3.5 Terabyte NAS Reviewed

Steve Kerrison writes "Thecus' new N5200 NAS can hold five SATA drives, which with currently available drives means up to 3.5TB (or 2.75TB in RAID-5) of storage before formatting. From the review: '£600. That's roughly what this will set you back, minus hard drives. Add in five 750GB drives and you'll be forking out a number closer to two thousand. However, act a bit more modestly and you can still have a terabyte (even in RAID-5) for under a grand.'"

Comments

Build one instead?

[JeffElkins]

I need a good NAS to hold a video collection. I wonder though if I'd be better off to build one instead. Cheap headless linux box with 5 bays would work, yes?

Re:Build one instead?

[aersixb9]

Would you build one for personal use, or for others? How much could you sell such a box for, and how would you sell it? Is there a different custom PC you could build to sell, and how would you sell it?

Re:Build one instead?

[unts]

Hi there,

The reviewer, in person, here. Yes, you certianly could build a cheaper solution and whack Linux on it (the N5200 uses Linux too, incidentally). Of course, it depends on what features you long, how much you like fiddling, and what sort of case you fancy building it into.

Indeed, this thing isn't for everyone, but doesn't it look lovely?

Re:Build one instead?

[Kjella]

For your average video collection (unless you're a serious home video guy who need real backup) I suggest skipping RAID altogether (except maybe RAID 1 on boot or whatever). Since any disk tends to fill to capacity, I've figured I'd rather have more and afford to lose some than not having space to store them at all. Plain Linux server, if price sweetspot is enough (300-320GB at the moment) drop in 4-6 of those (depending on mobo chipset) and you have 1.2-1.8TB of storage. If that's not enough, start dropping in 750s (they're actually better value than most 500GB disks). I run a setup like that but with older disks (2x160+120+100 = 540).

Re:Build one instead?

[JeffElkins]

I'd go for a cheap whitebox that I could cram 5 3.5 drives into. No LCD or other fancy stuff, just ssh for access.

Re:Build one instead?

[Randolpho]

I need a good NAS to hold a video collection.

Don't let the MPAA hear you say that.

Er.... see you write that.

Er..Yeah.

Re:Build one instead?

[ben there...]

I have about 20x as much space filled by captured TV shows than movies.

That's still legal, right?

Re:Build one instead?

[Anonymous Coward]

sure, you could get 5 and have a NAS like everyone else does. Or you could get 24

Re:Build one instead?

[ozmanjusri]

I wonder though if I'd be better off to build one instead.

I've just done that. I put together a Sempron 2800 powered rig with 4 Western Digital WD5000YS SATA RAID drives for AU$2,300. I'm using ClarkConnect for the OS, and running the drives in a RAID 5 array, which gives about 1.5TB of usable space. The box runs headless, and is hidden away in a cupboard in my office.

Re:Build one instead?

[un1xl0ser]

Yep. FreeNAS is also a good solution, if you can deal without a full OS. I personally am building a FlexATX motherboard (VIA 800 Mhz) that has two PCI slots. The motherboard draws about 30W, so I am going to try and get by with an 80W PicoPSU Power supply. I haven't decided if I am going to go with a simple mirror or RAID 5 yet.

Re:Build one instead?

[houghi]

If you want a movie, server, look here: http://www.kaleidescape.com/products/server.html
5.5 terabytes and you can even buy movies pre-loaded. Yes, you can add additional servers.

Re:Build one instead?

[legallyillegal]

i haven't heard a single case of MPAA vs. Random IP for the download of "Anal Bunnies 15" and such...

Re:Build one instead?

[MrShaggy]

I was doing some server research and there was some 'free' as in beer, NAS software. It made it real easy on paper. There was also a real cheap way to build a box with used SCSI2 parts off of ebay. I think that it might have even been posted here on slash, before.

The only real cost was an empty drive box. I wish for the life of me that I could remember the names. Ahh well.

Re:Build one instead?

[swillden]

For your average video collection (unless you're a serious home video guy who need real backup) I suggest skipping RAID altogether

That's fine with a small collection, but as it gets larger you start to value it more because of the time it takes to rip and transcode all of those movies. The process is pretty automated, but ripping and transcoding three or four hundred DVDs takes a a great deal of time. I also have about 300 movies on VHS that I plan to digitize, and that's going to take a lot of time (enough that I'm actually considering renting DVDs and ripping them instead of digitizing the VHS tapes, but that is a bit too close to piracy for my taste -- plus I know that's only an 80% solution).

After filling up the better part of a terabyte for my home video jukebox, I really, really don't want to lose any of it, so I use RAID-5 with a hot spare. I would use RAID-6, but five of my disks are IDE, and I only have four controllers, so one of the disks is a slave. Actually using that slave all of the time would kill performance, but it doesn't cost anything (in performance) and adds a safety net to leave it sitting as a hot spare.

In addition, I also have home movies, my music collection (also re-rippable, but it would also be a lot of work) and my photos on the same file server. Even if I didn't put my video collection on RAID-5, I'd have to have redundancy for that stuff. I'm trying to arrange for off-site backup as well.

Re:Build one instead?

[MrShaggy]

This is the page for the software; http://www.serverelements.com/naslite.php

Re:Build one instead?

[houghi]

Ripping? Won't it be etter to just copy the iso and then mount the iso when needed? Indeed more space but also you do not loose that much time and still have all the extra's.

Re:Build one instead?

[Storklerk]

Yeah the N5200 does use linux. But I did not find any clear hint to this on the Thecus website.

Also I'm missing any documentation of how to upgrade the firmware to your own linux system.

If you want the source of their linux look here:
ftp://ftp.gpl-devices.org/pub/vendors/Thecus/

They tried to hide the linux, but without success:
http://gnumonks.org/~laforge/weblog/2006/02/24/

So until they openly say they are using linux and offer a way to upgrade the software on the system I will NOT buy one of these.

I did think about getting one of these. It has really nice features and if I could put my own linux system on one of the hard disk I could use it also as a dsl router and proxy (squid).

Anyone knows of a similar device with an upgradeble linux?

Re:Build one instead?

