Snap Appliance Snap Server 1100 NAS Device

~*77*~ writes "While taking up considerably less space than a shoebox, this little device seamlessly allows users to add additional storage to any network in less than five minutes. Today we review the Snap Appliance 80GB Snap Server 1100. This compact NAS (network attached storage) device has many great features including: 5 minute installation, a compact web and ftp server, or simply a network share. Most importantly it works in a network mixed with Windows, Netware, UNIX, Linux, and Macintosh machines... "

Comments

SNAP

[jmays]

I work with a 1.2T SNAP daily ... these things are great. Reliable, scalable and robust.

Re:SNAP

[Anonymous Coward]

Robust enough to handle a slashdotting?

Re:SNAP

[Anixamander]

Reliable, scalable and robust.

Robust? Robust? Something tells me you're spending too much time reading their marketing literature. Reliable...ok. Scalable...sure. But robust? This isn't coffeee you're talking about.

Re:SNAP

[jmays]

The 1.2T with the proper webserver and bandwidth ... yes ... without a doubt.

Re:SNAP

[jmays]

Robust.

" Powerfully built; sturdy. "

Re:SNAP

[whiteranger99x]

Oh HOW I second that. I used to work for a place that used the 40GB models, which primarily stored image files used to image PCs on the field, and download client files to transport between sites. Being relatively entry level to the IT field, I was VERY thankful that I could use one of these instead of having to carry around various Image CD's or *gasp* having to download client files on floppies X(

On that note, I want one of my own! :P

Re:SNAP

[Twirlip of the Mists]

You're thinking of robusta, not robust.

Silly rabbit.

These things really are quite convenient

[Meat Blaster]

For one thing, you can add network storage without having to dismantle a fileserver or purchase a new one. Also, setup is a breeze, and it looks seamless to the end user.

Being able to swap it out is also helpful should problems arise.

Re:These things really are quite convenient

[daksis]

I'm really curious how the value proposition of NAS appliance is going to hold up. Sure you have the integrated plug and play box - etc. etc. But You can get 300GB of HD space for under $250 Throw in last years hot PC that you got for cheap - and you've got yourself a pretty nice file server - that's probably under $1500 for 0.6TB of mirrored storage - no matter what OS you're using.

Q: Are there any distros with the express intent of building NAS type boxes? A sort of "Knoppix NAS" could be a really neat project.

Re:These things really are quite convenient

[RetroGeek]

last years hot PC that you got for cheap - and you've got yourself a pretty nice file server,/i>

In your home, or a small business maybe. But try running several hundred people, post offices, etc on such a box and you quickly see why companies spend a LOT of money on servers, backups, storage, and admins. Oh did I mention 24/7 uptime? Fail-over, redundancy, clustering are all used to keep the "lights on".

Enterprise level servers are not toys.

Re:These things really are quite convenient

[Anonymous Coward]

companies spend a LOT of money on servers, backups, storage, and admins.

Close, but you missed the verb tense. That's spent. We use a T to indicate the past tense. That is, an event that happened in the past. Veritas is almost the worst performing stock on the Nasdaq this year and this product is the initial trickle of the flood soon to begin of the NAS for the home market segment.
That market segement wouldn't be happening if corporate clients were still buying the overpriced toys they have in the past and as others have noted, these early samples are lame gimicky toys tossed together with otherwise unsaleable crap. The fun stuff is coming soon as SATA comes into full stature and the prices are going to be competitive to say the least. It would not be unlikely to suspect the marketing sweet spot will be Terra something or rather.

Re:These things really are quite convenient

[Anonymous Coward]

Ouch, look at that. There I go with my pompous grammar teacher tone and I drop a sentence fragment. That hurts.

Re:These things really are quite convenient

[Twirlip of the Mists]

My time has value to me. If I can build it myself for $1500 and a Saturday or buy it for $2000 (I made that number up), I'll probably just buy it.

I'll bet there are a lot of people like me out there. People who buy instant pancake mix and microwave burritos.

Re:These things really are quite convenient

[yomegaman]

I thought we buy microwave burritos because we're too inept in the kitchen to actually cook anything?

80 GB

[wpiman]

80 GB doesn't seem like very much today.

I have a Ximeta 250GB Netdisk and it works great for me. Sure it is not NFS and requires its own drivers- but it works for me.

Re:80 GB

[k2dbk]

You're right, 80GB isn't that much, but this kind of device actually works pretty well for internal software distribution with corporations. The firm that I work for has around 30,000 employees, and we use a whole bucketload of these dispersed in various locations. Since the type of information we keep on them is primarily run-of-the-mill corporate applications (both commercially developed and internally developed), the size works out to be a non-issue, and they have the advantage that we can configure them centrally and just send them out. If one breaks, we swap it out and send another one overnight. (I think in some cases, we have on-site "hot spares", precisely because they are so cheap.)

Of course, YMMV, and this isn't exactly cost-effective if all you need to do is to add another 80 or 120 Gb to a small LAN.

Re:80 GB

[sinergy]

I've heard they crash when commercial security scans are run against them. How does a large corporation deal with the security issues?

Re:80 GB

[Short Circuit]

How about another kind of distribution? Multiple NAS modules on a campus, at different locations. If you have a fire, you only lose one box. Maybe two.

As opposed to having your NOC wiped out. (Though that should be extremely in a well-worked-out setup, anyway.)

Re:80 GB

[Milalwi]

I have a Ximeta 250GB Netdisk and it works great for me.

Details, please!

What OS ( I assume some Un*x variant, since you mention NFS), any problems with setup? Any issues in daily operation?

I am asking because I've been thinking about getting one of these things, mainly for backup of my home fileserver. I have noticed that they had a RH9 RPM for their software, but there seems to be very little info on the net about people using it with Linux.

Thanks,
Milalwi

Re:80 GB

[another_mr_lizard]

Agreed.

Also, its a bit strange to see a current review of this model, as we have had 4 of the little beasties in work for well over a year. Still a great little piece of kit though.

Re:80 GB

[wpiman]

For home. I have a couple of PCs, a mac, some Audreys and a Sun Ultra 10. I don't have a Linux box up right now. Basically, you can run a driver on macosx/windows or linux (double- again no experience) and this drive can be mounted on those machines. It plugs right into the ethernet switch in my basement. Great for backups and as a MP3/video server. The windows boxes can mount this thing directly. My basement pc is always on and I share that drive- and so the sun can see it thru sharity. Not ideal (ethernet bandwidth waste), but I just do that so I can access it remotely via sftp on the sun. The audreys play mp3s- so no bandwidth hog there either. The price is right for home- but for work- I would just shell out the cash for a NA box. But for home, works well. For backup- it is perfect. Run a ethernet cable to it and viola. It is quiet as well. Do you have a PC running?

we use a snap server at my work

[Squeezer]

we use a snap server at my work (sorry I don't remember which model off hand) but it was very easy to setup. It runs a custom version of liunx, and you can ssh to it. We already have a samba server but needed more space for a few people. So I edited the snap's smb.conf and added passwd server = archives1 and used the snap server's adduser script to create the users we needed, and the users use \\snapserver\username in windows to access their home directories to store more files. They use their username and passwd from archives1, so I didn't have to add them to samba on the snap server. very cool

Re:we use a snap server at my work

[Mateito]

> It runs a custom version of liunx

Well, that preempts the "but does it run Linux?" posts.

Re:we use a snap server at my work

[jea6]

Must be a newer model. We have a 2000 running 3.4.772 (US) and it does not have SSH capabilities.

Re:we use a snap server at my work

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, it seems to be based on FreeBSD. Look here and here.

Well, I guess that counts as linux too.

Re:we use a snap server at my work

[Squeezer]

[adam@awilliam adam]$ ssh admin@snap1
admin@snap1's password:
Last login: Tue May 4 10:09:58 2004 from 10.8.5.87
Snap Servers are optimized file serving storage appliances.
The secure shell utility SSH is provided to enable easy installation of
Snap Appliance Inc. certified and sanctioned backup agents only.
Snap Appliance Inc. is not responsible for the support of installed
third-party applications and cannot be held liable for system failures
and/or data loss which may ensue from improper use of command-line or
Graphical User Interface management utilities.

For a list of compatible Snap Appliance Inc. backup agents / client
applications, please refer to our web site at
http://www.snapappliance.com/support
sh-2.04$ uname -r
2.4.19-snap.clipper
sh-2.04$ uname
Linux
sh-2.04$

Re:we use a snap server at my work

[Squeezer]

i just checked, our model is a 4200

ooooh nice!

[Anonymous Coward]

An advertisement for a second rate hardware disguised as a Slashdot article! What a brilliant and original idea! *roofle poofle*

Does it support SMB ACL"s?

[nurb432]

Their older produdcts didnt do this.. and made it a royal pain to manage.

Re:Does it support SMB ACL"s?

[Elwood P Dowd]

The accepted way to pluralize an acronym is without any sort of apostrophe:

Does it support SMB ACLs?

Re:Does it support SMB ACL"s?

[pbranes]

We have 2 new snap servers here at work. They STILL do not support SMB ACL's except through the web interface (!!!), also they do not have full NFS support - no hard links (!!!), so we had to use the servers for less important tasks due to their lack of functionality. So, on paper, the snap server looks great, but when we tried to use it, we were quickly disillusioned with it.

Re:Does it support SMB ACL"s?

[Bagbug]

We also have 4 snap servers at work. 2 Differents generations and we really regret to have waisted our money on these.

Lots of weird problems with 2 of them.

Twice, one of them had to be completly reset, for a reason no one can tell !
We also had a hard disk failure on another one...

Getting more common

[AKnightCowboy]

This Slashvertisement brought to you by Snap Appliance, makers of fine SOHO NAS devices. When you are ready to deplot a SOHO NAS solution, Snap your fingers and head on over to one of our quality resellers for information about how you could own your very own Snap NAS Appliance. For a limited time, buy 4 NAS appliances and get the fifth one for just one penny!

Re:Getting more common

[AKnightCowboy]

When you are ready to deplot

Damnit, deploy, not deplot. :-)

Re:Getting more common

[MoonBuggy]

Don't worry, the user that submitted this has just slashdotted their own server. You have to love poetic justice >:-)

Re:Getting more common

[TheTomcat]

I coined the term "Slashola" on 2004-Mar-24 here (check the URL).

