Iomega come out with *that*.

timothy

Re:especially with laptops! :)

[Anonymous Coward]

So, what are you going to do with this heap of laptops?

I mean, the ones with the expensive runty little drives, of course.

What a putz. An iBook customer.

April joke

[Anonymous Coward]

HAHAA another april joke hahah

Snap Server

[sulli]

Snap Server has a cheapish ($550) 40GB network server. These things get MUCH more expensive as you go up in size, though - I suspect that once the consultants convinced them that they had an "Enterprise Class Network Attached Storage Appliance" instead of a miniserver they decided they could jack up the price.

But I bet it's hackable, like TiVo. Why not buy a cheap one and upgrade the drive?

and is it linux? opensource?

[Anonymous Coward]

is it gpl'd unix, or some other thing...I think it's time the people reap the benefits of open source in products like this. I mean can it run apache or something on it in both the windows and unix config? That would be cool

practicalOS -- reaping the benefits of open source for windows users

Re:and is it linux? opensource?

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet you're the kind of guy who's hacked his Palm device to run Unix, so you can run Apache on it. Only now it gets twelve minutes of battery life.

Lamer.

Get The Windows Version

[nuintari]

It can suffer from the click of death, AND the blue screen of death! Double bonus!

Re:Get The Windows Version

[nathanm]

And don't forget the Ping of Death

Compaq

[NetJunkie]

Compaq's NAS boxes do NETAPP-like snapshots. Very good boxes, but they do run Windows 2K.

Iomega ...NAS..Unix

[ACK!!]

Well, at least Iomega has the foresight to give the customers the options.

After all, not everyone in the universe has been sucked in and assimilated over to Windows.

The funny thing though is the fact that most of the people using these appliances are looking for quick plug it in and forget solutions or they would load a cheap PC with a bunch of big drives and roll their own.

It would be nice to see a review comparing the Unix to Windows install of these machines. Which tends to work better -- I would think obviously that the Unix version would be more stable and the configuration UIs would be standardized so that the choice would make Unix the logical choice for most.

________________________________________________ __

Affordable BACKUP for home users?

[Sabalon]

This is what is needed. Disk space is getting huge right now. Floppys don't work for backups anymore :)

Not many people can afford a DLT library to backup their 200GB of data.

The way it's looking, a hotswappable drive might be the cheapest backup solution in the long run...yikes!

Re:Affordable BACKUP for home users?

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, lots of home users need to back up 200GB. err... umm.. whose home is this again?

Re:Affordable BACKUP for home users?

[JatTDB]

I'm willing to bet that a significant portion of that is stuff that will not change...mp3s, movies, porno, whatever...it's all archives. DVD writers are finally getting relatively stable as for formats, and the drive and media prices are dropping.

I've got a 40GB mp3 collection. With 4.7GB/dvd, that's only 9 discs. As the collection grows, I burn supplemental discs when needed. Not too shabby, for the prices involved. Kicks DLT and Ultrium and DDS and whatever else tapewise is common nowadays.

Re:Affordable BACKUP for home users?

[HiThere]

Mine.
Of course, I want to be able to back up from more than one OS...

If I felt it safe enough, I might even store HD Images of different versions, though I doubt they'd be bootable. Still, back up the entire OS before trying a new version...

200 GB is less than 10 snapshots unless one uses compression, which slows down the backup significantly.

OTOH, it doesn't really need to be hot-swappable for a home system. But that sure would be nice!

Re:Affordable BACKUP for home users?

[Sabalon]

Well...it's getting there. And as more people are buying computer with intergrated video capture, downloading...err...ripping tons of MP3's, etc... that space will fill up quickly.

Give my wife a digital camera and she could probably take enough pictures in about 2 months :) (Yes...that is an exaggaration - it'd take her 2.5 months)

Nothing unsual

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm... My experience with Iomega would not lead me to trust them for online network data. Unreliable storage can cost a lot more than the amount you might save up front.

What's the big deal anyway? There are plenty of inexpensive *nix NAS devices; for example:
http://www.snapserver.com/

Broken DHTML, sweet product tho'

[Cally]

We're just spec'ing out a 40-ish machine rack at work for CPU intensive processing. The existing rig uses cheap no-name PC parts from a relatively local company, since we bought those a few years ago they've moved to the 1U form factor - these units (which tons of people make) are just the bee's chalfonts , whoever makes 'em ;)

Slightly off-topic - the DHTML is b0rked in mozilla; a quick search at
bugzilla.mozilla.org shows no-one else has logged this so I've done so myself. (Hmmm, actually I was just searching against the URL to find the bug I just logged and it didn't turn up... oddness... ) (And now I get the error "Sorry, bugzilla links from Slashdot are not allowed." heh! :) http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/slashdot/index.html?id =134931 is the one, anyway... ) Yes folks, you can file mozilla bugs against the "tech evangelism" component to sic the mozilla wranglers onto the site's designers and get them to fix non-standard HTML for the non-IE world's benefit. (Remember when sites were designed only for Netscape, and we used to complain that they should test on mionirty products such as IE? Ah, happy days...) </ot>

iSCSI?