[goober1473]

How about - rip/transcode whatever.... Then burn onto DVD - keeps the costs down nicely. Just how many films do you own to justify a 2TB storage solution? How often do you watch them? With the money saved you could even go an watch a film at the movies (while on holiday with the rest of the saved cash).

Re:Build one instead?

[Karzz1]

I built a 2Tb storage device w/another 250Gb for the OS a couple years ago as a backup solution for ~30 colo servers. I used a Tyan dual Xeon motherboard (there is a lot of compressing taking place on this machine), A 3Ware hardware RAID card, and a Chenbro 3u rackmount case with 12 SATA hot-swap bays and a single internal bay. I put 13 250Gb drives in it (2x250Gb software mirrored for OS, 10xRAID5 = 2Tb storage and 1 hot spare).

At the time the cost was ~$4000 while commercial solutions were closer to ~$8,000. I used CentOS 3 as the OS (4 was still in beta) and had to use the centosplus unsupported kernel in order to use reiser on the 2Tb array -- ext3 didn't work for some reason that I don't recall. The 3Ware card showed up with stock kernel modules as a SCSI controller.

I assume someone could build a similar system for about the same cost with much more disk space now. Also, if cost is a factor, the hardware RAID card (~$800) could be dropped in favor of software RAID and a single processor mobo could be used. I really** like the Chenbro case though and for the extra cost it leaves a lot of room for expansion if you were to start with only 5 drives and wanted to expand later.

Re:Build one instead?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got a 2 TB server that cost around $2000 6 months ago (a significant fraction of the cost went to the motherboard needing to have PCI-E, which was only available on 64-bit motherboards at the time, which meant an expensive athlon 64 too, which was really horrible overkill).

I highly recommend the 3ware 9500S-8 controller, it is very well supported on linux (3/5 of the sections in the instruction manual were for installation on redhat, suse, and some other distribution), supports RAID-5, is SATA, supports up to 8 drives, and was very inexpensive considering it's features. It goes without saying that it's "real" RAID as opposed to software RAID. I've been running dapper server edition on it for six months, and couldn't be happier with it. 6 x 400 GIG generic hard disks, and when the time comes I can easily add in two more 400 GIGers to expand the array to 2.8 GIGs. I think it supports 500 GIG disks too, which means you can get up to a 3.5 GIG RAID-5 array.

Re:Build one instead?

[JeffElkins]

"How about - rip/transcode whatever.... Then burn onto DVD - keeps the costs down nicely. Just how many films do you own to justify a 2TB storage solution? How often do you watch them? With the money saved you could even go an watch a film at the movies (while on holiday with the rest of the saved cash)."

Won't work for me. I have about 400 transcoded movies, ripped from my DVD collection. DVDs are inconvienient when compared to central storage and theaters are a hassle when compared to a 60" widescreen LCD. Plus the fact that DVD-Rs are rather unreliable, even when you buy more expensive premium discs.

Re:Build one instead?

[Anonymous Coward]

I built my own system at home. A dual-core Opteron with 2GB RAM and four 300GB hard drives running in RAID5. I got an Areca RAID card which only has 4 SATA II ports, but you can get models of the card that has 8, 12 or 16 ports. With the PCI Express bus, I don't think you will have any bottlenecks there. My only complaint about the card is the lame looking web interface, but other than that, the card is well worth the money. I tried using FreeNAS, which seems fairly cool, but ended up going with Windows Server 2003 because of other needs. If you are looking for a free and simplistic interface (same as m0n0wall), definitely check into FreeNAS.

Re:Build one instead?

[TCM]

Why is everyone always using 4 drives or 8 drives with RAID5? Considering most writes consist of 2^n bytes, you always need 2^n+1 drives in order to not waste any speed, i.e. 3, 5 or 9 drives.

I am using a software RAID5 and the difference between optimal and non-optimal is 71MB/s vs. 8MB/s writes! Hardware controllers could overcome some of this with their buffer memory, but I still think you should be using the optimal number of drives there.

Re:Build one instead?

[ozmanjusri]

Why is everyone always using 4 drives or 8 drives with RAID5?

Because speed isn't always the goal. I used 4 because that gave me the space and redundancy I needed, not to get a high transfer speed.

Re:Build one instead?

[nxtw]

Do you have a link for more information, or can you explain this more fully? I have a 8x200gb software RAID5 that sustains just over 7.5 MBytes/sec (four of those drives are using the two IDE channels; the other four are Serial ATA, so that might contribute to poor performance as well).

I wish I had known this before I moved 1 TB of data to the array.

Re:Build one instead?

[swillden]

Won't it be etter to just copy the iso and then mount the iso when needed?

I do that with some movies, but not most, for two reasons. First, disk space. It's not yet cheap enough that I can afford to rip the whole ISO. At an average of about 7GB per DVD multiplied by ~400 DVDs, that's almost 3TB for my video collection. By ripping just the main title from each DVD and by transcoding it into a high-quality DivX file, I reduce the per-movie space to about 2.5GB. The other reason is that most of the time I find DVD menus annoying. When I want to watch a movie, I just want to watch the movie. I like to use the MythTV browser to pick a movie, and just press play. If I want to see the extras, the DVD is sitting on the shelf, and since it hardly ever gets used, it's unscratched and plays well.

Re:Build one instead?

[TCM]

I could only find this from the developer of NetBSD's software RAID implementation called RAIDframe http://mail-index.netbsd.org/current-users/2002/04 /19/0011.html:

The 'problem' with 4 disks is that you have (effectively) 3 data disks.
Since most times you're doing a 'power-of-two' write (e.g. 16K or 32K),
it's impossible to divide that power-of-two data by 3 and have a nice
full-stripe write. That leaves you with doing partial writes all the
time, and those are the ones that kill RAID 5 write performance.

In my case (NetBSD FFS) most writes are indeed 64K since I'm using a filesystem with a 64K block size. A whole stripe on my RAID is 64K as well (with 4 "data" components+1 parity component and 16K stripe size each), so a 64K write from the OS translates perfectly to 5*16K writes to the disk. This gives me over 107MB/s read speed and 71MB/s write speed from/to the raw device.