I think it flows better than "Slashvertisement", but that's MHO.

S

Re:Getting more common

[LoudMusic]

This Slashvertisement brought to you by Snap Appliance...

Well what I find funny about all this is on most occations there are comments (which get modded up) that contradict most of the statements made in the 'article', with suggestions for better alternative routes.

So unless they (Snap in this case) make a bunch of /. accounts and post comments and mod them up, this would actually be a negative advertising campaign.

Re:Getting more common

[Ralph Wiggam]

Slashola does sound better, but it would imply that Slashdot is get cash under the table for favorable stories. I don't think they are.

-B

Re:Getting more common

[TheTomcat]

did you see the screenshot in my linked comment?

S

Re:Getting more common

[Ralph Wiggam]

Now I have. Does the ad server looks for key words in the story to find related ads? If so, then that situation makes plenty of sense.

-B

What are you going to do with it?

[thedillybar]

Looks good and all, but what are you actually going to do with this thing?

If you actually need more storage, you'll buy a harddisk.
This thing may be (somewhat) portable, but I rarely carry anything around that won't fit on a 256mb USB drive. Not to mention a DVD.

Anyone have a (moderately) good reason to need (or want) one of these?

Disclaimer: No, I'm not waiting 2 minutes for each of 7 pages to load so I can RTFA. The first page was more than enough for me.

Re:What are you going to do with it?

[spune]

Distribute warez by jumping from network to network? Or maybe use it as a sort of bridging point between a windows network and a linux network? Or if one needs to steal corporate data -- fast? Or to set up a local server without having it be a pain in the neck?

Re:What are you going to do with it?

[MoonBuggy]

I'm happy to leave my main computer on all the time meaning that I don't need to have all my movies and music mirrored onto all the machines on my network, but in an environment where a full machine running 24/7 is undesirable it'd be a waste of space and effort keeping 80GB of files synched on even my little 3 machine network, so for a large home network or small business centralised storage is a good idea.

Re:What are you going to do with it?

[michrech]

You miss the point. These aren't for transporting large amounts of data from one place to another (though that ceritanly is one use for them). They are meant to be put in place to add storage to a network where it's needed instead of taking down a file server. Of course, there are situations where even this isn't as good an option as just adding more space to a server, but, that's neither here nor there..

Re:What are you going to do with it?

[dave420]

The clue is in the name:

network attached storage

You add it to your network, so users can store their files on it. You can add it without ripping a machine open, and it doesn't require space in a fileserver. It's installed in minutes, and if a fault occurs can be removed in seconds.

I take it you don't administer a network :-P

Snap Webserver

[holzp]

Note to BigBruin: review a Snap Webserver next. Thanks Slashdot!

Re:Snap Webserver

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh Snap!

rtfa...

[sevensharpnine]

from the ask-me-again-when-you-have-a-250-gig-version dept.

From the article:

Key Features:

250GB, 160GB, or 80GB Capacities (reviewed item has 80GB capacity)

I guess I shouldn't fault Taco here. I'm sure he's busy fending off job offers from the Times, Post, WSJ, etc.

Re:rtfa...

[caffeinex36]

I can assure you hes not fighting off any from WSJ ;)

Re:rtfa...

[bl8n8r]

> I'm sure he's busy fending off job offers from the > Times, Post, WSJ, etc.
...Comcast, Spamhaus, Microsoft and every other pimp reseller looking for advertising space.

excellent

[spune]

I think we need to see more of this sort of thing. Not only do network drives allow for easy transferring of data, but having a drive that can be easily moved from network to network has vast possibilities. Albeit, many of those possibilities lie in the realm of warez...

http://www.snapappliance.com/ is the company's website -- one might get more info out of it than the listed source. I visited as soon as the link went up and it was a slow load.

seamlessly?

[Anonymous Coward]

isnt that a tired marketing analogy?

what does it mean anyway, if anything?

plug-and-play?

are there still any devices made with "seams"?

wow, nothing!

[GoNINzo]

Yeah, that sure is a great review. Maybe you should look into reviewing web servers next...

Anyone get a copy before the server imploded?

Re:wow, nothing!

[GoNINzo]

What is in the box? Nothing! YOU SO STUPID!

Re:wow, nothing!

[whiteranger99x]

Supplies!!! *jumps out of the Supplies closet*

HAHA, UHF owns! I should get that one on DVD

Not for the Adventurous

[calix]

The SnapServer is a pretty cool concept - we use several here at the office for NAS-only, and they work quite well and are a, well, snap to set up. For the home user? You might think so... or not. You can get an open-source server on a nice PC platform running Linux for under $200. Don't believe me? Check out Rob's column in Computer Power User (CPU). No intentional karma whoring going on here. I'm getting underway in doing my own little X-Box/NAS/Media Server project as soon as the parts come in...

Please....

[Fizzlewhiff]

Why do so many reviewers feel the need to photograph shipping boxes and packaging materials? Are you reviewing the product or the shipping department?

Re:Please....

[imidazole2]

Short answer - yes. The shipping department is sometimes almost as important as the product. It lets you know if you're likely to get the product in one piece. it lets you know if you'll end up with moving parts that... arent supposed to be moving. Apple's laptops, for example. Check out the packaging on those. My guess is the boxes and all will withstand a 20ft drop and the laptop will still arrive in pristine working appearance.

Re:Please....

[AKnightCowboy]

Apple's laptops, for example. Check out the packaging on those. My guess is the boxes and all will withstand a 20ft drop and the laptop will still arrive in pristine working appearance.

Are you referring to the same Apple laptops that had a huge "white-spot" issue with the displays because the packing material was pushing into the back of the display? Granted, I believe it was only the 15" Powerbooks and they've probably fixed the problem, but nobody's perfect.

Now if only I could get a damn 12" G3 iBook that doesn't keep having display probems. First it was a failed logic board and now if I open the display more than 30 degrees the backlight goes out (apparently another fairly common problem as seen on Slashdot a few months ago). Time to call Apple again. Next time I think I'm going to have to spring for the Powerbook or just go back to Dell. My 4 year old Dell Inspiron 4000 is solid as a rock.

Re:Please....

[Darkninja666]

Yes, it is important.

The way they ship their product tells alot about the company. Packing materials, boxes, and shipping costs are easy spots to cut costs. And the ones whom truely care about keeping customers will have good packaging, EVEN if its costly.

Re:Please....

[thetaikung]

My 4 year old Dell Inspiron 4000 is solid as a rock.

I didn't like mine because it was as big and heavy as one too.

Re:Please....

[Anonymous Coward]

My guess is the boxes and all will withstand a 20ft drop and the laptop will still arrive in pristine working appearance.

My guess is most people are worried about whether the unit IS working, not APPEARS working. Don't care how cool it looks. If I press the power button and nothing happens, not good.

Re:Please....

[Anonymous Coward]

Although, that is typical Mac fanboyism. Hey look, my machine looks fantastic! too bad it's slow as hell, expensive, and doesn't run 90% of the software and 99% of the games out there.

what a web designer!

[Anonymous Coward]

i don't know if its just a galeon thing, the page loaded too slow for me to care trying it more then once. black text on a black background! who came up with that design? that rocks! security through obscurity... but does the marketting hype need to be secured like that?

5 minutes?

[SkunkPussy]

In 5 minutes, I can add an 80GB HDD into a server. and power it up.

Re:5 minutes?

[Anonymous Coward]

well aren't you just Mr. Fantistic

Re:5 minutes?

[dave420]

Can you add it while the server is on? Can you remove it again, while the server is on?

This is supposed to make it easier to install a drive, not replace internal storage. It's machine-independent, so you don't have to worry about putting it on a slow machine that's processing paycheques or anything.

It's like people who argue against bluetooth because we have WLAN - they're both for different purposes, and those not appreciating those differences slam the supposedly-weaker technology into the ground.

Re:5 minutes?

[SkunkPussy]

Can you add it while the server is on? Can you remove it again, while the server is on?

Hotplug?

P.S. I know what you're saying tho

Re:5 minutes?

[Glonoinha]

-Can you remove it again, while the server is on?

I have seen this done with my own two eyes. The system was running Windows 2000 Professional, and the drive was not 'hot swap' hardware.

The drive came out real easy. No problem. Well the computer crashed, but I was sort of expecting that. That guy's computer didn't really like him much, considering he also tried to hot swap a video card. Was funny as hell to watch, through my laughing / crying eyes.

Cost is my question.

[El Pollo Loco]

How much does this cost? The site is loading very slowly. According to snaps website, you can get 80, 160, or 250 gigs of storage, for as little as 4/gig. Even assuming you can that price for the 80, that's $320 bucks for that. Why would you do that? 80 gigs isn't much, when most dells are coming with at least 40 gigs by default now. So to any people who've used this, or will use this, can you tell me why?

Re:Cost is my question.

[tuffy]

Even assuming you can that price for the 80, that's $320 bucks for that. Why would you do that? 80 gigs isn't much, when most dells are coming with at least 40 gigs by default now. So to any people who've used this, or will use this, can you tell me why?

You're paying for a preconfigured, RAID-capable, networked storage device that requires one switch to turn on and is fully administered from a webpage. That means convenience, low power consuption and a small footprint. For some people, those factors are more important than pure size.

Re:Cost is my question.

[bhima]

Exactly for that price I want a 4 or 5 place Raid enclosure with a 250 gig SATA drive intslled. Like someone else said "If I only wanted 80 gigs I just add another drive"

Do you ever get the feeling

[BrodyVess]

That submissions are often accepted based on the user account they're submitted from?

Re:Do you ever get the feeling

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. You'll notice that prostoalex and Michael Sims are quite "cuddly" in real life.

Where's Kevin Eubanks when we need him?

[Anonymous Coward]

Awwwww.......... SNAP!

An Open Letter To All Future Small Time Reviewers

[ticklemeozmo]

Dear Small Time Reviewer,

As you get too big for your britches and feel the need to post your 2-bit "review" (read: advertisement) on slashdot so you can get click-throughs and display money, please, for the love of God and all the 1s and 0s, use a reliable hosting company, and not your own l33t site off of your cable modem. When a story doesn't even have a post yet, and you are slashdotted, its time to seriously re-evaluate your how large you thought you were.

