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Best Home Network NAS
jammerjam writes "My WD 120GB drive got its MBR scrambled so it no longer mounts in my W*ndoze box (I can recover the data so I know that's intact). But now that's made me realize I need to implement my data backup plan. Scouring the Internet I can't find a reliable resource for home NAS solutions. For every positive review I can find a negative that refutes it. My first choice from what I found starts at $1200...I've got $500. Anyone have a suggestion? I'm not looking for enterprise-level storage here — but I do want reliability."
Buy a couple of 500 GB SATA HDDs. You can build a box with a SATA RAID controller for probably ~$200 or so and throw OpenFiler on it. You still won't do this under $500, though. Probably under $750, though, for sure, if you're careful.
/mbr. That should fix it.
As for the botched MBR, boot an MS-DOS or even a FreeDOS boot disk and do a fdisk
My blog
I'd get one of those cheapo walmart linux boxes...stick it in a closet....then just use rsync or rdiffbackup....with a real box you'd have the luxury of being able to add additional storage easy...you can even setup a software raid for extra protection...
If you have a left-over computer you can slap Linux on, you can install the iSCSI target software. It works rather well. Of course, this means you have to have another machine on... and potentially learn a new OS (depending on your skillset, of course).
For $500 you could buy a whole PC with a pair of 7200RPM 500GB SATA2 drives. You could configure a mirrored RAID 0 array and back your stuff up over the network. For many dollars fewer you could upgrade your power supply and stick those drives in your current PC, assuming your motherboard supports software RAID.
Last year I ditched the file server at home for the DNS-323. With the current firmware, it's been rock solid for me. At the time, it was $300 for the unit and two 250GB drives. It's iTunes server works well enough for me as well.
As a bonus, it's debian based, so you can hack the OS as well to server up things light lighttpd, upgrade samba, or run subversion.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/69013
Find an old PC, toss 2 or 3 hd's in there, raid them.. and go from there.
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
Build / buy a Windows Home Server.
$169 on New Egg for the OS (based on windows server 2k3). Backs up ten PCs with incremental backup, optionally allowing you to flag files / folders as 'important', so the OS silently stores the data on more than one disk. Also allows you to back up from either full images, or step through incrementally to see individual versions of files. Acts as a remote access point to your windows machines, and offers file sharing and media streaming.
Reason, free market capitalism, and individualism
$179 for an Airport base station, $321 for three 500GB USB drives and a USB 2.0 hub. Should be enough for a serious porn collection, and you get wireless N for free.
Without knowing what you've looked at, it's hard to give you an intelligent reply, but a friend of mine just bought a Drobo and loves it.
-- Old Man Kensey
Try the freenas server. It works great. :)
I use a old beat up computer with 3 500 gig external usb harddrives in a raid 5 which gives me a terabyte of storage
www.freenas.org
Get an old box, age doesnt really matter.
Insttall FreeNAS, http://www.freenas.org/ .
Raid-1 (mirror) a pair of reliable disks (hitachi or seagates).
Set up CIFs shares.
à_à
http://www.tomshardware.com/2004/11/19/using_windowsxp_to_make_raid_5_happen/index.html Found this online... if you have >= 3 HDDs available, can easily convert winXP into a RAID5 server, or so Tomshardware claims.
Get a super cheap, low power PC, hook up internal and/or external drive(s) and run any software you want on it to perform backups.
Usually people have older hardware laying around doing next to nothing. If this is the case for you, have a look at FreeNAS. It's really robust and works well for me.
Internal drives are cheap these days.
... you'll always need backups. Even the most reliable systems will eventually fail. Routine backing up is essential.
You don't need enterprise storage solutions: great. That means that you probably don't need to do nightly backups.
The lesson in you losing your data is not that you needed NAS, but you needed to make better backups.
More Twoson than Cupertino
Try and work out exactly what you're protecting against before you worry about solutions.
Do you want data to survive a hard disk failure? RAID. (Though I make no guarantee that any of these things have implemented RAID terribly well, particularly if a disk fails 2 years later and the replacement you plug in has totally different geometry).
Do you want data to survive your own mistakes? Then use the NAS as a backup for your own PC(s).
Do you want data to survive poor implementation in the firmware? For best results, you'll probably need two totally different devices and some means of keeping them synchronised. (Though a number of Buffallo's Linkstation products can support a separate external USB disk for backup of the NAS itself).
Do you want data to survive a house fire? If you've got immense quantities of data, you'll need a unit you can take offsite. If not, perhaps a subscription-based internet backup provider is the way to go.
If you've got data on only one computer, don't bother with a NAS and get a USB (or Firewire, which would be better since FW doesn't hog the CPU) hard drive. SyncBack isn't a bad free backup program for Windows, but the free version can't copy open files.