During testing I made a fatal error where, although the filesystem blocksize and stripe size matched, I had mistakenly offset the partition on the RAID by a number of blocks that was not a whole stripe. What then happened was that each 64K write didn't translate to 5*16K writes, but instead to 2* 4*16K reads (since each stripe is 64K and the 64K write from the OS overlapped 2 stripes partially), then parity recalculation of 128K data and then 2* 5*16K writes. This dropped the write speed to the mentioned 8MB/s.

I think the problem is equally bad if you try to write 2^n bytes of data to a prime number of data disks (3 or 5).

If you do it right, RAID5 write speed doesn't suck, not even with software RAID.

Re:Build one instead?

[TCM]

Another thing: It really helps if you have each disk on a dedicated channel. Never use 2 disks as master/slave on one IDE channel. I'd rather buy additional controller cards, even if it's just standard PCI.

Re:Build one instead?

[zuzulo]

Another thing to remember when building high density storage appliances at the moment is that the MTBF for >=750 GB drives that use the new perpendicular recording tech (multiple layers of data - 2 at the moment - stored at each point) is actually higher than that for standard drives. That is, the new larger drives that use this tech are actually more reliable than smaller drives using the old tech. Seagate is the only drive manufacturer actually using perpendicular recording tech for retail drives, although this should be changing in the near future as more devices from other manufacturers make it into the retail chain.

I am not affiliated with Seagate or any other HDD manufacturer.

Re:Build one instead?

[hobbit]

Depends on your jurisdiction. Here in the UK, I think we're not technically allowed to keep recorded shows indefinitely (or show them to more than N people).

Re:Build one instead?

[this great guy]

Very nicely done. But if I were you I would have done it slightly differently. I would not have used the internal disk bay (faster interventions, no need to open the case when replacing a disk). I would have only put 12 disks in the hot-swap bays (11 for RAID, and 1 hot spare). I would have used software RAID (hw and sw RAID are both capable of saturating a GigE pipe --I suppose you were doing backups over the network). Software RAID would have allowed me to create a small 100 MB RAID1 partition for booting (/boot), a 1-100 GB RAID5 partition for your root fs (/), and the remaining space for your backups (/space). This way you would have ended up spending less money (12 HDDs instead of 13 HDDs, no hardware RAID card), having more usable space for your backups (the equivalent of 10 HDDs minus 1-100 GB for / --compared to only 9 HDDs in your case) and having easier maintenance procedures (no case opening when replacing any disk).

Re:Build one instead?

[WuphonsReach]

I tend to treat MTBF as "interesting information" but not something I worry overly much about. They are probably useful in separating out the consumer-level 40hrs/week use drives from the ones that are capable of running 24x7.

Instead, I make the assumption that the drive will fail and at the worst possible time. Which means RAID + hot-spare + rotating/generational backups for anything important.

More important to me is the warranty period on the drives. Three years is nice, but five years is nicer. With a 5-yr warranty, assuming that the drive kicks the bucket in year 4, I get almost 10 years of life out of a single purchase.

(And the length of warranty also serves as a useful bit of information to separate the consumer-level drives from the 24x7 drives.)

Re:Build one instead?

[WuphonsReach]

I suspect the original poster was referring to the scenario where you can fit everything onto a single disk (500GB or 750GB) of content. In that particular scenario where you can afford a few hours of downtime, why not take the 2 disks and make one a backup of the other rather then a RAID-1 mirror drive?

That way, if the primary disk dies, you simply put a new one in and restore from the backup drive. And if the primary disk gets corrupted, the backup shouldn't be affected. Under linux you could even keep the backup drive offline except during backups to protect against fumble-fingers or other corruption.

I do something similar on my video editing box. I have (3) disks... primary, mirror and trash. Once a day (or as needed) the data is copied from the primary to the mirror drive. Any outdated or deleted files are moved to the trash drive (keeping the past 3 revisions). The added bonus is that during transcode work, I can use the mirror drive as my "source" drive and write the output of the encoding to the primary drive. That puts all of my reads on one spindle and all of the writes on a different spindle.

Re:Build one instead?

[j-turkey]

The reviewer, in person, here. Yes, you certianly could build a cheaper solution and whack Linux on it (the N5200 uses Linux too, incidentally). Of course, it depends on what features you long, how much you like fiddling, and what sort of case you fancy building it into.

I did not notice any evidence of a battery-backed cache in either your article or the product website. IMO, it is important to have battery when using cached RAID-5 in order to avoid a write hole. Can you confirm whether or not the N5200 is so equipped? For many users, this may be a deciding factor between the N5200 and a homebrewed solution.

Re:Build one instead?

[Gothmolly]

used a Tyan dual Xeon motherboard (there is a lot of compressing taking place on this machine)

How is that germane? We don't care about your dick size. Get to the point.

Re:Build one instead?

[Thing 1]

I really** like [...]

(Noting that there's no double-asterisk explanation at the bottom...) Combined with your sig:

Beware of he who denies you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.

Hmm...

Re:Build one instead?

[bec1948]

For your stated purpose you might find that upcoming boxes from Yellow Machine might be a good fit. Up to 3 GB and built-in streaming and mostly automatic discovery and automation. Pricing seems to be in line with hardware costs with what I, a genuine cheepskate, would consider reasonable.
The new models, about which I am writing, are starting to hit the market this month, with the really interesting ones coming in the fall and so forth.
This is not an endorsement, just information, as I have not yet tested the new boxes - I expect to received the current models in the next couple of weeks and will continue to evaluate them as they come out.

Re:Build one instead?

[Karzz1]

Ok, I have had a couple drinks, but that made me laugh out loud. I am of the habit of using "**" for emphasis :) I got it from an older programer that I IM with regularly. Could it be a Canadian thing....?

Re:Build one instead?

[drsmithy]

Why is everyone always using 4 drives or 8 drives with RAID5?

Most likely because it's exceptionally uncommon to find disk controllers with odd numbers of ports.

Most everyone building big chunks o' disk value space over performance. Particularly when they're typically going to be accessing it using PCs with pitiful bus bandwidth and/or over <10G ethernet.