Sincerely,
TickleMeOzmo
(on behalf of the slashdot community)

I have a stupid question...

[ErisCalmsme]

A NAS device like this is made to work with any type of network protocols... but how could it work with a network that has a windows, mac, netware, and linux stuff all happening at once? I mean is this even possible? Aside from acting as a web/ftp server? I don't know why anyone would ever want to have all those things mixed into one network anyway, but what if?

Re:I have a stupid question...

[Chibi Merrow]

Well Snap 2200s and 1100s (only ones I have experience with) support SMB network shares, which Linux/Mac/Windows can connect to, as well as exporting the filesystem as an NFS share (Linux/UNIX/Mac), as well as supporting the AppleTalk network protocol (God knows why) and the list goes on... Oh, it also can support NetWare clients by using a Novell server to handle security. Or an NT or Active Directory domain, for that matter.
And there still is that whole web/FTP server thing as well...

Re:I have a stupid question...

[DylanQuixote]

SMB for Windows (and netware?), NFS or SMB for Linux.

Re:I have a stupid question...

[Donny Smith]

It can work in the sense that same files can be exported/shared via different protocols, but due to different ways how these protocols do locking and caching, it's not recommended (in theory it's possible that files would get corrupt).

BTW, I find this posting really stupid - what's the big deal?
It takes 5 minutes to setup? Adding a 250GB HDD to existing Windows or Linux server also takes five minutes and it can be done and at a lower price.
Windows OS with free SFU add on can share files to Windows, Linux (smb or NFS), UNIX (NFS), Macs (smb or NFS). And with AD you don't have to fsck with accounts and permissions.
Linux, of course, can do the same. With NIS or winbind configuration you don't have to mess with accounts either, plus you can add this new HDD to a logical volume instead of creating yet another file share on the network.

Re:I have a stupid question...

[ErisCalmsme]

Ok so basically since it's running a custom version of linux, it can support anything that the linux kernel has support for (which is a lot, last I checked during make menuconfig ;)). Pretty neat!

Re:I have a stupid question...

[Chibi Merrow]

Actually it's running GuardianOS which seems to be a custom version of the BSD kernel. Unfortunately it only really supports whatever the OS image you download from them supports. Some of the fancier more expensive models you can access through SSH and theoretically install software on, but that's it.

Re:I have a stupid question...

[ErisCalmsme]

Very interesting! Thanks!

Re:I have a stupid question...

[Gothmolly]

Yes, you do.

Re:I have a stupid question...

[Chibi Merrow]

You don't understand the target market for this thing. It's designed to be a zero-administration storage solution for small office/workgroup situations. You plug it in and forget it exists; NOT something you can do with even a Linux server. It also does support NetWare/NT/AD for handling logins. You're thinking about an Enterprise level solution for a Workgroup problem.

Case in point - We have a remote office that's about ten miles or so outside of city limits. Way out in the boonies. There's about 6-8 users there at any time, max, and until just recently they had no connectivity back to City Hall. (Recently got Cable Modem VPN running...) How would adding a HD to our fileserver in City Hall help them? It wouldn't. Would it make sense to buy a proper server for a six person workgroup? Hell no. So we stick a SNAP server on their network. Then we forget about it. 80GB of storage is more than they'll ever need. We have quite a few offices like that one, with SNAP servers of varying sizes (the guys doing a lot of AutoCAD need a bit more than 80GB) and they're all better served by having a little SNAP in their wiring closet than us setting up a server that requires maintenance.

Re:I have a stupid question...

[dave420]

SMB, my friend :)

With the latest versions of Samba and OSX, you can get practically anything talking to anything. Samba 3 even supports becoming an active directory controller (as well as logging on to one, and sharing file permissions).

It's reeeally easy to get linux/windows/osx on a network talking to each other easily. It's when you want macs with OS9 on the network that things go horribly wrong very fast. Everyone else plays together nicely :)

If the snap server runs linux, which I believe it does, and as long as that machine has winbind, kerberos and samba v3+, it can participate on corporate domains seamlessly.

It's things like that which makes linux as powerful as it is, not the latest office clone or eye-candy.

Re:I have a stupid question...

[Twirlip of the Mists]

It takes 5 minutes to setup? Adding a 250GB HDD to existing Windows or Linux server also takes five minutes and it can be done and at a lower price.

How you can pull that off without taking the server down is quite a trick. Care to post details of the procedure?

Re:I have a stupid question...

[James_Duncan8181]

A firewire drive, added to fstab...2 mins?

I'm surprised you have failed to consider a consumer level, hotpluggable interface.

Re:I have a stupid question...

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Okay, you got me. Although I question your ability to do it in 2 minutes. Mounting the drive is not enough; you also have to make it available on the network via AFP, SMB, FTP, et cetera.

But setting that aside, try this trick: do what you just described in an environment like a small office where no server presently exists.

Re:I have a stupid question...

[Donny Smith]

It's a bit hard to imagine a SOHO that needs a file server and doesn't have an ADSL gateway server/PC, but if they really don't have one, then this thingie is definitively convenient.

Which leads us to the question asked by another poster - where to do you backup those 100 or so GB of data when you can't connect a tape drive to the widget? Of course, you need a PC/server to do that.

That is unless you do remote backup to IDC or don't mind to backup 1/Nth of data to each client in the office using scripts, or perhaps backup to 100 CD-ROM disks using CD-R attached to a desktop.

If I had 250GB of files, I'd at least consider RAID0 (and tape backup). Even it the data is all useless, it takes too much time to download it from the Net.

Re:I have a stupid question...

[Twirlip of the Mists]

It's a bit hard to imagine a SOHO that needs a file server and doesn't have an ADSL gateway server/PC

Beg pardon? I've been in this business for a while now, and I'm not even sure what an "ADSL gateway server/PC" is. I'd have to say that it's quite easy to imagine the absence of one, since I've never heard of one.

where to do you backup those 100 or so GB of data when you can't connect a tape drive to the widget?

Google NDMP.

Besides, tape is pretty much dead for these sorts of applications. The cost per gigabyte of disk storage is incredibly cheap compared to the costs in hardware, software, and above all administration costs of some kind of Rube Goldberg tape solution. It's far more cost-effective to just have a backup NAS available somewhere on the Internet. No muss, no fuss.

Re:I have a stupid question...

[Donny Smith]

>>It's a bit hard to imagine a SOHO that needs a file server and doesn't have an ADSL gateway server/PC

>Beg pardon? I've been in this business for a while now, and I'm not even sure what an "ADSL gateway server/PC" is. I'd have to say that it's quite easy to imagine the absence of one, since I've never heard of one.

Dude, I don't know which "business" is that, but "ADSL gateway server" (or PC if you're short on cash) is described in every ADSL How-To's. Refer to "A typical SOHO Network Setup" at
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/DSL-HOWTO/appendix.h tml# AEN1801

>Google NDMP....
>NAS available somewhere on the Internet

That is so funny!
I won't even comment on this.

Re:I have a stupid question...

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Dude, I don't know which "business" is that, but "ADSL gateway server" (or PC if you're short on cash) is described in every ADSL How-To's.

Ah. Well, that explains it then. I tend to stay away from the hobbyist stuff. Pardon me.

SNAP Experiences

[Chibi Merrow]

We've been using SNAP servers for a while now at work... Mostly pretty good experiences to report. The little boxes run some BSD derivative, support SMB/NFS/FTP/WWW/etc access to the files stored on them, and some can even run Java Servlets. They can even use a NetWare or Win NT/2K Domain to handle logins and security. We normally use them for small remote offices that don't justify a full server or for storing large rarely accessed files like aerials of the parish. Much better than storing them on a few hundred CDs that have to be tracked and stored properly.
My only real complaint is backup can be annoying due to a lack of tape drive or any real backup feature on the device itself. You'll have to write some scripts or make use of an external package on another machine to get some sort of backup procedure going.
They seem to use normal IDE drives, so they WILL eventually fail. However, Snap Appliance went ahead and replaced one of our 1100s free of charge when the drive developed errors and the software update applied incorrectly while trying to fix it. This was despite the fact that the server was no longer under warranty.
All in all, beautiful little boxen.

Re:SNAP Experiences

[monsieur Penguin]

Not all versions of the SNAP servers run with IDE drives, just the SOHO devices from what I can tell. Also - im at the point now where I have spent so much cash on replacing SCSI drives in large disk arrays for file storage, that I dont really see a problem with using high quality SATA drives with the proper failover protection. Ill still have to replace drives, and possibly even more drives than before, but at least I get larger storage space, and the drive by drive cost is much lower. Now - can someone build a cheap solution for my databases?

Re:SNAP Experiences

[Anonymous Coward]

It would seem to me that a simple script using rsync would handle backing up these little critters terribly easy, even to the point of taring the whole mess up, and writing it to tape, only a couple dozen lines in sh and a cron entry.

Re:SNAP Experiences

[Otterley]

They seem to use normal IDE drives, so they WILL eventually fail.

All disk drives will eventually fail, whether they're IDE/ATA, SCSI or Fibre Channel. With IDE, you lose tagged command queueing, seek performance generally isn't as good (8-9ms vs 4-5ms for the latter disks), and you don't get 15k RPM spindle speeds (7200-10k is the maximum for IDE).

But, for a single-disk unit such as the SNAP server, those factors aren't all that important.

Re:Had one of these

[Anonymous Coward]

Get ready for more problems.

I bought two of their higher end units about 18 months ago.

Fortunately one arrived DOA and the other didn't support NFS features I needed; so I was able to get out from under both of them.

Excel Meridian makes a good box; including failover and sync to redundant unit; better cooling and shell access to the OS.

But why so expensive?

[conway]

Quick search on google shows its above $500 for the 80GB version, and much more for the 120GB.
Why so much? I can get a small 80GB headless desktop from parts, and install linux to give all the filesharing / print / web / ftp server for about $200. Charging an extra $300 basically for a cute case is not my idea of a breakthrough product.

Re:But why so expensive?