Even if you've got two or three computers, a good external HD will be cheaper and probably more reliable than a NAS box, simply because there are fewer parts to break on a USB drive than a NAS, which is typically a power supply, network card, some RAM, an OS in ROM, drive controller, and one or more hard drives. The only thing you won't get from an external HD is RAID, but you can fake that with software if you get more than one per computer, and RAID only means that the data's still accessible if one drive dies (assuming you're not stupid enough to use RAID 0), so it's probably not important for you.
If your data is valuable, burn the most important stuff to DVD periodically and stick it in a bank's safe-deposit box.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
I've been contemplating this as well. I'm intrigued by the D-Link DNS-323 http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=509
There's some hacks for it that allow you to add NFS and some other goodies: http://wiki.dns323.info/
http://www.shopping.hp.com/product/desktop/desktop_hp/storage/1/accessories/PE592AV%2523ABA
Uses Windows Home Server and is essentially a no frills standard PC tower. Comes with 1 year support, upgradable to 3 years with next day exchange.
While it doesn't fit everyones taste, backup up to an online service is a fairly cheap way of getting it done. Depending on your needs, amount of data and bandwidth it might be more or less reliable/useful for you than using local disks, but I'd suggest at least looking into it.
Mozy does the job for me. There's oodles of others, but Mozy was the only one I found with a decent Mac client.
Go to office Depot or Staples or whatever the local office supply store is, buy out their entire stock of paper and number 2 pencils. Proceed to copy down bit for bit the content from your hard drive. If you write really small, you might be able to fit it in under $500 worth of supplies. For even greater redundancy, you can use clay and chisels, but thats just too time consuming for the average user.
We've secretely replaced the Enterprise's dilithium crystals with Folgers crystals. Lets see if they notice.
I love my Buffalo Terastaion. I got it to backup my file collection going back about 15 years that's made the trudge from system to system. I like that I don't have to worry if my motherboard dies and the raid controller changes, it doesn't care what OS I use, etc. About a year and a half ago I paid 700 for a 1tb version, they have cheaper versions, and the price has come down. If you look at tigerdirect or other sites that send me crappy magazines, you can find generic nas raid enclosures for under 400, just with no hdd's, but I like Buffalo.
An I.T. motto in the hands of an idiot is a dangerous thing...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I run a slug with a 500GB WD essential drive attached to it. There is one more 250GB WD essential drive (my old one). The two combined together is more than enough to backup all the machines and laptops. It runs OpenslugOS/SlugOS 3.10. It's reliable and a cheap solution. You can implement software RAID if you want.
#include std_disclaimer.h
I'm currently considering one of these little boxes for non-NAS backup:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817716028
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817392017
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817716051
Or this puppy, which looks fricken sweet, on-line array expansion, and does NAS as well as direct-connect:
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=3143432&Sku=D162-1000
Just add hard drives.
I don't know about you, but my servers run on the power of cotton candy and happy thoughts. -Anonymous Coward
I just got a 1 terabyte WD MyBook World Edition 2 from Costco for 390 canadian. And it seems to work well. Of course I had to upgrade my router to gigabit to get decent network access. It also is software hackable(http://martin.hinner.info/mybook/) and user servicible. One of the problems I have is that it doesn't spin down the drives after inactivity. I didn't use the supplied software. I also had a Netgear SC101. It is nicknamed the toaster, not only for its looks, but the heat too. It did spin down, but you needed to install the Zetera drivers to access it. It wasn't really a nas, but a SAN. It is now collecting dust...
Would this satisfy your software need: http://www.nexenta.com/corp/ ?
It combines the OpenSolaris kernel with the Debian package manager. Personally, I have been using Nexenta on my desktop at home for the last 6 months and have been very satisfied, but the bulk of the dev effort in the community for a while has been on server-side support, so I would bet this latest release is also high quality.
RAID0 = Striping
RAID1 = Mirroring
RAID5 = Striping with parity
RAID0+1 = Mirrored Striping
RAID10 = Striped mirroring
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
does fdisk /mbr. affect data already on the drive though?
meep
If I'd known that I could have bought one of these, I'd have not bought my 2640B :-(
One swallow does not a fellatrix make
I run Bacula (it's not just for the enterprise, folks) and back up all the important data to the disk array.
I think I peek in there once a month or so, mostly to check disk space and see to patching. The box has zero Internet connectivity, so no probs there.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
... and I built my own software RAID solution.
Ingredients:
- Cheapo processor/mobo/case combo, $100. Make sure it's a low power, or you'll have a very noisy box. Ensure that the motherboard has onboard network and at least four SATAII connectors.
