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Home Network Data Storage Device
It happened again- a machine on my home network died. Taking with it tons of data. It's mostly backed up. No huge loss. But I finally think it's time to get some sort of network raid disk. A unified place to safely store data accessible to the numerous machines on my home lan. So now I pose to Slashdot readers- what are your recommendations? I'm looking for something with RAID and SMB sharing. At least a quarter TB, probably a half, but with some room to grow. What have you used? What works? What fails?
I've been looking on-line trying to find this sort of possibility and the only prefab system I've found that has configurable RAID in a consumer NAS is the Buffalo Terrastation. I've seen lots of NAS devices but basically they are all just a single hard drive with a network connection.
I have not used one of these and do not know if it's any good, but like I said, I haven't seen any other options for a prefab system. I've priced out what it would cost to roll my own system like this and it ends up being only a tad more expensive to get a prefab device. Actually, I think the price dropped on the terrastation so I'm not sure that's true anymore.
Also, if you get something like this, you should seriously consider upgrading to gigabit Ethernet if you haven't already. I have a network mounted share for most of my files and it works pretty well, but when I try to do things like synchronize my ipod against it, it totally crawls. Having a networked file server works better if it doesn't feel like your files are on a network.
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The only non-obvious thing (i.e. a lot of people are telling you to do the wrong thing) is that you should use software RAID instead of hardware RAID. The cheapest CPU that you can buy, will still be 99% idle.
A less non-obvious thing (but some people still forget it) is that you want a well-cooled machine, because heat is what kills hard disks. Get a nice case; pretend you're building a machine that you wanna overclock like an 31337 h4xx0r, but then of course, don't really overclock it.
Oh yeah, and keep an eye on /proc/mdstat -- when your first disk dies, you want to know it happened, instead of finding out a year later when your second disk dies. (I use a lil' python script that displays the array status on a VFD using lcdproc. But there are lots of other ways to deal with it. Just make sure you deal with it somehow.)
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You can hook up several hard drives (or other usb toys) via a usb hub. Performance is not great, but totally fine for storage of music and movies if you only have a few users on your network. It supports samba, ftp, nfs, http, probably any other way you'd like to access the files. You could do software raid or some other type of mirroring/backup if you'd like.
The main reasons I really like this thing for an at home server:
I was amazed at how quiet my office became after replacing my PC file server with this guy and PC firewall with a wrt54g. I could actually hear the gf talking again, which is the only downside so far.
-Lod
Once you understand that RAID is reliability strategy and are prepared to have appropriate backup measures in place, then RAID 5 becomes an attractive option for the home network. I've recently looked at several options.
In my case, a three disk RAID 1 solution proved more appropriate than RAID 5. I value high reliability on the home system and wanted to use a rotating third disk as a backup in the event of catastrophic data loss (e.g. house burns to ground). FWIW, I also use a DAT for differentiatial backups. For many users this may be overkill -- sacrificing three disks plus fixed hardware costs to greatly reduce potential data losses -- but for priceless coding projects and digital pictures, this might be good for you as well.
For some users working with video or having large audio collections, much larger disk systems may be desired. First make sure that you have an appropriate mechanism for backing up a terabyte or three. Then, the Vanguard V5 may be an excellent solution if the $2-3k price is acceptible.
Given one hour to live, the student replied: "I'd spend it with professor FP who can make an hour seem like a lifetime."
I've been putting together the specs for such a beast. I decided to go with SATA for cheap drives and "SATA-II" (or whatever you want to call it, since there isn't a standard name for NCQ and 3.0Gbps support) for future-proofing.
1) The natural first choice was 3ware. 12 port SATA-II controller (9550SX-12), for about $800. 3ware products are very well supported on Linux. The only downside is that it's a PCI-X device (this is NOT "PCI Express"!), and PCI-X busses are generally only found on very high end motherboards for servers and workstations. Any athlon motherboard or single-processor opteron board claiming to have PCI-X is lying, they really mean PCI express (AMD chipsets did not support PCI-X at all until around the time dual opteron motherboards were being created)
So since I didn't want to spend $500 on a motherboard that had built in scsi raid, support for 16GB of ram and dual opteron processors just to use that $800 card, I looked around some more...
2) And found a serious contender, the 12 port Areca 8x PCIe ARC-1230 (also about $800). While most low end motherboards don't provide an 8x PCI Express slot, they DO provide a 16x slot which will work just fine for this card (after all, this will be the fileserver, so a motherboard with crappy built in video will do, we're not playing Doom 3 here). Linux drivers are provided as source, even including a kernel tree patch which will build the driver into the kernel rather than as a module, making booting directly from the RAID controller easy.
Slap the Areca into Tom's Hardware's 37 watt computer (motherboard has built in GigE, but pentium-Ms are 32 bit processors, making giant files/filesystems a pain. An Athlon 64+cheap mini-ATX can be had cheaper, but uses more power), add in a stack of 10 watt 400GB WD Caviar Raid Edition 2 drives, and you're set for a very low power fileserver with a lot of storage.
Now, my turn to "ask slashdot":
Where do I get a 250-300 watt powersupply with 12 SATA power connectors?
Alternatively, do the SATA drive cages (like 3ware's RDC-400-SATA (pdf) have their own SATA power connectors built in and use standard molex connectors on the outside? Do I need special cages to support 3Gbps drives (ok, not a serious problem for now, but futureproofing)? 3ware's website says it'll work, their product PDF doesn't.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
You don't need 1000 CDs.
You don't need 500 DVDs.
You don't need hours and hours of shaking, badly focused home videos.
You don't need 5000 bad pictures.
(if you really do you know I am not referring to you).
Nobody is going to watch all that crap, and unless you have not got a life, you are included on that select group.
Prune your digital trash.
You will find that a moderate amount of disk space is more than enough to hold all your files.
If you want to make a datacentre of your home, go ahead and enjoy, but the lamest excuse is to house all those GBytes of data that are never going to be seen again.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.