[dave420]

Remember, you're buying a whole computer in a box, not just a network adapter and a hard disk. It's not an ethernet->IDE bridge.

You're paying that $300 for a motherboard, PSU, memory, NIC, CPU, R&D and labour. It's actually a great deal.

Re:But why so expensive?

[chill]

And can you install the distro, configure Samba to authenticate off of the existing Windows Domain and have everything up and running in under 10 minutes?

I've yet to meet a sysadmin (with a job) that has enough spare time to do what you describe. Your time is worth (or should be) more than the $300.

I've installed four of these units for consulting clients and they are quite happy. Most of their happieness comes from everything being up and running in 10 minutes and they now have more storage space without major hassles.

-Charles

They work out

[MC68040]

I work with several NAS appliances daily and the easiest to administrate is clearly the SNAP servers. Although we use Dell branded ones that work just as well with unix/novell/linux/mac/windows so the product discussed isn't very "unique" so to say. And it's been in the market for quite some time...

But I guess it's good for those that havn't discovered the advantages with snap's yet.

Re:They work out

[Anonymous Coward]

and the easiest to administrate is clearly the SNAP servers...

Administrate? Administrate?

Please tell me the meaning of the word administrate? Is that what an administrator does? If so, you may want to try "administer" or even "manage". Bet you're an MSCE...

Re:They work out

[Anonymous Coward]

If so, you may want to try "administer" or even "manage". Bet you're an MSCE...

That's MCSE .

Hi. I just owned your pedantic ass. Thank you bye.

Re:They work out

[Scyber]

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=administr ate

Re:They work out

[MC68040]

English isn't my native language, and no I havn't attended anything MSCE related thank you. Spend some less time correcting other people and some more time writing your own posts? :)

Sales sthick?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does this look like a cut and paste from a sales brochure to anyone else? Any particular reason this non-revolutonary product is getting a free ad?

OT: 3COM NAS

[rimmon]

Hi,
sorry for this OT posting, but this opportunity is just to good: I have a 40GB 3COM NAS (3Com Office Connect Network Storage Server) which is a great device with just one problem: 40GB is not quite enough :-)
Since it uses a normal 3,5" harddisk i'm wondering what it would take to change the HDs. I think there is a hidden partition on the disk that contains the OS for the box.
Since I have no experience with these things I would love to hear if anybody has done something like this and can give me some hints? Thanks

Re:OT: 3COM NAS

[SomeGuyFromCA]

--
I have a 40GB 3COM NAS (3Com Office Connect Network Storage Server) which is a great device with just one problem: 40GB is not quite enough :-)
Since it uses a normal 3,5" harddisk i'm wondering what it would take to change the HDs. I think there is a hidden partition on the disk that contains the OS for the box.
--
I've been spending a bit of time hacking on a Tritton-made NAS, pulling the supplied 120 gb / 2 meg cache drive and replacing it with a 250 gb 8 meg cache drive.

First thing you should do is crack it open, pull the drive, and mount it in your local Linux box. (You *do* have a local Linux box, right? If not, the new Knoppix just came out...)

Use that to poke around the disk's partitions. If there is a hidden partition, no prob, you just have to partition the new drive similiarly and copy over the hidden one. Also note what filesystem the old drive is formatted for.

Get a scratch drive out, try formatting it in that fs, copy anything you found on the old one to the new one, pop it back in, and hope.

Of course, it's a word

[tomblackwell]

It just happens to be a marketingspeak word rather than geekspeak or normalpersonspeak word.

Re:Of course, it's a word

[jmays]

Just because you heard a word a lot in the .com BOOM doesn't mean that word doesn't apply.

In final, the SNAP server is ROBUST. And by that, I mean it is powerfully built.

Re:Of course, it's a word

[proj_2501]

i call shenanigans. we coders use 'robust' a lot more than the marketers, at least at my company.

Re:Of course, it's a word

[Anonymous Coward]

None of my geek friends use "robust," so it's not a normalpersonspeak word.

Could you please show me the dictionary where you found "marketingspeak," "geekspeak," and "normalpersonspeak"?

Eric S. Raymond's "dictionaries" don't count, by the way.

Re:Of course, it's a word

[sketerpot]

They're made up. So what? They get the point across, and they fill their niches. What're you complaining about?

Man

[Aggrazel]

Need spam filtering software for /. now ... :(

mine crashed in first week

[CranberryKing]

I loved the concept so I convinced my coworkers to get a 60MB number. It was cake to setup and worked well until a few days later the disk failed. Talking with tech support, they couldn't believe it but determined it was definately DEAD. No refund available, just a replacement unit. The new one has worked well since so it may have been a fluke but it doesn't matter now since nobody in the office will trust it for more than an mp3 server. Kind of dissapointing really.

Re:mine crashed in first week

[EaterOfDog]

Your office has an mp3 server? Things been a little slow lately?

What's the point?

[streak]

I'm wondering what's the point of such a small drive as NAS? Is it when all your machines are filled up with HDs and you can't add any more? I mean, 80GB? There are firewire drives that are more than double that size.

Am I missing some crucial point here?
I understand that to add more storage you might have to take a server down, etc.. But I guess when I see how much my company uses disk space, a 80GB anything would be filled probably within a month - seems like you would have money better spent on bigger drives.

Re:What's the point?

[streak]

Followup:
I guess it does provide a ftp/web server, but I think I could get a suitable box set up in an hour with all those things with at least triple the disk space.

Re:What's the point?

[rimmon]

Maybe you're don't belong to the target group? This is great for small offices with no admin: They just connect the box to their switch and that's it.
You know, there are offices that don't have a server and don't need one. They just need a small box which is easy to setup, easy to use and does everything they need: store some files.
Can you run a multinational cooperation with thousands of user of theses things? no. A company with ca. 10 persons that is not in the IT business? sure.

Re:What's the point?

[RESPAWN]

It all depends on what your uses for disk storage are. Where I work, most of our applications are terminal emulation, thin clients, and web based clients; all applications that require very little local storage. On our file server we are only using 28.4 GB out of ~100GB, and more than half of that is from IS use as it makes it much more convenient to install software if you don't have to constantly swap discs around.

Slashdotted

[xaoslaad]

Yes boys and girls, we've learned today you should not run your website on snap appliances.

Useless

[Anonymous Coward]

Wake me when I can use it to store my SQL database primary files on. (without that trace flag hack)

$500 and no backup?

[unfortunateson]

For over $500, and $800+ for the 160GB, it seems overpriced.

For me to reach out and buy a server device like that, it's missing one thing: backup. If they included, say a DVD+/-R/RW drive, the price is still high. Is there something special about this drive? A RAID-5 hidden in that little box? Somehow, I doubt it.

Re:$500 and no backup?

[Chibi Merrow]

Actually the 2200s and up do support RAID-5. As well as plain striping or mirroring. What's special about it is that it's a fire and forget zero administration solution for a small workgroup scenario. They also come with a great warranty, wherein I had a server replaced free of charge even though its warrant was expired (as mentioned in above post).
The whole idea is you're paying for a solution you can install and forget about. Can't say the same about full blown fileservers.

Re:$500 and no backup?

[sir_cello]

It's not overpriced when you consider the total package: buy it and plug it in. We're not just talking hardware and software costs, we're talking cost of warranty, convenience and everything else. It's not aimed at home/consumer use either.

Certainly I'd like one of these in my house, but cannot justify cost.

In fact, I am in the process of converting an old 150mhz notebook into network storage server. If you're wanting to do something at home inexpensively and gain hacker-enjoyment, this is the solution: not only are old notebooks cheap, but they're low power, have built in uninterruptable power supply, are small and compact, and usually with a pcmcia, you can put not only 100mb wired, but wireless 802.11 as well. The only downside is that 2.5' hdd's (if you have to upgrade) are more expensive than 3.5's: I need to replace the old 4gb with at least 80gb.

Previously I ran a website production system for over 12 months on the same notebook. Great value for money, considering it was surplus to my employer and purchased for near-nothing (no one wants to buy old notebooks ...).

Re:$500 and no backup?

[Snowdog668]

"They also come with a great warranty, wherein I had a server replaced free of charge even though its warrant was expired (as mentioned in above post)."

Wow, I had the complete opposite experience. I had a SNAP go belly-up with three weeks left on the warranty (bad HD controller, killed two disks on the RAID5, TG for backups). I called that day to get the ball rolling. They first sent two disks out thinking that maybe two disks just happened to die at the same time. Well, that didn't work so they told me to ship the unit back for a replacement. I shipped the unit back and UPS delivered it to their receiving dock within three days (which gave me about a week left on the warranty). It was signed for by their receiving guy and everything. They promptly lost it somewhere on the dock, before entering into their system as returned. It took them about two weeks to find it. Then they tried to tell me that I had to pay for the replacement because the failed unit was delivered outside of the warranty period. I had to get UPS involved to prove that the unit was in fact delivered inside the warranty period which shouldn't have mattered anyway because the initial call was within the period (sigh). Of course they wouldn't send a replacement until they found the bad unit. Luckily I was able to restore from tape to a computer with a big drive and run from that until I had the replacement unit. I've had a couple of their units go bad and never had much luck with their tech support.

Oh, and as for "install and forget", keep your patches up to date or tech support will not talk to you. The first thing they ask is your release level. If you are not on the current release they will tell you to get up to date and then call back. Not too big of a deal because we all should know to keep up to date but not exactly "zero administration". :)

SnapServers are great!

[franknagy]

I have 34 at work (2x4100s and 1 4200 plus a 2000 which has been upgraded to 240GB) plus I have bought 3 for my home (2x2000s with 240GB each plus an 1100 with a 120GB disk). They are great. Robust, reliable and easy to use from either Windows, Linux or Macintosh (either OS9 or OS X).

Re:SnapServers are great!

[Anonymous Coward]

> Dr. Frank J. Nagy Fermilab Computing Division Data Communications Dept Technology Group

That is so much begging for an acronym.

Robust!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just you wait until it crashes one day, like 2 of our 3 have. On both the drive controller failed and trashed the drives. Not a pleasant experience I can tell you.

While this is a new model, I hope they improve the robustness, otherwise other people will just go out and buy OTS Dells like we have. I'd just like to add that the Dells have given us no problems whatsoever.