[GodWasAnAlien]

Does the device follow any standard protocol?

around the data center pond

[TimButterfield]

I can just imagine it. As evening approaches, first just one starts to click. A bit later, another responds and clicks back. Then another joins in. Pretty soon, you have a whole chorus going.

The poor admin will be afraid to open the door.

They're alive, I tell you.

I don't understand this.

[billcopc]

What does it matter whether the NAS runs Linux or Windows ? I've never used NAS devices, but I'm just assuming it's a big networked hard drive, right ? Why would it need a user-oriented operating system ? All it needs to do is read and write bits from network to disk and vice-versa, with a little management on the side. It doesn't need a full blown operating system to do that.

Snapshots and linux NAS

[Yobgod Ababua]

Raidzone (www.raidzone.com) also makes Linux-based NAS products. They're (for the obvious reasons) many times less expensive than NetApp, and easier to customize the configuration (just add new rpms) but aren't nearly as slick in a few regards.

Snapshots are the biggest way in which NetApp is much better. Raidzone supports it's own "snapshots", but it implements them with a series of gigantic find-based cron scripts that can (on a large filesystem) bring your NAS to it's knees, and it maintains them more like incremental backups than NetApp's snapshot concept.

Basically, each snapshot 'bucket' contains -only- files that have changed in the last time increment. If you delete a file that hasn't been changed in longer than the longest snapshot bucket, you lose. I'm not real thrilled with this, but don't have a better linux snapshot implementation without messing with the hardware or the kernel. Anyone know of anything more NetApp-like?

[My opinions are my own and no one else's]

OK this is an ad, right?

[Anonymous Coward]

I love the way they try to word it in the casual slashdot-style. Actually, I hate it. Slashdot has taken a major step down in my estimation!

You are a MORON if...

[Anonymous Coward]

...you want to put your database devices on network drives. Why do you intentionally wish to deliberately impede the I/O thruput to your database devices like that? That goes against everything that good database server administration is all about. If you're that much of a performance mascochist, then why don't you simply just put all your data onto USB-attached external hard drives instead?

The *only* NAS device even remotely worthy of holding cooked files for any active database engine would be the NetApp units.... and only then if you link them back to the database engine server via *dedicated* switched full duplex GIGABIT ethernet segments.

Re:You are a MORON if...

[Anonymous Coward]

All gigabit is full duplex.

Wheel reinvention

[Yobgod Ababua]

You need software capable of controlling disks, using the network, providing some sort of configuration ability, and implementing NFS and SMB.

The easiest way to accomplish this is to use an OS and associated software that can do this already (ie: Windows server or UNIX w/Samba).

Network Appliance took an OS and stripped it down to the bare minimum required to do what the NAS needs to, but they spent considerable time and money doing so. Most people are willing to take the extra/unused functionality of a full OS rather than design their own, new, NAS OS.

[my opinions are my own. They definately aren't my company's.]

Re:Wheel reinvention

[billcopc]

Well, if I were selling a 10k$ wheel, I'd reinvent it A-to-Z to make it perfectly suited to its task. In this case, I'd probably build something around a StrongARM core (or many), tailored to do precisely one thing : serve files. Port samba and NFS over, that's fine. Design your own direct ethernet circuitry, hooked into a simplified, high-throughput bus. Yes it's alot of work on the drawing board, but the money you invest in R&D will be saved tenfold on implementation costs and your profits will soar.

3ware? Maxtor NAS? Don't do it!

[Anonymous Coward]

We returned our Maxors within a week. Total junk. During pre-production testing, one of them crashed hard enough that it wouldn't boot up again and the other one lost a disk and was running a disk short after a reboot.

Not to mention the interface was slow as shit and didn't load most of the time.

And don't get me started on the Maxtors....

As far as 3ware goes, they discontinued their ide raid line. You want to use an end of life part for your precious data? Insanity....

We moved all the data off several 3ware based machines after one of them age 800 gigs of customer data. Soon we'll be a 3ware-free shop.

Maxtor running win2k, 3ware under Linux. Both were trash. Avoid like the plague.