I am using a software RAID5 and the difference between optimal and non-optimal is 71MB/s vs. 8MB/s writes!

Your problem is(/was) elsewhere. I have numerous RAID5 arrays with even numbers of drives getting over 100M/s write speed.

Possibly the RAID5 implementation on whatever OS you were using wasn't particularly good ? While I'm not a huge fan of Linux in general, it's software RAID and LVM capabilities are second to none in the OSS world.

Hardware controllers could overcome some of this with their buffer memory, but I still think you should be using the optimal number of drives there.

Doubtful. The scenarios where hardware RAID is faster than software RAID - particularly when you're at the filesystem level and not the raw device level - are few.

Re:Build one instead?

[Thing 1]

Could it be a Canadian thing....?

It must be; I've never seen emphasis at the end of a word like that. Generally I see something like *emphatic* adjustment.

Or, to use the markup that Slashdot allows, something like <b>bold</b> or <i>italics</i>...

Glad to help the milk come out of your nose. ;-)

Conversion for Americans

[cynicalmoose]

For those of you who don't know how much a pound is worth:

£600 = $1100
£2000 = $3700

(Yes, the pound is one of the heaviest currencies in the world - in that one GBP is worth more than one unit of other currencies)

Re:Conversion for Americans

[Anonymous Coward]

(Yes, the pound is one of the heaviest currencies in the world - in that one GBP is worth more than one unit of other currencies)

Yes, but it's nothing compared to kilos.

Re:Conversion for Americans

[bertboerland]

And if you dont know how uch a USD is worth (since it is declining faster then the trust in the US goverment), see pound in euros or any other currency

Re:Conversion for Americans

[ralmin]

Question: what common commodity has a value close to one pound sterling / pound weight?

Re:Conversion for Americans

[benbread]

I believe you're refering to Sterling Silver, but it's been some time since you could buy a pound of silver for 1GBP :P

Re:Conversion for Americans

[Anonymous Coward]

...dont know how uch a USD is worth (since it is declining faster then the trust in the US goverment)

WTF are you talking about?

Re:Conversion for Americans

[daBass]

one GBP is worth more than one unit of other currencies

There are some exceptions; probably amongst others, the currencies of Bahrain, Kuwait, Cyprus, Malta and Oman are all worth more in units than GBP.

Re:Conversion for Americans

[rossifer]

I understood his remark to refer to the growing number of people who observe the PATRIOT Act and similar laws, domestic wiretapping, financial surveillance, etc. and see a government increasingly set on being a police state.

Since I don't trust police states to do anything except trample on liberty and freedom, my trust in the US government is declining at a rapid rate.

(I am a Registered Republican and a libertarian)

Regards,
Ross

Re:Conversion for Americans

[FyRE666]

I love the fact the pound is so strong at the moment (and the dollar so weak ;-) It's far cheaper for me now to buy stuff (mostly performance car parts) from the US, pay for shipping, and even get stung for VAT than to buy it here in the UK! Hopefully the dollar will drop a bit more, then I can buy more stuff ;-)

Re:Conversion for Americans

[rkww]

A pound sterling per pound weight is about 45p / kilo, which is about the going rate for a large bag of potatoes

Re:Conversion for Americans

[A. Bosch]

If you are a libertarian, why register as a Republican? I gave up my Republican registration years ago. I no longer belong to a political party.

Re:Conversion for Americans

[Anonymous Coward]

And lets not forget

£ (£) = pound = currency of the United Kingdom. We know what a pound is...
# = NOT pound

Re:Conversion for Americans

[daybot]

Er... he said one of the heaviest currencies...

Re:Conversion for Americans

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately google calc doesn't tell how much # is in euros..

Re:Conversion for Americans

[rossifer]

Two reasons I'm a registered Republican.

First, I'm a libertarian, not a "L"ibertarian. Though I did vote for Badnarik, and I do want a smaller government involved in fewer aspects of our daily lives, I don't actually buy into the anarchist aspects of the official party platform.

Second, as a registered Republican, I get a chance to vote in Republican primaries. Which means that I can support John McCain, and vote against whichever religious right-winger who tries to get elected where I live. Since this helps the Republicans, I don't feel deceptive to register as one.

Ross

Big and Redundant. Nice.

[Captain Jack Taylor]

Hmmm...needs a lower pricetag, but can you think of ANYWHERE better to put your pr0n? :p I want one.

Re:Big and Redundant. Nice.

[Anonymous Coward]

...can you think of ANYWHERE better to put your pr0n?

On DVD so I can actually watch it on something bigger than a monitor? I don't like sticky keyboards. :)

Under a grand?

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess if you don't count shipping, you might be able to pull it off.

Re:Under A Grand?

[eebra82]

A hot tip is to check out google's own currency conversion. Simply type in something like "500 usd in gbp" (without the quotes) and you will get the result, looking like this:

500 U.S. dollars = 271.783443 British pounds

Works the same way for converting Celcius to Kelvin, metrics to other systems and so forth. Calculator included!

Re:Under A Grand?

[rtaylor]

I just got an external 500 gig from newegg. Price? 230 real dollars.
$230 * 4 (redundancy to prevent data loss) = ~$1000 for 1TB.

If you don't mind losing your data then this product is not for you. We can also ignore the performance difference between 4 individual USB drives and a single network attached device.

Re:Under A Grand?

[OmnipotentEntity]

Huh? I just got done pricing storage, and if you get a $300 8-slot Hardware RAID card, plus 250s (or 300s) at around $90 a piece (You have to look to find them, but they're out there) you wind up a shave over a thousand and you get 1.75 TBs in a RAID 5. Forgo the RAID, and you can get 11 for under a grand, which is well over a TB.

Re:Under A Grand?

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, $230 * 3 (RAID5) = $690 for 1TB.

Re:Under A Grand?

[rtaylor]

Um, $230 * 3 (RAID5) = $690 for 1TB.
They were USB drives. USB is pretty easy to unplug thus making RAID5 very fragile.

Best use either RAID6 (double parity) -- minimum of 4 disks.

Re:Under A Grand?

[kneppercr]

Awesome. Thanks man. You learn something new every day.