Gee Wally, that's super but....

[smcavoy]

how do I do an offsite backup of the data that I have on it.
Really, I love the idea of plugging in the device and BooMfile sharing actioning is going on. But when you need to back up the data... what do you do? Buy another one? Hope nothing bad happens to the building it's in or the device itself?
something like a usb 2.0 / firewire / scsi connection for an external tape drive or even an external HD to back it up to would be ideal. Otherwise you've got all your data in one spot, which is fine until shit happens..

Re:Gee Wally, that's super but....

[Chibi Merrow]

Well they can mirror to other SNAP servers... But you could also write a backup script to mount it, tar+bzip the contents, then store that to a tape, couldn't you?

Re:Gee Wally, that's super but....

[smcavoy]

Yes, but the point being is you then have to setup a tape server.
This would, I'm sure, fit well into existing infrastructure.
i.e. you've got a MS domain, or Active Directory, an existing Fileserver/tape backup unit.
But if you don't have existing infrastruture, and you want reliable backup, you need to purchase a second unit to mirror to, or a system with a tape drive.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Empty NAS?

[Erwos]

I was wondering if anyone knew of any (relatively) cheap NAS solutions which came _without_ an IDE hard drive? That is to say, so I could install a hard drive of my choosing. No need for features except for SMB and NFS support, either.

My fiance and I are getting married in Feb, and I'm trying my best to hunt down print servers and network storage so we can combine our network in a sane fashion. The print server is already taken care of for the LaserJet 6L, but we have no decent network storage solution for my external hard drive. (also have no solution for her crappy HP color inkjet, but it'll probably break before we get hitched anyways *grabs a hammer*).

-DMZ

Re:Empty NAS?

[dave420]

Whatever happenend to wedding registries being the hot topic?? Print servers??? :-P

j/k

You're probably better off just biting the bullet on that one, and getting the best deal on a cheap NAS you can find :)

Re:Empty NAS?

[Anonymous Coward]

My fiance and I are getting married in Feb, and I'm trying my best to hunt down print servers and network storage so we can combine our network in a sane fashion. The print server is already taken care of for the LaserJet 6L, but we have no decent network storage solution for my external hard drive. (also have no solution for her crappy HP color inkjet, but it'll probably break before we get hitched anyways *grabs a hammer*).

You mean your wedding planner doesn't do this for you? Perhaps you could work the merging of networks into the ceremony! ;-)

Oerfect for an open project ? NAS storage ?

[amix]

To me this seems like the ideal candidate for a community-built project. More and more of us utilize servers at home and sometimes it might be just better to attach external storage-subsystems than building newer and bigger computers.

When I built my HomeServer the first option I was investigating was to modularize everything. However I had to discover, that this is not a good position: The stuff on the market just did not fit my needs: To expensive. Too "smallish". Too "touch-the-market" of AOL users. So I ended up with a ATX VIA board and a C3 Nehemiah CPU with a 3ch ICP Vortex S-ATA controller, a 2nd NIC and WLAN card.

However, I wonder, why the community does not create some own inventions, custom-tailored for private users and, most importantly, not limited in possibilites, due to fear of support-problems with AOL users.

A community built NAS could consits of a small embedded computer, with onboard hardware RAID own cache (min. 4ch S-ATA) and come with a good case. Cases have been built by the community. Embedded systerms also. So, why not ? :-)

Best would be to offer the board and driver/software and let customers build their own beast. Maybe with syste-boards, that can be combined to offer more power.

Anyone ? :-D

Re:Oerfect for an open project ? NAS storage ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been following OpenFiler for a while (www.OpenFiler.org), but its died on the vine.

Version 1.0 was supposed to work, but the installation process was very incomplete, undocumented, and nobody could get it working.
http://www.pcquest.com/content/linux/103 120205.asp
The developer has been promising a FC1 v1.1 RPM "real soon now" for the past several months, and both mailing lists are dead.

It looked like a pretty good foundation that was 95% complete, but just *stopped*. In fact, there was a previous Slashdot article about it quite some time ago, and everyone was really excited.

I'm running a small server (Netgear ND508) with a 60GB drive, 128MB of RAM, and RedHat 7.2 running Samba. It works great for my home. I've got a second box with a 120GB drive, 256MB of RAM, and I want to build a FC1/Openfiler device, but I'm still waiting on Openfiler!

I'm not a developer, but I'm darned good with bug reports, documentation suggestions, and all sorts of good feedback; but how does the community get something like OpenFiler back on track and moving forward again?

Of course, just as I'm posting this, I saw that they had their first news item in several months, saying that a beta is ready for FC2. So, I guess the advice here is "release often!"

Alright. I've waited a few months. I can wait a few more weeks.

Re:Oerfect for an open project ? NAS storage ?

[Rude Turnip]

I use Clarkconnect Linux running on a 500Mhz VIA Epia mobo set into a tiny, Flex ATX IBM Netvista case. Web browser-adminable Samba, WWW, DNS, Squid, SSH...you name it. Total cost? About $200 using a 40Gb HD and 128Mb RAM.

Re:Oerfect for an open project ? NAS storage ?

[evilviper]

More and more of us utilize servers at home and sometimes it might be just better to attach external storage-subsystems than building newer and bigger computers.

I'm currently trying to do about the same thing. I have well over a terabyte here, but it's spread across several computers.

They are all networked, but it is still difficult to access the data on each different machine, and as a result, there is a LOT of wasted redundancy. The problem is network file systems...

NFS has no security, so it's ruled out immediately, but even if it did, it doesn't provide a unified filesystem. In other words, what you need is some Net FS that will show all the different data, merged into one big filesystem, sorted by folders, and completely independant of where the data actually happens to be.

OpenAFS is the only one that seems to offer this functionality, but it's been very difficult to get it to work on a lot of different platforms. I'd like to see it supported on a lot more platforms, but I think the odd IBM license is going to prevent it from getting a lot of support.

Here's hoping Arla can get a working AFS server soon (BSD-licensed project).

Re:Oerfect for an open project ? NAS storage ?

[amix]

I use Clarkconnect Linux running on a 500Mhz VIA Epia mobo set into a tiny, Flex ATX IBM Netvista case. Web browser-adminable Samba, WWW, DNS, Squid, SSH...you name it. Total cost? About $200 using a 40Gb HD and 128Mb RAM.

So what ? That's not the point. I got a VIA C3M266-L ATX board with a Nehemiah 1GHz, a 2nd NIC, WLAN and a 4ch IPC Vortex S-ATA RAID Controller with 3x 120GB in RAID-5, and I plan adding one single JBOD swap-frame for backup purposes. But what do I do if the 3 hda are full (actually 2 hda since it is RAID-5) ? P2P helps in that. I need a second RAID controller (expensive) and thus a new mobo, since I used already 3 PCI. So, I need to buy a new base-system, even new CPU since this is a VIA and does not work in all So370. Ditch that! What I want is a real nice and expandable NAS.

Snap 80

[HancockDC]

I have used these for a few years with very few problems. A couple caveats:

• They are a single drive. If your are storing really important data, spend twice as much and get a 4 drive system configured as RAID 5.
  
• You are paying extra for ftp, httpd, netbios, etcetera. If you are just mounting it on a local computer, then get yourself and external drive such as a 160 GB Western Digital and save about 66%.
  

Re:Snap 80

[dave420]

Don't forget you're also paying for the memory, cpu, NIC, motherboard, etc. This is a whole computer in a box, remember. Comparing it to an external drive is like comparing a RAID-5 fileserver to a USB keychain :-P

Re:Snap 80

[Anonymous Coward]

Which was exactly the guy's point. If you think it's a neat device, but will just end up mounting it as an SMB share on a single machine, you can get equivalent functionality with less hassle in a USB/Firewire drive, for 25% of the cost.

Are there open source hardware projects?

[dowobeha]

This brings up a good point. Are there open source hardware projects out there?

There are lots of software engineers working on free (as in speech) software projects. Are also computer engineers working on free (as in speech) hardware projects?

Re:Are there open source hardware projects?

[amix]

Yes, there are.

- LinuxBIOS
- OpenBrick (?)

and more.

Backup anyone?

[tliet]

It's all fine and well, a closed box that can be tucked away to forget about it. But how about backup of these things? When it goes poof, it can take up to 250 gigabytes of data into it's grave.

I've never understood these things. Buy a FireWire or USB disk, but don't connect one of these things to the network.

Re:Backup anyone?

[Chibi Merrow]

You don't understand because you're not in the target market. A firewire or USB disk isn't too useful if you need to let a couple dozen people access the data all at once, is it? If you want to back it up, either have itself mirror to a duplicate server or use (insert favorite backup package) to mount the share and back the data up.

Re:Backup anyone?

[Bill_Mische]

The tape drive on the e-mail server works quite nicely thanks.

What it boils down to is that if you've just need a dedicated fileserver that does nothing but - this is a lot cheaper than a fully featured server (the features of which you don't use).

Re:Backup anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you back up a normal drive? Yeah, do this one the same way.

New slogan..

[schon]

My only experience with this is bad - SNAP uses two regular IDE drives, in RAID-0... A customer bought one, and one of the drives died.. I suggest a new slogan:

"Twice the storage, half the reliability!"

Re:New slogan..

[pukeAndCry]

I have an old snap server at home (I forget the model). My employer was going to throw it away so I brought it home. It had two 10 or 20 gig drives in it which I replaced with two 80 gig WD special edition drives. After I upgraded the BIOS it recognized the new drives upon boot and let me choose how to configure them. The choices were Raid 0, Raid 1 or Raid 0+1. Perhaps upgrading to the latest BIOS will get you more than Raid 0.

Re:New slogan..

[tuffy]

All two drive Snaps allow for RAID-1, RAID-0 or individual drives configurations. If you choose to configure it as RAID-0, total data loss happens if a single drive fails and the manual states as much.

Re:New slogan..

[crap_on_you]

In what situation would a Raid-0 drive failure be recoverable? Raid-0 isn't the only possible configuration. Why the hell would you bother with raid-0 over then network, anyway?
I bought one of these for a client that required push-button simplicity and data redundancy. Although expensive and a little slow on writes, this thing does the job well.

crap_on_you

Re:New slogan..