-Been there, done that

Trolls make the world go round

[Anonymous Coward]

We stand storng in the face of tyranny.
We fight hygemony
We rig every Oscar night
We hold back the electric car

So fight on brave trolls
We shall previal

The few.
The strong.
The trolls.

New meaning of NAS

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure with Iomega's legendary reputation, there's an ulterior meaning for NAS:

No
Apparent
Support

Why not firewire?

[Anonymous Coward]

What happened with firewire?

It seems like it could have been a really good solution for something like this, at least for somwhat local (but portable) storage. Throw in a firewire hub for cheap and you can get more clients onto the dumb thing.

Considering I've been seeing firewire cards at Best Buy for $29.99 now at least the hardware to connect is cheap, faster than 100BT and barely more expensive.

Re:Why not firewire?

[RustyTaco]

IEEE1394's speed is a little limited for serious NAS uses. That's not a big problem though, the BIG problem is consistancy. Each and every system you plug in to that hub will assume it has full control over the drive and doesn't have to worry about somebody else changing things. This would quickly mangle any data you might want to keep if it were allows(It isn't on most ATA-1394 bridges).

Now using IP over 1394 and some disks might get you something.

- RustyTaco

Not neccessarily a way to make $$$ fast

[Yobgod Ababua]

Besides the R&D costs, you now also need to provide software support to your customers. Additionally, when the next generation of hardware arrives, you have to port and debug your little OS all by yourself.

Implementation is much easier and cheaper in both the short and long run with an off-the-shelf OS solution.

What you might gain is performance and stability, but will you gain enough to offset the fact that you now have to charge $20k for what could have been a $10k wheel in order to cover your SW development costs?

To the price-performance leader go the customers... sometimes.

[my opinions. Not anyone else's.]

Score +4?

[Wakko Warner]

Yes indeed, there are absolutely no NAS solutions out there that don't lock you into a Microsoft-centric solution.

How'd this get +4?

- A.P.

Re:Score +4?

[coene]

Though EMC will lock you into much worse, I think the current mandatory service contract from EMC requires a young virgin, the first born male of the family of an executive in the purchasing company, and I think that I remember hearing something about a satanic worship...

Re:Score +4?

[Anonymous Coward]

that's a good question, but you should quityerwhinin. it's all about getting people communicating. screw the trolls.

Re:Score +4?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well from the EMC/Cellera standpoint I am very happy with their NAS services thusfar. So far the performance it blowing the socks on our Linux/Solaris based NFS services.

NAS reviews?

[wafath]

Is there any site/publication that reviews NAS units? My company is looking at using them heavily in a mixed NT/Solaris setup. We have run into some problems with the windows based units, and it would be nice if someone could tell us ahead of time which units suck, and which, well, don't.

W

[OT] Re:Whats the compatibility with MS SQL

[Yankovic]

SQL Server does not support NAS because it's got some serious latency and performance problems in comparison to SAN.

http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles /q 304/2/61.asp

http://www.sqlmag.com/Articles/Index.cfm?Article ID =23166

http://www.sqlteam.com/item.asp?ItemID=128

There's almost no way you can get the performance you need with a NAS. Avoid NAS for the near future, and go with SAN. And don't listen to NetApp... they claim they can support database access, but they can't.

FreeBSD has snapshots

[Anonymous Coward]

The rock-stable FFS file system used in
FreeBSD now has snapshots. There's no
reason to run *linux anymore and risk losing
your data due to *linux instability.

Re:FreeBSD has snapshots

[nakaduct]

no reason to run *linux anymore and risk losing your data due to *linux instability.

*the only downside is that since *free*b*s*d doesn't support the *shift key, you need to type in lowercase and denote capitals with the asterisk. *it's not that bad, once you're used to it.

cheers,
mike

Re:FreeBSD has snapshots

[jelle]

Be glad that keyboards have that numeric patch on the right (yes that part that almost nobody uses), otherwise, how else would you type an asterisk without the shift?

-- ps: I'll give freeBSD an honest try as soon as Debian has packaged it (soon). I'll take apt-get source over cvsup any day.

They're using FreeBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

If they're smart, they'd stay the heck away
from *linux and run the technically superior
BSD.

lvm does snapshots

[Paul Jakma]

you can do snapshots on linux with lvm.

IDE?! Performance?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Surely you jest. IDE is TERRIBLE. You want latency? You want a system tied up in I/O? By all means...go with IDE.

SCSI is still the only solution for speed. IDE is a bad joke that needs to die and has no place in serious servers.

d20 Conversion

[doublem]

Lever 3 Hacker gains "Mad Hardware Skillz" and can scrounge and build a PC for close to nothing as a standard action.