Far too much

[joevai]

640kb is enough for anyone! RAM, Disk space, meh it's all the same.

OT

[ichigo 2.0]

Your sig doesn't work.

Re:OT

[jez9999]

Yes it does. It's a great example of how you can help excercise your right not to vote by passing away your idle time viewing link farms.

How about a little truth in advertising

[Anonymous Coward]

"storage before formatting."

Well you can't very well use it _without_ formatting, can you? Lying marketing hacks. Of course it might not have a terabyte free after formatting, and then won't be cool enough for those geeks that can't get a hard on unless their SAN passes the latest .

That's it?

[ben there...]

Only 40 twenty-four days of DVD-quality porn. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.

Build it myself

[hak_addictk]

I think I would much rather build a NAS instead of paying this much for one. Also I think it could be fun to build

Under A Grand?

[kneppercr]

A thousand dollars (pounds actually but it is too early to convert stuff) is a ridiculus price to pay for a terabyte of space. I just got an external 500 gig from newegg. Price? 230 real dollars. Yeah its USB, but you know what? I paid about 50 cents for a gig. THATS a good deal.

Buffalo Terastation Pro

[Bushcat]

I have a couple of the Buffalo Terastation Pros (name depends on market). They seem to be a no-brainer at their pricing point if one doesn't get the largest-capacity model. Reason for two: one can do encrypted backups to the second, so my stuff is reasonably backed up and maybe secure. The things are almost silent in use, which is a way bigger factor then I ever thought it would be. Downside is the units don't support NFS out of the box, so they're just a tad too slow to stream video from. (Unless the problem is the Tvix5000U, a Korean product which is a great hardware design totally stuffed by abysmal software.)((As was it predecessor))(((And its portable equivalent)))((((Bugger, I spot a purchasing trend here I should have fixed))))

Re:Buffalo Terastation Pro

[Cheeze]

too slow to stream video?

What kind of video are you trying to stream from it. It should just be disk IO, and a full HD video stream fills up about 5-8MB/sec.

Hopefully, you are mistaken.

Re:Buffalo Terastation Pro

[rikkus-x]

We have one of these. It cost GBP 500 (they were going cheap at Misco) for 1TB. It was easy to set up and seems to work fine. I don't know why the Thecus thing is 600 quid without any drives. It doesn't seem to offer much more.

NFS isn't necessary for streaming video - CIFS doesn't have enough overhead to cause a problem in that area. It's probably your video player that has a problem.

Re:Buffalo Terastation Pro

[imsabbel]

Speed.
Simple speed.
Those Terastations have about 15Mbyte maximum write speed in raid5 mode, this one according to the review >35.

If you want to actually use it as a NAS, and not as a media server, thats a huge difference.

iSCSI? NAS?

[digitalhermit]

What are people using for small office/home file servers? I'm looking for something that will hold about a terabyte in storage, and another terabyte in some sort of SAN backed disk. I.e., I want to be able to present arbitrary sized LUNs to machines on the network and also have standard file storage ability (CIFS/SMB, NFS, FTP). Right now I'm running Samba/NFS on Linux but have not figured out how to present LUNs to the clients. The iSCSI and Coda stuff in the kernel has not been updated in quite a while from what I can see.

Re:iSCSI? NAS?

[Antique Geekmeister]

Cheap storage is one thing. Having all the features a particular site wants, such as LUN's in your case, or NFS in others, or Active Directory authenticated CIFS for others, or high-performance streaming, or single partitions over 2 Terabytes for others, are another set of things altogether.

Also beware the controllers. Good file servers have good quality RAID chipsets, like Adaptec or 3Ware. Cheap file serversz have those awful Promise or other low-end chipsets, with lots of wildly touted NEW! EXCITING! FEATURES! but extremely poor performance and reliability.

When you add up the costs of good components, and testing them together in a stable configuration, and getting a service contract in place for a critical service, a good-quality commercial NAS for $3000 for for 2.0 raw Terabytes starts to look very reasonable, compared to the time and work of building up your own.

Re:iSCSI? NAS?

[digitalhermit]

Actually $3K sounds very reasonable, cheap even, for two terabytes. Prices I've seen are in the $5K-$7K range :D Cost per gig, just for the disks alone, is in the $2 range. DO you know of a product in the $3K range that has 2 terabytes after the RAID is built?

Re:iSCSI? NAS?

[WuphonsReach]

SAN seems to be very expensive (doesn't seem to matter what flavor). iSCSI might be less expensive, until you look into the pricing of the iSCSI PCI/PCIe cards. I suspect, for companies who have less then a dozen servers, that SAN is not the way to go.

Unless, of course, money is no object.

Re:iSCSI? NAS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Good thing an iSCSI card isn't required.

CLV vs CAV

[Anonymous Coward]

""Thecus' new N5200 NAS can hold five SATA drives, which with currently available drives means up to 3.5TB (or 2.75TB in RAID-5) of storage before formatting."

If hard drives used constant linear velocity instead of constant angular velocity then they could have a greater capacity.

Re:CLV vs CAV

[plupa]

For hard drives, CLV would require that the platter change rotational velocity as the head stepped to different tracks. A head can be seeked to a new track in less than 10 ms. To change the RPM of the platters would take *forever*. Heads can be produced very light, platters need mass to provide ruggedness.

If there was a desire to utilize the additional platter capacity on the outer tracks, it could be more simply done by writing more sectors on outer tracks.

But having a variable number of sectors per track (even if hidden by disk firmware) would play havoc with the OS's attempts to optimize disk layout.

Re:CLV vs CAV

[Anonymous Coward]

If there was a desire to utilize the additional platter capacity on the outer tracks, it could be more simply done by writing more sectors on outer tracks. But having a variable number of sectors per track (even if hidden by disk firmware) would play havoc with the OS's attempts to optimize disk layout.

Actually, drive companies have been using these methods for years. The disk is divided into different zones which have varying sector sizes. The geometry infomation that comes from drives is an obsolete/fictitious concept. While old OS's like VMS tried to mirror information on a different platter rotated 180 degrees, this hasn't been possible in about a decade (in any storage technology). When an OS deals with a Raid array, the geometry is completely meaningless. When was the last time you saw an ATA drive that reported the correct number of heads?