[schon]

All two drive Snaps allow for RAID-1, RAID-0 or individual drives configurations

To the best of my knowledge, no they don't. Raid1 may have been an addition. It wasn't until the customer brought it back that anyone even knew that it had two drives.

If you choose to configure it

I didn't configure it at all. It wasn't mine (as I said.)

Re:New slogan..

[tuffy]

To the best of my knowledge, no they don't. Raid1 may have been an addition. It wasn't until the customer brought it back that anyone even knew that it had two drives.

The Snap 2000, the very first two drive Snap Quantum came out with, allowed for RAID-0, RAID-1 or seperate drives. One can change the setting from the "System Configuration" page, though certain changes were destructive (RAID-0 to RAID-1).

I can understand that a customer might prefer the striped configuration to get the most out of an expen$ive Snap unit, but the setup screens and the manual make the number of drives and the ramifications of their different configurations quite plain.

do they still have the case insensitive bug?

[Anonymous Coward]

Snap has (had) one of the dumbest freakin' filesystem bugs (they call it a feature) -- PARTIAL support of case sensitive filenames. The rules as I remember them are:

1) you may create files with caps in the names
1a) listing the directory contents shows caps
2) you may access those in a caps independent fashion -- case is completely ignored.
3) if you create a file without caps it overwrites the one with caps and vice versa
3a) directory listing still shows case of the original file even though the new file had no caps in the name.

I wouldn't be upset if they said flatly "no caps" or allowed a setting to ignore caps.
I would be happy if they respected the caps.
I reject their claim that half-way respecting caps is a in any sense a good thing.

Now some will say "you need to have your filenames mean something" so they don't over lap. Consider this: say you have a script that makes a temp file name a.img. Now after some transmogrification a file A.img is derived from a.img. This is convenient so temp filenames are short yet self consistently named. Thanks to SNAP A.img overwrites a.img.

This doesn't even go into the possibilities of over-writing files because you didn't see the directory listing for the same file only with some different case letters.

SNAP and Solaris

[Figec]

Overall, we like our SNAP server. However, we have issues getting it to NFS serve a Solaris client. So much so, we gave up after an hour or so of trying. Buyer Beware.

Right-- but how do we make a beowulf out of these?

[Spyder]

Alright, big whatever on the widget and it's intended purpose. What does it take to load it up with debian, and use it as a little linux box? The reason I'd get on is to set up a little linux dev box for doing little stuff on my home network, so I can finally kill my old desktop. If the artical would have been a "This is how we hacked it" kind of thing, it might have been useful.

That didn't take long...

[Anonymous Coward]

This Account Has Been Suspended
Please contact the billing/support department as soon as possible.

Re:That didn't take long...

[Bender Unit 22]

"Please deposit 500$ to continue slashdotting"

Re:An Open Letter To All Future Small Time Reviewe

[JamieF]

Translation: Your story obviously sucks (even though I haven't read it); how dare you not pay more money so that I could read it (even though I've already decided that it sucks).

They suck

[narve]

We've bought a 1TB SnapApplicance and it sucks. UPS doesn't work, our backup system doesn't work (absolutely no logs or error messages, impossible to debug), and we've had a total of 3 hard drive failures so far _this_ year. We don't dare to use it, so we keep using our p-pro no-brand home-built server, which have been working for 3 years... and are taking the necessary steps to get our money back. Oh, and by the way, the support people suck too: Quite friendly, nice to talk to, and they know slightly more about this computer stuff than my grand ma. Oh, and in addition to incomplete logs: If you reboot your system: Poof. No logs. Which is quite inconvenient, to say the least.

Lock files

[Anonymous Coward]

We have an older snap server. A bigger one, but the file locking under nfs dosn't work as expected. So some applications like KDE don't work from this drive beeing mounted as home.

I much prefer a small linux box where *I* have control and get continously new updates and features.

Why not Gigabit

[jonasmit]

Ok say you get one of these and upgrade your network to Gigabit - then what? Can you change out the NIC like a home grown SFF box? I doubt it. If this is a media storage server or a heavily used backup device 10/100 would really slow you down.

Re:Why not Gigabit

[Chibi Merrow]

If you're upgrading to Gigabit you'll also be buying one of the more expensive Enterprise models instead of the reviewed Workgroup model. I don't know why people keep pointing at some enterprise level requirement and saying "It won't work for that!" That's like saying "a pickup truck is worthless because I can't move as much as an eighteen wheeler." This box is meant for a small workgroup of a dozen or so people who just need some storage that everyone can use that doesn't require any administration. That's it. If you want more than that, look somewhere else.

Re:Why not Gigabit

[jonasmit]

You missed the point entirely. Gigabit NICs are CHEAP! Put the Gigabit NIC on the Snap device and when the user upgrades to Gigabit there is no new device to buy. Why is Gigabit an enterprise only requirement? Speed is good anytime. If you can more value out of something you should - this is a quick hitter that will enhance the value beyond the 10 extra bucks. Get it?

Re:Why not Gigabit

[CatOne]

All my Macs have Gigabit built in. So I can get an 8 port Gigabit switch for like $100 now, and all my NICs are Gigabit, so why would I want a 10/100 piece of crap for a NAS?!

Not enterprise at ALL... for the home market I cannot see ANY reason why some little snap server wouldn't have Gigabit built in. It costs like $2 more for parts... and it can make a 3x or 4x difference in performance... WTF?

Re:Why not Gigabit

[Chibi Merrow]

Gigabit gives you 3 to 4 times the performance in the same way that a 3Ghz processor gives you double the performance of a 1.5GHz...
Assuming you could get even 50% utilization of a Gigabit network connection, that's 64MB/s. What do you think the throughput is on the IDE hard drive in this thing? I'll point you toward this benchmark of one of Seagate's most recent top of the line drives, and you'll notice that the read speed in the BEST case tops out near 60MB/s, and that's an artificial non-real world example that couldn't even be maintained. That's also on an Ultra ATA/100 controller, which I'm sure the SNAP box is lacking.
The network connection isn't really an issue here; even if it were a gigabit connection, the drives would be too slow to really take advantage of it. Plus, as I've said in numerous other posts, their target market doesn't give a damn about gigabit support. If you do, don't buy their product or better yet try to sell your own improved NAS device.
Besides, a SAN administrator would laugh at your puny gigabit ethernet connection while he points at his Fibre Channel setup.
This Snap Server isn't designed to serve everyone's needs, it fills a niche market that was sorely in need of a solution like this and if you find it lacking YOU'RE NOT IN ITS TARGET MARKET! Don't try to sell a semi truck to someone who just needs a pickup!

Re:Why not Gigabit

[CatOne]

Ummm... so last I checked 100 mbit was what 12 MB/sec? Or 10 MB/sec give or take? So even your 5 year old drive can sustain reads at > 10 MB/sec. So 3-4 times would be maybe 30-40 MB/sec.

Even assuming the drive cannot saturate a gigabit link (even at 50% utilization), which is a point I agree with, the drive certainly CAN beat 100 Mbit. So, again, my point is, given this, why not spend the extra $2 for a GigE adapter?

I mean, how different is this to using a USB interface on a portable HD instead of a USB2 device? In this day and age, that would be stupid now wouldn't it?

I'm fully aware of the differences in FC performance, and still this doesn't affect anything. I have an external, network attached storage device. I have full Gigabit (switches, NICs in my machines -- again, at a CONSUMER price point). So attaching storage via 100 Mbit? I'll look at perf #'s between this device and its competition with GigE, and choose the faster one. Methinks it isn't the 100 Mbit model.

case insensitivity is not a 'bug', it's a feature.

[The Monster]

Consider this: say you have a script that makes a temp file name a.img. Now after some transmogrification a file A.img is derived from a.img. This is convenient so temp filenames are short yet self consistently named. Thanks to SNAP A.img overwrites a.img.

Don't use something designed for Windows users, then apply *nix assumptions about filename case. Windows (since 95) has preserved case, but not considered it significant. When you're doing SMB shares, those are the rules to play by. (NFS can use different rules.)

Are you all talking about the same snap! server ?

[xtermz]

We use a couple of these, and they are not anything like what the reviewer described.

Reliable? IBM DeskStar IDE drives in a RAID configuration is reliable? Right...

Frequent weird permissions problems, connectivity issues, etc etc. Not just on an older model, but also a new one we recently purchased as well....

Grr...

[Chibi Merrow]

Stupid keyboard switched back to DVORAK while I was responding... As I was saying, the more expensive models support you SSHing in to install some backup software, but otherwise you can use ArcServe or Veritas or any other software package to go ahead and just mount the network share and backup the contents to whatever sort of archive you use. Or you could, as I said before, write a little cron job that grabs the data and stores it on a tape for you. Whatever works for you.

I have one

[Remlik]

I have the Snap 2200 model running on my Windows network at work.

It is more or less a pair of IDE hard drives with a hardware RAID. You can run them mirrored for half the space (aka 240G becomes a mirrored 120G) or as a single drive for full space.

The SNAPs can interface directly to a windows domain controller for user login security. Very slick, took about 20 minutes to get it up and running from zero knowledge.

This is the second SNAP device we have had, the first was a 40gig model a few years back. THis is also the second SNAP i've had fail. The first lasted two years before the cooling fan on the CPU inside failed and caused the device to lock up under any kind of normal load. Since the unit was out of warranty and the fan was too small to find a "home brew" solution we opted to upgrade. I have since removed the drives from the old device and passed them down to desktop machines.

My current SNAP (the 2200) just this week lost the secondary mirror disk. The unit has only been in use for 5 months and has seen very little usage day to day. Thankfully I was running in mirror mode (and had tape backups) so no data was lost. The unit locked up when the drive failed but after a reboot discovered its error and reported the failed disk on the admin info screen. I simply FTPed the data off the remaining drive and called their tech support number.

Snap's warranty service seems well structured, after 10 minutes on the phone and sending the consultant a couple log files I was issued an RMA number and instructed to send the unit back, once received they would ship another. If I needed immeadiate replacement I could give them a CC# and they would ship that day.