- RAM: 512MB will do just fine, $20.
- HDD's: 3x500GB, shouldn't run you more than $250 for the lot. I like Seagate drives, but you can get cheaper ones if you wish.
Instructions:
Install your linux distro of choice on one drive and create a software RAID5 using the mdadm tool. Fast enough for network storage, and you end up with about 915GB of usable space.
Toss it into a closet and enjoy!
Price, Reliability, Speed: Choose two.
I'm using a Linksys NSLU2 as a NAS. I've wiped it of the original Linksys firmware and installed the officially supported ARM version of Debian Linux on it. Debian is installed on a 2GB USB Memory Stick, and I have a 500GB External USB HD attached via a tiny USB hub. I also have an HP F380 Printer/Scanner attached.
I'm using the box as a Samba server for file sharing, SANE server for remote scanning, CUPS server for remote printing and a Twonky Media server for steaming audio and photos to my XBox 360. It all works really well.
Not a bad NAS (or really a complete Debian Linux box) for about $250 for the NSLU2 and the Harddisk.
--- I'm sure using a computer was fun back in the 80's. *sigh*
I had data across a couple of software-raided drives under linux and a couple non-raided external USB drives, and I knew that eventually I was going to either run out of space, or a drive would fail and I'd lose data.
I started looking, and talking to friends, and decided that what I really wanted was a ReadyNas NV (http://www.infrant.com/products/products_details.php?name=ReadyNAS%20NVPlus) from Infrant (now Netgear) - I knew four satisfied customers. Trouble was cost - about $1100.
So I decided to try it on the cheap, and picked up an NSLU2 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSLU2) which can run a customized linux distro (http://www.nslu2-linux.org/) and do software raid across attached drives.
I experimented with some drives I had on hand and discovered that while it would technically work, it was really only going to be useful for network backups (and fairly slow ones at that). It wouldn't replace the direct attached storage for doing photo storage (and editing) as it's only 100Mb Ethernet attached, and a fairly underpowered processor that mostly keeps up doing raid, as long as it's just mirroring. It is, however, functional, and more reliable in theory than non-RAIDED drives.
The total cost is in line with your budget - NSLU2s can be had on ebay, and then it's just drives (500GB drives are just over $100), drive enclosures, and some time.
For me, however, the experiment cost me under $100, and made it clear to me that if I wanted good performance, there was a price tag attached - either in dollars or in dollars and space (i.e. build a bigger dedicated raid server). So I resold the NSLU2 and started watching for a good deal on the ReadyNAS.
I found it a month or so ago - at the moment (Q3 of 07), if you spend the $1100 on a ReadyNAS with 2x500GB drives, they'll throw in a 3rd 500GB drive as a purchase incentive. That made it 1TB usable storage for about $1/GB. Still more than raw disk, certainly, but enough to convince me to give it a go.
I've had the ReadyNAS for a month, my home directory's living on it, as are all our digital photos, and media - it "just works." I started with 2x500GB drives, added the third and it grew the volume. I can add one more 500GB drive, which lowers the effective $/GB before the chassis is full. If 4x500GB isn't big enough one day, I can replace each drive, one at a time, with larger drives and the volume will expand to fit once all drives match.
For the usual Home/Soho NAS with SATA/software RAID :
- Thecus (2 bays - 700$ ; 4 bays 950$)
- Synology (2 bays - 750$ ; 4 bays - 800$)
- QNAP (2 bays - 650$ ; 4 bays 1250$)
- Netgear (4 bays - 1300$ ; 2 bay model seems sub-par to me)
Prices are for 2x750GB and a few weeks old.
Check the specs and reviews for what is important to you.
My criteria are : Media protocols capability, BT client, rsync, throughput, software maturity, webserver : I'll go for the Synology DS207+ , that is - unless this discussion leads elsewhere.
I've done the home Linux RAID thing a couple times. It will work, but it's not the easiest, and the hardware you end up purchasing is overkill for the job unless you have a spare computer laying around.
Last year I opted for a Synology CS-406. It's small, quiet, embedded linux, regular BIOS updates, room for 4 off the shelf SATA drives, supports SMB, AppleTalk, SSH, FTP, UPnP, and NFS.
One of their CS-XXX models is probably overkill for you. They have DS-XX models that run a mirrored RAID with 2 disks. Even smaller then what I have.
I'm a big fan.
I have had nothing but great experience with this 1TB Iomega 1TB StorCenter. You can hotswap the SATA harddrives, all RAIDd out, and has a great power saving feature to reduce power consumption.
Wait... did you say Win-bloze?