As far as the product in this article, I wouldn't use anything other than Raid 6 with ATA/SATA drives if I really cared about my data. Consumer grade drives are good for around 300k hours mean time between failures (MTBF). Having 5 drives drops the storage set to 60k hours MTBF. Regenerating parity on 3.5 TB of data is going to take a long time, which leaves you vulnerable to a second failure that would lose all your Raid 5 or Raid 1 data. In addition, the undetected error rate of SATA/ATA drives is poor enough that you'll expect a couple of errors to creep in. You probably wouldn't notice in video data, might just get a "pop" in audio data, but it'll destroy an application or compressed file. It seems okay for a serious home user, but I wouldn't want to use it in a business for anything but backup (a fault of SATA/ATA in general, not this product in particular).

OS

[Kadin2048]

It would seem to me that one of the strengths of the COTS solutions are that they have fairly slick integrated interfaces for managing access.

If you roll your own, you might well have to set up Samba/CIFS/Netatalk all separately, which could easily become a huge pain. If you want a new share, you'd have to add it manually to all three, and deal with their varying authentication schemes.

I did some Googling around for OSes specifically designed for roll-your-own NAS boxes (which it seems must exist), and came up with some stuff. One of the neatest projects looks like it has died, which is sad: Darma NAS OS. It seemed to be Linux-based and had a Java web-based management GUI, used the usual SMB/NFS/AppleShare, and supported ACLs and some other neat management stuff.

I'm curious what people who've gone the DIY route are using to ease the management hassle that I could easily see a SAN becoming if it's OS is just straight Linux.

Re:OS

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm curious what people who've gone the DIY route are using to ease the management hassle that I could easily see a SAN becoming if it's OS is just straight Linux.

I'd guess Webmin

Re:OS

[jregel]

Have a look at OpenFiler. It might be what you're looking for.

Re:OS

[Karzz1]

Very nice and based on my favorite distro as well CentOS.

However, for someone posting with such a low UID, I would have expected a link. Your /. user card is in serious jeopardy of being revoked :)

1.2 terabytes for $450 including harddrives

[Anonymous Coward]

NAS is overrated. Just put them in any computer and leave it on all the time, put it to sleep when you don't need it:

3 ide 400gb harddrives at $150 a piece = 1.2 terabytes = $450 (pricewatch)

No need to build a seperate linux box. Linux is great that its free, but most distros don't have a sleep/suspend function, which is how Windows DEVASTATED Linux right out of our office (and we were hardcore linux). The linux community has no clue just how important being able put your computer to sleep is by simply hitting the power button, and then wake it up instantly by hitting the power button again (or a keyboard key). That and winning over the 3d game developer community. Linux has come a long way with auto hardware detection and UI, but its got to get the suspend function, 3d developers, and most of all, it needs to understand people who want to get work done don't want a complicated as crap OS (that needs lots of config) to get in the way, they want the OS to get OUT OF THE WAY so they can get on to doing WORK. I'm no windows fanboy, but when push comes to shove, I need stuff to just plain work by default with no further config and never crash. That was everyones big beef with Windows back in the day, it was crap, but with XP they finally fixed it, and we have zero plans to upgrading to vista. Run an XP box as light as possible with a few key critical apps you actually use, keep it clean, and never install any software on it from dubious sources, and you can run stable as hell (well, as stable as linux anyway). And have your Battlefield 2.

I think I've got about 2 terabytes of data myself and growing, across 3 amd64 computers.

And in other news...

[rsperry79]

a review came out today showing how much faster a tape drive is in playing back porn that the uber large NAS with a whopping 6mb/sec restore.

A custom built alternative

[nxtw]

(All prices approximate.)

This will support 4 drives over SATA, or 7 if you use all of the IDE channels:
$105 4U case and 400w power supply
$165 915G Socket 479 Motherboard w/ 4 SATA, 2 IDE, and gigabit ethernet.
$71 Celeron M 370 (Dothan) CPU
$25 DDR2 memory (256MB)
$25 CompactFlash OS drive (1GB)
$15 IDE to Compact Flash adapter
$0-25 Linux OS -- there are specialized NAS distributions available commercially for those that afraid of setting things up themselves
= $406-$431

Which beats this device's $670 lowest price found on Froogle.

Additions:
$20 4x SATA I
$60 4x SATA II
$50-100 Replacement power supply
+$60 1GB DDR2
+$150 Pentium M CPU

Sure, the Celeron M will use more power than a Celeron M ULV, and the included power supply may be inadequate for configurations with large drives (but that's more drives than the article's product supports). And this device doesn't have the USB device capaibility, either. But you've got the freedom to do things how you like.

Re:A custom built alternative

[Anonymous Coward]

How about adding a hardware raid card and use the new NASLite v2.0

http://www.serverelements.com/naslite-2-usb.php [serverelements.com]

Re:A custom built alternative

[Saeger]

Just to see how reasonably low I could go, I spec'd out an even cheaper do-it-yourself Micro-ATX software raid5 box:

$34-44 - MicroATX MINI-tower case w/ 300-400W PSU, 4x int 3.5" bays + 1-2x ext 3.5" (or 5.25" bays w/ brackets)
$79 - MicroATX Asus Socket 939 MB w/ 4x SATA2, 2x PATA, pci-e, gigabit, integrated vid&audio
$92 - AMD Athlon64 3000+ (cheapest socket 939 cpu)
$22-$40 - 256MB DDR400 (or $40 for 512)
$25 - 1GB CompactFlash (80X)
$12 - IDE-CF Adapter
$14 - 1x SATA PCI-e controller (1 + 4 onboard = 5x sata and no PATA crap); micro-atx MBs with more than 4x sata aren't common. Would like 6x for a hotspare option.
$0 - FreeNAS, or roll your own.
= $278 - $306

Add 5X Seagate 320GB SATA2 drives @ $100 each, which comes to $773 total for a 1,280GB RAID5 NAS box. Not too shabby. Could get the drives even cheaper than $0.31/GB by waiting for a better with-rebate-hassle deal.