The only bad part about this is that I had thrown the box away...Keep the box, they require 2 inches of solid foam, or 3 inches of bubble wrap else you void the warranty...no peanuts.

SO if you are planning on either the 1100 or larger keep the box, run in mirror mode, and keep the units well cooled.

I like snaps and will continue to use them, I feel as though I may have just found the 1 in 5000 bad drives.

Re:I have one

[cr0sh]

Do you still have the old box (sans hard drives and fan, of course)? Would you be willing to part with it (I am not interested in buying it - without the hard drives or fans, it is essentially worthless, right?)? I would be willing to pay shipping, though - reply back, or hit my site to send email.

Kind of

[EvilStein]

They also had the NASRaQ appliance, which was similar to this.

I wish Sun didn't kill off the Cobalt stuff. I wish Sun never bought them *sigh*

Another market Sun missed

[MemoryDragon]

They had the base for appliances like these in their portfolio with the Cobalt line, but they dropped the ball a few years ago.

What about iSCSI?

[swb]

Where's that at, anyway? While anyone can "deploy" SMB servers (either canned, home-grown, or otherwise), it doesn't make any sense at all to just add a bunch of new shares willy-nilly, fragmenting your overall storage capacity.

What WOULD make these kinds of devices make more sense would be iSCSI and the ability to dynamically expand an existing volume to use the new space over the network. I know there are some expensive SAN systems that can do this now, but iSCSI would make it a lot less expensive, using an existing or dedicated IP network to connect the devices instead of expensive fiber channel fabric.

Re:What about iSCSI?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where's that at, anyway?

I just upgraded 3 of our SNAP 14000 (2.5TB/Raid5+HS) NAS devices to Version 3 of their "Guardian" OS. The major new feature?

iSCSI volumes.

I've only played briefly with the MS iSCSI intiator on a couple of Windoze boxes- but BLOCK level sharing is there on larger SNAP appliances.

Re:What about iSCSI?

[silas_moeckel]

And performance? Reliability?? iSCSI is a great tool to get things where FC is to expensive or just cant reach. You would need a big box in the front to manage everything as every packet must go through it.

Realy if you need those fatures though FC is brobably a better bet because you will need performance and reliability. I shutter to think of how much fun iSCSI becomes when you start dropping packets when a port goes bad.

Re:What about iSCSI?

[swb]

Realy if you need those fatures though FC is brobably a better bet because you will need performance and reliability. I shutter to think of how much fun iSCSI becomes when you start dropping packets when a port goes bad.

I don't know about that. What makes an iSCSI SAN different from a FC SAN? AFAICT it's the layer 2 and 3 transport technology, not the overall structure. You can implement a vulnerable iSCSI SAN using your production data network, interfaces and VLANs, or you can dedicate interfaces, VLANs or even entire ethernet switching fabric to iSCSI, increasing its reliability to FC levels without having to pay FC prices. FC products are more mature, but that's just a matter of time. FC devices, ports and switches are as vulnerable to problems as ethernet switches, if not more so due to the lower volume of production and consumption.

Whether I'd build an entire new data center based on iSCSI is debatable, but it's certainly an inexpensive way to get most of the bennies of FC SANs without the FC cost.

Re:What about iSCSI?

[silas_moeckel]

If your going to build out a whole network I think you will find that to FC ports are not much more expensive than production grade ethernet. Remember that FC is twice the speed of GigE so double your port count to move to ethernet along with makign sure you can run jumbo frames if you want performance, thats not low end switching gear. You also have to look at the differences at the transport layer is not in general a broadcast medium. Switched fabric is just that insead of ethernet that was designed as a shared medium and then made to work in a switched envirnment.

If I had a datacenter to build and was very cost consious rather than looking for max stability I would go with infiniband at 10gb a sec per port and it's very cost effective and backends into FC and GigE well. iSCSI has it's place in long hauls and low bandwith/cost right now and may push out FC but it would seem it's more an intergration of FC for the disk side and iSCSI to do the long haul and low price per port end of the equation with FC still there for the high bandwith servers.

Re:What about iSCSI?

[swb]

I'll agree with you, but I think you need to push the bandwidth/latency/reliability to the top 5-10% of all possible applications to really justify FC prices. For a large segment of the marketplace, iSCSI can do "good enough" to make it worthwhile, with some the added flexibility to go places FC can't easily go.

Buggy and unreliable

[love2hateMS]

Sorry, we have two of these and they are garbage. Very unreliable and lose their network connection all the time.

We'll never buy them again.

DIY

[sir_cello]

I was looking at DIY something like this (since I am competent in building BSD/Linux systems from scratch):

- 3.5' IDE based HDD
- 3.5' or smaller form factor embedded linux/bsd based pc
- power supply

There seem to be a number of 3.5' ff embedded pc's, something like no less than 100-200mhz seemed ideal: just needs 16-32mb ram, onboard 100mb NIC and a serial port - anything else is a waste of money. Lots of taiwanese manufacturers making these. Some have inbuild 16mb SDRAM and inbuild CF or at least PCMCIA (for a CF adapter) to put the boot image on. The current drain on these systems I've seen a few quoted at ~4W, average seems to be 5-10W. Low power :-). Mix of ARM, Intel or GEODE processors.

Would be very interesting to hear anyone else who has done something like this, esp. re prices and suppliers, and appropriate CPU type/speed required to service ATA-100/133 + 100MB NIC, and whether 16mb SDRAM suitable.

Something like this I guessed would set me back no more than ~UK120GBP (incl. ~50-60 for 160gb HDD).

What about raid?

[phish_head]

This looks great but I need RAID protection for all my data. I would love to replace the Giant Proliant server I have with a tiny box that can store just as much data. Does anyone know if they have a device that does at least raid mirroring for the home / small office?

Re:What about raid?

[krray]

Absolutely, but of course, YMMV

I've had multiple of their 60G flavors when they were big and bad. You can set them up to do RAID-0 (useless IMHO) and/or RAID-1 (there's versions with multiple drives enclosed). I believe that they have RAID-5 versions as well...

I fortunately had MULTIPLE RAID-1 Snap! servers setup -- the main device (RAID-1) and a mirrored/backup to another RAID-1 Snap! server ... which saved my butt. Probably due to lightening the entire device was DOA and the only way to get the data off of it was to send it back to them (for a charge). This is where I switched this type of setup over to old PC's running Linux. Give me a couple of large hard drives and I can do lot of damage/storage for next to nothing.

I've found that a old 486 running Linux with a couple of hard drives stuffed in it (RAID-1) is typically MUCH faster than the Snap! appliance servers and can serve the same clients via the same protocols with no issue.

Re:An Open Letter To All Future Small Time Reviewe

[hanssprudel]

Given that the "bigbruin" guy submitted it himself, it is more like: "Why annoy two hundred thousand people with an advertisement/review if your site can't even handle the traffic."

The real question is about Taco: Were there no better stories then this today??? How lousy were the rejected ones?

Live-CD distribution?

[Espen]

I've always wondered why there isn't a Live-CD/Knoppix type distribution for this kind of thing: ie. Something will boot an old PC taking up space and present whatever disks are in it as a file store on a network (w/user management, and RAID/LVM etc. if it wanted to be fancy).

Be wary

[shrikel]

We have a snap server here, and if more than about two people are accessing it at once, it's SLOW AS MOLASSES!!! You can practically sit there and watch the bits shuffle by. (We only use it for long-term, low-access storage because it sucks so bad.)

Cheaper Solution for Home/Small Workgroup

[jonasmit]

Mini-itx Motherboard (Fanless, Very Small) ~$115
80GB HardDrive $70
Gigabit NIC* $25
Pretty Case $100
Linux Free*
Total ~280-305
*Optional
^Requires Initial Work (Maybe there is a handy Distro for this type of thing I don't know?)
BTW Newegg.com says they will carry mini-itx soon so prices may get much better in the US.

Re:An Open Letter To All Future Small Time Reviewe

[thePMG]

I really don't think that the owner of BB submitted this story to /. Pull your head out of your ass, son.

BTW, your vanity site FUCKING BLOWS. Who the fuck give a shit about your school schedule?

Whoopie

[Sarrek]

All us /.'s DOS another site .. Sorry Link Owner

Not always good times

[baldcamel]

I am gald to see that most people seemed to get along with these but my only experience was bad.
It was used to help set up a new office were cash was tight - but it just proved a nightmare for people to use. So slow and unreliable - just like the IT support guy there.

Hate.

[lemonylimey]

I have an 80GB Snap Server at work, and I dislike the thing throughly. It only picks up a random 80% sampling of our Active Directory users every time it's rebooted, which means we have to run it with no file security. Snap's helpdesk claimed this problem would be fixed by installing the new "Snap OS 4", which at the bargin price of $100 offered "Complete Windows 2003 Server ADS compatibility!" But, I protested, we were only running Windows 2000, and it says Windows 2000 compatibility on the box ...

After much cajoling, the helpdesk admitted that wasn't strictly true, but Snap OS 4 would make it so, and add a glorious weath of new features into the bargin. So we sighed, and bought it.

Needless to say, it's now picking up about 70% of our Active Directory.

The moral of the story is: Don't buy hardware from companies that charge $100 to patch something that should have worked from the get-go.

You can always try another review site.

[AltGrendel]

Like this one at DesignTechnica

Not until they sell mirrored units.

[RatBastard]

I won't put any storage out on my LAN that isn't mirrored. I've lost too much data to flaky hard drives in the past.

Re:An Open Letter To All Future Small Time Reviewe

[Anonymous Coward]

BTW, your vanity site FUCKING BLOWS

Indeed it blows ROYALLY.

What's wrong with external drives ?

[dargaud]

It seems like a good idea if you need to share with other machines. But something even quicker to setup is a USB/Firewire to IDE enclosure. Put whatever drive you want in it (I usually put the biggest IDE on the market, currently waiting for the 400Gb Hitachi) and use it to backup all the internal drives.

But I could also leave several plugged in as movable storage media. Just setup the share so others have access to it and you'll save money, even if the performance isn't that great.

Great article--not!

[Arqweld]

I especially like the "This Account Has Been Suspended" part. Anyone have a mirror for this poor ./ victim?

