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?

[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).

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.

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.

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.

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.