Sigh...enough about COD.

[Chanc_Gorkon]

COD happened YEARS ago. Like OVER 5! I have had two Zip drives myself and can't say anything bad about them. One was the SLOW parallel port one that got knocked around cuz I took it back and forth to work. For the last two round of PC upgrades at work, all machines have had Zip drives installed. Zips in a user base af about 1500-3000 computers. I talk to the PC guys alot (I am mainframe/UNIX dude). I have heard NOTHING about Zip drive failures. Creative Labs Infra CD-ROM drives sucked and I heard about it too (especially since my boss had one...thing would suck the tray back in immedeately after ejecting it). Over 1500 drives in service with not much failing...it either means they just work, or they ain't using em. The Iomega COD think comes back every time Iomega releases a new thing. Yeah they made mistakes, but I think they have done well. Yeah, the clik disk/HipZip did suck, but only cuz it took them too long to develop it and by the time the 40 MB disks came out, CF cards were well above the 40 MB mark and cheaper then they once were. I just got a 128 MB CF card for my camera and it was only about 90 bucks (could have had it for 80, but I was lazy). Clik was just too little to late and Iomega ain't the only company to do this. This bash Iomega because of a problem 5 years ago is getting a little freaking old.

Re:Sigh...enough about COD.

[Anonymous Coward]

Its not really about the reliability of Iomega products anymore. Iomega products could be built like brick shithouses and not a single CODer would care.

The fact is Iomega treated a huge portion of its userbase like crap (and I'm not talking the "My product needs updates which you'll get in 2 months" sort of crap, but the "My product is perfectly fine, its your fault, and if you want to bitch hold the line with thousands of others to our long distance number, or pay us $30 to bitch on our premier 900 number" sort of crap). When you do that you leave a lingering feeling of non-support and, dare I say it, hatred of your company.

The absolute last people I would buy a NAS solution from are people who were too pathetic/cheap to have an 800 number when I needed it most, and management so ignorant that it took a major loss of a class action suit to grab their attention.

Do you want to be the next person to sue Iomega when your NAS fails? That's been their MO for so long, hoping you wouldn't sue them, that I wouldn't hesitate to say "can a zebra change its stripes?".

BTW: Does Iomega have an 800 number yet? It wouldn't surprise me if they never bothered to get one, even after losing a suit.

Re:Sigh...enough about COD.

[Chanc_Gorkon]

You know, I see alot of use "IT" folks treat equipment like crap and expect it to work. I ain't saying that COD is cuz of this or that Iomega has the best service in the world. I also do know that alot of stuff in computers is like this. Until something is studied to death (especially something like COD...it just did not make sense to them I am sure), the company will not admit it's wrong. I am sure we'd be the same way. I also do know that I would have handled it differently if I was Iomega....I would have said something like we know there's a problem, but we don't know what it is....if you want a refund....and post a procedure. I know they did not handle it this way, but for only buying ONE product and having a problem with it doesn't mean all of them will. That would be just as irresponsible as Iomega's behavior. I personally have never had a problem with a Zip Drive. I have used many different ones and they have all worked. Heck I screwed up the door on one of my zip disks and fixed it by bending it back in place and it still worked. Also, if I was picking a NAS solution for anything other then maybe a small office, I would not pick a Iomega one....ever. Even if I had one I would not (and I am sure I would like it and it would serve MY needs well). If i had to pick one for work right now, it would be a EMC( or one of the other soltions from one of the other companies that are more robust. This Iomega NAS unit isn't made for a data center....it's made to be used in a office or home environment. Anyone who would use such product in an environment that it would be a critical piece of equipment is insane. That said, I am sure it will work fine for people such as us using it at home on our home networks. I know Iomega HAD problems and I have never seen any of the other problems mentioned on here. COD was along time ago and it's time to bury the hatchet. Besides they are offering something other then windows alongside windows. How cool is that?

fuck iomega

[mshurpik]

Fuck Iomega. Zip disks have been stable in price since Kurt Cobain was alive and kicking - ten cents a megabyte, last and every time I checked. Zip disks were slow and expensive even when they were introduced.

Remember the parallel port drive? That piece of trash was wasting my time way back before I had sideburns. Remember 2.8M floppies? Backwards-compatible 100Mb floppies? They're gone, and the parallel port Iomega drive lives on.

Now they're coming out with a storage server. What are they supposed to be, some sort of market leader in storage solutions? Give me a break. This company has been nothing but marketing hype from day one.

Re:fuck iomega

[Anonymous Coward]

>Now they're coming out with a storage server. What are they supposed to be, some sort of market leader in storage solutions?