Build your own snap server

[solosaint]

Does anyone have plans on buidling your own. I have a small motherboard, case, and drive... would love to put a linux interface on it and make my own...

Re:Build your own snap server

[Anonymous Coward]

Download the SME server linux distribution from www.contribs.org. Install on a pc with 1 or 2 drives (2 must be mirrors). Decide if you also want an internet firewall/nat gateway on the same box. Add users with the web interface. Done.

Looks like he ignored the /. effect

[CatOne]

Or, I should say, linking to it killed him, DEAD.

Article text?

Re:Looks like he ignored the /. effect

[Bender Unit 22]

Imagine him discovering the next day that his submission got approved and his site was down all the time. :D

Snapped

[Nynaeve]

Judging from the number of negative comments regarding this product, maybe their slogan should be "*snap* it's broken".

NAS on the cheap

[mj_brutus]

This looks like a cool, convenient product and all, but $500 for 80GB starter! I got a 120GB drive for $180, a $20 USB 2.0 enclosure and plugged it into my Linux server. I published it with Samba and for $200 I've got net storage. OK, I have to manage my own backups but I can't see paying the price for one of these critters.

Re:case insensitivity is not a 'bug', it's a featu

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the point: SNAP ignores NFS rules whilst claming to support NFS. If I were accessing it by SMB, then I would expect weirdness.

I hope Snap Co donates money to the Samba team

[Anonymous Coward]

since their product is largely based on the excellent Samba distribution.

Re:Cobalt Qube?

[dagnabit]

This is correct, although the Qube didn't do NAS (by default). Just SMB for Windows (and an old Samba that didn't do PDC/ACL etc) and netatalk for Macs.

FYI, Sun released the Qube and RaQ 550 OS under BSD license (the parts that weren't already GPL etc) last year. You can find it at http://open.cobaltqube.org/. There's a new group working to put it on generic Linux boxes, called BlueQuartz.

Distro that provides similar functionality?

[intendedacceleration]

Is there a distro out that mirrors the functionality of this device?

Something like Knoppix only have it JUST serve as a small Samba/NFS server with a web interface. Something like that would be ideal for an older box with a large harddrive where you don't need the capabilities and bloat of a full distro, but would like to use it for simply a backup or music server at home or something.

Re:Distro that provides similar functionality?

[intendedacceleration]

I know Gentoo quite well as I run it on most of my production servers here at work.

What I am talking about is something that you could boot off a cd, go through a short setup process (tcp/ip config, etc), then administer it through a web interface. Something that would take only a couple minutes to get up and running.

Do *not* use as webservers

[Anonymous Coward]

At the company I previously worked at, we had a half-dozen SNAP 4100's of sizes ranging from 120GB to 250GB.

The servers use RAID-5 IDE, and let me tell you, I have come to loath them. More correctly, I came to loath how our incompetent manager was using them.

Two of the servers held our customers graphics. Millions of graphics. These were being served out via SMB through Apache, and the bottleneck was not Apache. We had drive failures on these two servers at least three times more often than the others; roughly one drive failure every 6 to 8 weeks.

When our traffic volume for images peaked, the SNAPs would be unable to deal with the level of requests on the network, and performance would grind to a halt. My brilliant manager then decided to cut Apache out of the loop, and put our SNAPs, running an unknown webserver on an closed platform, directly onto the internet.

The first time, the server immediately crashed. After that, it only crashed at random. Even proceeding this, both SNAPs would crash every few weeks with kernel panic errors.

The SNAP 4100's, in my experience, make excellent plug-and-play storage for small to mid-sized LANs; but only the foolish would use them in a production environment.

PRICE?!?!?!

[jsimon12]

From the SNAP website:

"80GB, 160GB or 250GB of Network Attached Storage(NAS) for as little as $4/GB! "

That sucks for home users, seeing as that is about 4-5 times what SATA disk actually costs.

Re:PRICE?!?!?!

[pe1chl]

Pity that SATA was designed so braindead...
They "solved the master/slave problem"... you can attach only 1 disk to 1 controller.
I find this extremely disappointing. SATA would have been nice when you could put a stack of drives in an external enclosure and connect it to your system with a single convenient serial interface, at the same time avoiding the 2 or 4 drive limit of EIDE controllers. But no, it was made only for office desktop PCs.

i hope its better that the snap 4000

[drwho]

The 4000 is horrible. we're replacing it at work, because it causes us so much pain. What it lacks is features:

1 - sym links aren't portable between CIFS and NFS
2 - No support for GID
3 - No strong authentication of windows users -- only support NTLM not NTLMv2 or Kerberos. Passwords in the clear!

p.s. for some reason my first post of this message did not go through.

Wireless version?

[Anonymous Coward]

Y'know, someone should make a version of these with wireless networking, so you can hide it in a wall (or floor, or ceiling..). Have an unobtrusive switch somewhere, and when the RIAA busts down your door looking for your stash of MP3s, flip the switch and *poof* it disappears.

MOD PARENT DOWN

[josh3736]

Parent is a troll - please mod down, and do not click the link. (It redirects to some adserver who then redirects to an ebay listing.)

Snap Server ... *sigh*

[ghost1911]

We have one of these at out work. The model .... *runs over to snap server* ... well whatever. It's a 480 gb array. The thing is NOTORIOUS for crashing and losing data, comprable to using Windows 95 with a fat16 RAID. Yep, that bad. We used to rely on it for backups but we quickly learned a few *bad* lessons and moved it away from our hosted location. We have replaced it with an ATA-Boy which (thank god) has been running really smoothly since installation. The ATA-Boy in fact is a really impressive workhorse that performs via remote-raid better than the local SCSI drives (according to our intensive I/O benchmarks). I think ours is a 1TB model... imagine all of the pr0n ... I digress.

no case-sensitivity in filenames

[altadel]

I've got five of these, and they are nice, but have one fatal flaw if you're contemplating them for Linux or UNIX use:

no case sensitivity in filenames.

So, if you have users who have two files in one directory:

f and F

there'll be hell to pay when they try to retrieve their files. I've brought this up with SnapAppliance, and they don't care, and won't be fixing this problem.

So, Snap servers are fine for Mac and Windows use. Don't purchase them for use in a UNIX environment, unless you know about this limitation and are the only user.

Why on Snap Snap Appliance Snap?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Linksys EFG80 is even better, easy to add or replace existing hard drive and cheaper.

it's a word without useful meaning

[MrChuck]

so I can stand on it? Maybe jump a bit? Drop it from a desk?

Or is it the flexibility that I can have it server SMB and NFS and NFS4 over TCP and perhaps AFS?

Oh I know,it's that I can easily upgrade it to be able to do these things.

If you're going to toss defs at us, don't take parts out of context. I used this and got:

1. Full of health and strength; vigorous.
2. Powerfully built; sturdy. See Synonyms at healthy.
3. Requiring or suited to physical strength or endurance: robust labor.
4. Rough or crude; boisterous: a robust tale.
5. Marked by richness and fullness; full-bodied: a robust wine.

So your machine is healthy. No, I think you whipped out a word you heard from marketing. And you don't even knowit. I'm going to go our on a limb and suggest that you don't sit around at your Windows Users Group meetings as say: "Gosh, I really found this application to be robust."

Now using the marketing term, I'd suggest that it's a handy little closed box (eg, I can't get to a shell that I know of) that can be used for low performance file service. This is fine for a small network. They have a great niche.

AS for "being portable to carry files" I'd suggest that the 40GB firewire drive I can put in my pocket and attach to the Mac is equaly useful. If less costly. And more "robust" in that, attached to a Mac or any firewire computer, it's as flexible as all un*x boxes.

Re:it's a word without useful meaning

[OldSnapper]

Actually, you probably can stand on it. I threw one 10 feet across the room a couple of times in a simple, lightly padded camera case to test it (the case), and it still worked.

Asinine Joke

[chadjg]

"... so we can combine our network in a sane fashion."

So, this is what the senior geeks among us call it... hmm. Well congratulations Erwos, and good luck. Pretty soon ministers and priests will start having to insist on pre-marital network consulting.

SNAP == bad

[Lifthrasir]

At my place of employment, we trialed 5 of the 160GB models, and basically they suck. They have 4 IDE drives in them, and they were set to run as RAID 5. They were all authenticating against a NT4 domain (yeh, i know, but this is a hospital so pretty backwords here). They would have to be rebooted fairly often because they would basically stop working properly, and 3 of them developed bad drives.

The problem with the bad drives is that they aren't hot-swappable. All of the drives are mounted on the inside of the case, and require turning off the device to pull it apart and swap the drive over.

Compare this with our standard HP/Compaq (now the same company) servers, which all have hot-swappable 15k SCSI drives in them. When one of those goes bad, just pull it out and put in another drive.

The other downside of the SNAP's is, when you have swapped the drives over, it takes an hour or so to rebuild the array, and you cant use it during that time.

So basically these things might be good for a home user (ie major geek) or maybe small business, but it is definately not an enterprise product.

iSCSI plus NAS File Sharing DOES exist

[Anonymous Coward]

Check out neustream.com, they mix iSCSI, logical volumes, Mac/Linux/Windows fiel sharing, Domain support, etc.

Google Cache of article.

[Anonymous Coward]

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Plus a bunch of filler to defeat the lamenews filter, because, well, it was pretty lame without the filler.

Experience with Snap as a company

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting anonymous because I used to work there and don't want to burn any bridges.

The hijinks that go on at this company are on par with the crazyness that HP has been up to lately. They laid off my entire office on April Fool's day and didn't even realize or care about the irony.

Just a bunch of dick heads (but no, I'm not bitter).

NTFS? FAT32? ReiserFS?

[Anonymous Coward]

what does the snap hdd use? NTFS, FAT32, ResierFS? etc... can it really be written too from both WindowsXP and Linux clients?

SNAP servers == Evil

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for as a systems admin for a large network of 4500 users. We invested heavilly in snap servers to use as file servers. Out of the 10 that we purchased 9 failed within 2 years. We ended up pulling out every snap server because they were just too unreliable.
We had extensive data loss and down times because of them. I would recommend anyone considering purchasing these to steer clear of them. They are more trouble than they are worth.