Biggest downsides to this kinda of thing:
1) setup time for h/w and s/w
2) no easy hotswap bays with blinken LEDs to tell you "THIS DRIVE IS DEAD/DYING; REPLACE ME!", so you have to rely on mdadm alert emails and SMART monitoring, then crack the case open and KNOW the sata order so you replace the RIGHT sdX drive.
3) ugly and bigger than it needs to be

When some company comes along and sells a 5-6 drive raid5 box like this for $150-$250 (instead of triple that) I bet it'll be a HUGE hit.

Re:A custom built alternative

[Anonymous Coward]

I prefer to go a lot beefier (allowing the server to do other duties such as database / web server in addition to DHCP, DNS, OpenLDAP). Okay, so the following is overkill for simple NAS. But it's the box that I'll be building next month to serve as a 5-person development server / PostgreSQL server / SubVersion server.

$0400 Opteron 170 Denmark 939 dual-core 2GHz
$0240 Tyan Tomcat K8E S2865 G2NR
$0200 Kingston 1GB KVR400X72C3A/1G
$0035 DVD-ROM, 3.5" Floppy
$0020 Cooler Master STB-3T4-E1 4-in-3 Device Module
$0020 120mm cooling fans, misc parts
$0130 Antec p180b case
$0140 650W PSU COOLMAX|CW-650T 650W
$0520 2x WD Raptors (147GB 10k RPM SATA-II)
$0520 2x Seagate 500GB SATA-II
=====
$2225 base cost

Expansion:
$0200 (2) Kingston 1GB KVR400X72C3A/1G
$0130 HighPoint RocketRAID 2300/2310 SATA II 4-port PCIe
$1140 4x Seagate 500GB SATA-II
$0130 HighPoint RocketRAID 2300/2310 SATA II 4-port PCIe
$0520 2x Seagate 500GB SATA-II
=====
$2120 additional expansion costs

Using 400GB drives would be a good bit cheaper. The 500GB drives are still a bit pricey (as is the WD Raptor for the O/S).

The big disadvantage to the p180b case is that the hard drives are not in trays (unlike the older p160 case). You'll have to disconnect as many as 4 drives (depending on how many are in each cage) in order to swap them. That means twice as much downtime when swapping hard drives. The p180b case offers very good cooling for the hard drives.

I'll probably configure the (8) 500GB drives as (1) RAID1 set, (1) 5-drive RAID5 set, and (1) hot-spare. Alternately, I'll go with (2) RAID1 sets, (1) 3-drive RAID5 set and (1) hot-spare. There are performance advantages of having the 3rd RAID1 set (putting PostgreSQL logs on a separate RAID1). I may use as many as (6) Raptors instead of the larger 500GB drives.

I'd substitute

[Brian Stretch]

$91 Athlon 64 3000+ CPU which will spend most of its time in power-saving mode, depending on how often the array is used. This also allows you to use a 64-bit Linux distro. AMD64 mode gives a very nice performance boost to encryption, if you're into that. There are cheaper 64-bit Sempron series chips if you don't mind sacrificing some L2 cache. Eventually there will be some cheap dualcore CPUs too.

$85 ASUS M2NPV-VM Socket AM2 NVIDIA GeForce 6150 Micro ATX AMD Motherboard. Everything you need including the best onboard video available. I'm using its Socket 939 predecessor in my home server.

You'll need to be more careful about the memory you choose though. Spring for a good high-efficiency power supply too, probably Seasonic S12 or Enermax Liberty.

Re:I'd substitute

[Joe The Dragon]

and you may want a pci-e sata card maby even a h/w raid one

NASLite

[Anonymous Coward]

NASLite from http://www.serverelements.com/ allows you to use quite ancient hardware (eg Pentium 1 or 2) and get a 4 (or even 8 with the latest version) hard drive NAS up and running with SMB, NFS, FTP and HTTP access. Took me about 10 mins (not including formatting), and only had to buy the hard drives since people virtually throw away machines that this can run on! Worth every cent of it's modest fee IMHO. (I have no affiliation to NASlite)

Re:NASLite

[Anonymous Coward]

The new NASLite v2.0 rocks, supports hardware raid, rsync and a host of other new features.

FYI

[ichigo 2.0]

My guess is that TF he is about is the FED's irresponsible money printing, and the governments disrespect towards the constitution which explicitly states that money must be backed by silver or gold i.e. no fiat money allowed. Not that the euro is much better, but at least it isn't burdened by huge deficits.

NAS without RAID5?

[poptones]

No way would I use a machine like that without a RAID5 setup. I've lost countless hours (and access to music I no longer have, since the CDs were lost in a move or just quit playing). Whatever you spend on discs, going from 4-5 only adds 20% in cost, which even at $400 is pretty damn cheap compared to the work a TB or two of storage represents.

Old machines with ATX type motherboards and such are far too cheap to justify shelling out $700 or more for a "dedicated" type solution. Get an old machine with a P2B-F motherboard and a decent PII cpu, throw away the old power supply and put in a shinty new $70 or so power supply, plug in a controller card if you wanna use SATA drives, and off you go - essentially for the price of the drives you want to put in it.

Big Cheapo RAID

[Doc Ruby]

Why spend $1100 to get 5 drives when you can spend $150 for practically any cheap PC with 4 IDE slots? That's $600 for 8 slots, 6TB raw @750GB for another $3000 or 2TB @250GB for $500. It might not be as fast, but if you distribute the data right, you're getting access times across 8 IDE switches instead of 5 - and it's just as reliable. Spending all $1100 gets you 6 hosts, 24 slots; $1500 for 6TB @250GB or $9K for 18TB. You might spend more time replacing drives and components, but that might be worth the money.

And you get 6 hosts on which to distribute other processes when not fetching data. Quite a nice compute/storage fabric.

You've still got to boot, and decide which Linux distro to run your SW RAID. Maybe off a CD - whose distro?

Re:Big Cheapo RAID

[oktokie]

I used to tinker a lot when my time was relatively cheaper than commodity not so expensive hardware(college years).

Not anymore. My time is much more valuable than fiddling with linux boxes and I am not geeky enough anyway.