Maybe Iomega is a market leader in +100GB parallel port networkable storage solutions?

Let's see, 25 mins to fill a 100 MB zip disk. So that's just under 5 years! The only question is, can the drives last that long?

Just network 'em

[autopr0n]

I've got a couple machines here, and i just network 'em together. No real reason to get a NAS, although personaly I would like one

The REal question is

[Anonymous Coward]

and yet the only real question I have about this shit is what will Jay Z think of it?

snapshot...

[simpl3x]

the NetApp snapshot is actually a bunch of pointers to the storage locations on disk. so, only the memory of the pointer is necessary to retain the information. nice product.

Re:It's too bad Iomega is dying anyway-Home NAS.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not NAS servers for the home and home business?
Several things are coming together for the home consumer. Hard drives are becoming cheaper and larger. Networking equipment is becoming very common and very cheap. Broadband is becoming more available. Have a NAS somewere out of the way and store all those MP3's,Porn,Movies somewere while freeing up space in the computer.

too much w2k stuff

[Penguinoflight]

I've been hearing way too much positive stuff about win2k. Everyone seems to excuse windows 2000 by its stable, and nice. Come on, this is a Unix site, and we don't need that kind of nonsense. If you can make a good device on win2k, you can make a better device on Linux, period.

Just use a rounder wheel

[nelsonal]

As best I can tell, please tell me if I'm wrong but that is almost exactly what EMC does for their NAS products. The processors are PowerPC, I think, but they use their own OS and controlling software. Hitachi has an excellent Storage primer, its very basic and written for nontechnical stock analysts (in pdf) here. Unfortunatly it hangs the conversion tool. It also crashed at work under Winn 98 (fine under Win2k) when printing at about page 185. The link is to the file which is quite large (about 6 megs). I found it to be rather useful but somewhat basic. Also, EMC usually charges at least $100k for their wheel. Veritas sells just the software. I would doubt its cheap, but probably less than writing your own comparable product.

Drawers for Disks, DVD, and Firewire/USB2 for home

[billstewart]

Appliances for home? Don't be silly! An appliance is a high-performance combination of PC, serverware, and drives that lets you feed a network, and is usually far overpriced compared to putting the disks directly in your PC - if you were going to spend that kind of money, buy a new PC and turn the old one in to an appliance - otherwise, either buy external disk drives instead, or buy removable-disk drawers and put the disks in your machine, or pick a removable-media standard like DVD and use that.

You can get removable plastic drawers for disk drives for about $25, in which you mount whatever flavor of disk you like. When you want to change disks, just pop the drawer out and pop in a new one. They're typically 5.25" outside and hold 3.5" drives, and of course $25 has gone from "trivial percentage of the disk price" to "non-trivial percentage but still $25" :-) The latest price I saw for disk drives at Fry's was CD-Rs are the new floppy-disks - they cost less than $0.25 on sale, drives come included with your PC, and they're big enough for a single application but not really enough to back up your whole machine frequently. (If the drive's not included, they're cheap and fast.) DVD recording standards are still changing, and I'm not buying one for a while, but if you've got a standard that works for your PC and your TV's DVD, go for it - 4MB or so drives are big enough to be reasonably practical for backing up most systems.

External drives - they're *really* convenient for home. Firewire costs more than IDE drives, but not *too* much more, and you can get firewire boards for your PC for not too much money and impress your Mac-addict friends with your broadmindedness. USB1.x is slow (fine for MP3 jukeboxes, semi-ok for cameras, still really boring for actual disks), but USB2 rocks out and you should be able to buy USB2 shoebox disks at reasonable prices pretty soon. I've seen some Firewire-shoebox-add-your-own-IDE-drive boxes in the store, so you can buy one to start with and upgrade it as the disk-drive market continues to get bigger and cheaper.

Re:I'm confused-broken

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course you have to climb through the broken Windows to do that.

Europe and NIS support

[martin]

AS per usual something hal;f decent and we can't get it in the good ole United States Of Europe.

Re:Europe and NIS support

[martin]

OAHHH errent return...

anyway as I was saying...

would be nice to have NIS or LDAP for authentication besides Windows Domain...

Re:160GB IDE drives running for about $225?

[Anonymous Coward]

wow.. must be the states..

i just paid $250 can for a 60 gig IDE, never mind 160.. fuck me..

this blows. let's all go eat.

Re:160GB IDE drives running for about $225?

[snoozebutton]

yup.. that's it.. that's me.. oh well.. i c.. yeah.. and it was full of digital video in about 3 hours..