I would recommand thecus YESBOX for video collectors. Put two 750GB and set the box to the raid1 mode. Box isn't the fastest box on the net but it is useful while maintaining it's size small, quiet, and has physical on/off button to turn on/off without loggin into box remotely. It comes with two gigabit interfaces.

Search for keyword "thecus" on eBay. It's bit pricy but it takes out the hassel of system administration of your file storage.

Oktokie

Re:Big Cheapo RAID

[Doc Ruby]

But I'm already doing sysadmin on the rest of my LAN. A few more boxes in the closet that don't host users, just a RAID, aren't going to significantly increase my workload, once I've installed it.

But then, I find occasionally setting up a PC for myself relaxing. I guess because I'm both geeky and cheap. That's why the cheap PC approach seems better, especially for home systems that don't need the performance/manageability of an enterprise RAID.

The role of commodity HW actually makes the cheap PC RAID more interesting. Because it's so cheap, while the Thecus isn't cheap. Which indicates there's a market for geeks to distribute bigger distributed RAIDs like I described for less money, bundled cheap.

So what? CLV costs more

[Anonymous Coward]

Raw capacity isn't what's important.

What's important is cost per gigabyte.

5 Drives not bad...but

[Ma3oxuct]

I have a 3 year old Pentium4 that I built. It currently houses 8 ata drives for a total 2.1 tera-bytes (I use cominations of RAID 10, RAID 1, and RAID 0 arrays on it). What did all of those drives cost? On average of $60 after rebates (I've recieved them long ago). If I needed more space, I could add a bunch of 500 gig ata drives on the cheap. However, I'd only have 4 terabytes by the end.

So, in conclusion, SATA drives provide more space, have less need for drives and therefore save energy. (And they prevent me from boasting about my Pentium4 :'().

Oh wait a sec! I should RTFS, I can still have more space, cheaper! Current SATA solutions get up to 3.5 Terabytes, but 5. Either way, SATA definitly depricates my ATA setup.

No pics?

[fiendy]

I guess with all the ads crammed on to the page, they don't have room for a pic of the actual piece of hardware they are reviewing.

a banner day for us old fogies.

[nblender]

I know I can't win "I remember when ..." rod-length-checks but this is a banner day for someone who paid barely under $1000 for his very first ever hard disk; a 10MB Seagate ST-506 with controller.

But will it work with Vista?

[Digital Pizza]

I didn't see mention of what internal software was used, but a lot of NAS devices use Samba and won't work properly with Vista. Check out this link.

That's the problem with NAS devices; Microsoft loves to change its network protocols with each new version of Windows, breaking countless NAS devices that are past vendor support.

There are a number of NAS devices designed to work with Windows 2000 that don't work well with windows XP; the vendors won't provide updates and would rather you just chuck it and buy a new NAS device.

Recommend Controller Cards for ZFS

[cmason]

I'd like to experiment with ZFS on the cheap. In particular, I'd like to start off with two drives, and slowly add drives as my storage needs increase. Great, but: which controller card(s) to use to maximize my eventual capacity while spending the least on cards. I don't need hardware raid (with cards like the 3ware 9500S-4LP that someone else mentioned starting at $315). Does it make more sense to use 4 port cards for performance reasons? Or can I use 8 or twelve port cards? I imagine performance will suffer? Or is it more constrained by the total bandwidth of the bus? In which case should I use PCI-Express or PCI-X? I'm wondering where the price/performance sweet spot is in terms of SATA cards; obviously, I'm limited to 3-4 cards total, but if I could get by with only one (eg 12 port) card, I could go with a smaller form-factor case. Can anyone shed some light here? Recommended brands?

Not necessary hassle

[DrYak]

I'm curious what people who've gone the DIY route are using to ease the management hassle that I could easily see a SAN becoming if it's OS is just straight Linux.

Done the DIY route.

1. I use LVM2 to manage the discs and ReiserFS partition. No need to create new mount points for disc (no new "/data2" directory to add to all configuration), just add more storage space to the LVM pool and grow the partition (which can be done while system is live with ReiserFS). More space will automatically be available in the directory exported with other service.

2. Have SMB configured so that unix system accounts and passwords are used (by default on recent installations). Once SMB is up and running, no more needs to fiddle the configuration. When new user must be added, just add him in the system and the user will be both available to Samba and SFTP/SSH. I rarely make new directories and configure them with every service, instead I create subdirectories inside the already exported one and rely on linux file access control mecanism.

3. Most distro provide nice GUI (or, enable you to install an additionnal software package like WebMin, GParted, etc...) to make above configuration painless.

4. Added benefits of using LVM2 (with or without addition of software RAID) is that data is automagically accessible when plugged in any other linux box (even when using external USB2 or 1394 cases). Useful if server craps, or when new bigger drives are installed and data must be copied from older disks (over network, old disk plugged in some other machine). When a hardware RAID controller craps, one must plug the disk in the exact same model, otherwise they aren't accessible.

5. Old desktop motherboard also have hardware monitoring/sensing, additionnal grunt power to run P2P clients like mldonkey or to run SETI@Home when idle, can run a virus scanner, etc... and general purpose distros have easy-to-configure package for those features, which may not be available on all XScale-based dedicated box (although the box from TFA *did* have SMART, could be used as a print server, etc...)

Curent system is a P2B motherboard with a Coppermine Celeron @1.1Ghz and 768MB (thanks to this guide for tips about CPU upgrade, and this other for RAM upgrade), 2x Seagate 300GB discs, for data and swap, compactflash with IDE adapter for booting or FreeDOS for flashing bios. Realtek 1Gigabit NIC (a little bit overkill given the bus speed). Bigwater SE for cooling. Took me 2 evenings after work to set-it up completly (actually, checking the watercooling kit against leakage and downloading the .DEB was what took most of the time).
In addition to serving files over Samba/NFS/SFTP/HTTP, it runs mldonkey, BOINC, lm_sensors, smartmontools & hddtemp, clamav, rkhunter & chkrootkit, auto-downloads updates with cron-apt and also has some package installed that make nice e-mail reports of everything.
It doesn't make coffee yet.