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
As others have said, you could build a cheap PC with some 500GB drives. For me, that's too much work (admittedly it isn't much), and I don't want to configure it. For $400, go for this: www.lacie.com/us/products/product.htm?pid=10953
Like everyone else here will probably say, you can build a pretty basic NAS with any old PC. I like the old corporate Compaq Deskpros--those things last forever. Load it up with a distro you are familiar with (I used to use RedHat, now I use Ubuntu, others will probably suggest FreeNAS) and two big drives. My old one has two 120 GB drives--one has the OS and data, it runs rsync each night to copy /home/ to the other drive.
The computer you buy will be dictated by how much space you need--if you want multiple 500s, 750s, or 1 TB drives, you'll need something newer. AFAIK the Everex that WalMart now offers has two SATA connectors. If I were to build one today I'd go that route. A comment on the product page describes using one as a FreeNAS server and booting from a USB thumb drive.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I have an XP system that likes to zap the MBR/partition table on one of my external USB drives on a semi-regular basis. I fix it by booting a Linux LiveCD and using fdisk to reset the partition table since I know the drive has/had a single NTFS partition, I just create a new single partition of type 7 (NTFS) and voila, the disk re-mounts in XP and all is well again (actually this hasn't happened for awhile now but I have done it a number of times in the past).
Dr. Frank J. Nagy Fermilab Computing Division Authentication and Directory Services Group
EMC Celerra FTW!
When considering a backup plan, make sure you consider the amount of data that you would care to have saved should the worst happen (you house burns down, or some such). You should consider backing up this data remotely. A number of providers offer remote disk space that you can access via scp, rsync and sometimes even smb/samba (I recommend rsync based hard-linked snapshots, not difficult to setup (Google knows of a number of good tutorials) and pretty flexible).
If your vital data is not more than a few Gb then it'll only cost you a few $ per month. "bqbackup" is the only provider name that spring to mind but I know there are several out there with reasonable reputations so google for more options. You could even set it up yourself with a cheap VPS from a good provider, but that will be more hassle and will likely cost more for the same amount of space (if you go for a not-ludicrously-over-sold provider).
You could backup your entire 120Gb drive that way, but that it probably not be practical as most of your data will be static and would be better (or at least much cheaper in the long run) backed up to a second hard-drive or DVDs (more than one copy, and refreshed every now-and-again, to allow for disks degrading over time, maybe with par2 recovery volumes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Par2) for extra paranoia) and held at a friend's house.
..last year, and after a lot of research, settled on the D-Link DNS-323 GigE NAS box with a pair of mirrored 500GB SATA drives. After that was full (of archived digitized Hi-8 video footage, not porn, no really), I bought a second box and put a pair of 750GB drives in it.
My requirements were -- hardware RAID 1 (mirroring), using a standard (non-proprietary) format (ext2), standard OS (Linux), and GigE connectivity. The DNS-323 has all of these things, and comes bare so I can drop whatever drives I want into it. It's also a breeze to install and configure, and does most of the bells and whistles if you like (iTunes music server, etc). At the price point I got, the whole thing including drives was well under $500, and has the advantage of being simple and small, and in my experience, reliable.
I would just put extra HD's into my PC. I just bought an extra IDE card to add all the IDE cards I have.
However if you want to have it cheap and ONLY for NAS/Backup, then I would buy a cheap PC via Ebay that still works, put any Linux distribution I like on it and put as much HD in it as I can lay my hands on. Connect it to a network and done.
The only connection you need is a network card and even if it is not on the mobo, a cheap 100MB card will be enough for any homeuse.
Alternatively, if you like to do much more with it for more PC's and have it as a multimediaserver, then http://plutohome.com/ might be a good distribution. Based on Debian, it can do all of your domotica. Why stop at NAS if you can have so much more for the same price.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
You're absolutely right. For a long time now it's been Windows*
This guy's the limit!
For under $200 you can pick up a number of different wireless routers with USB ports for printers or drives. The Linksys WRT350N is an example.
The NSLU2 from Linksys is great. Mine runs debian on a memory-stick, so it's quite energy-efficient. Community-Support is quick, friendly and helpful. You can attach a USB hub and USB-Drives. And you can hack it (Serial console, free more USB-ports, upgrade the RAM etc.)
I read as far as "W*ndoze" and then just gave up on the article. If the submitter cannot act like an adult and not a 12 year old using 'witty insulting names' (ahem) for things then I really can't be bothered to waste my time on him. This is Slashdot, a public forum full of people from all walks of life, this is not a playground, we expect at least some sort of maturity beyond the level shown in this article.
I like muppets.
I hate to pimp for the company I work for, but these are actually pretty good, and I don't see a lot of breakdowns with them. $200, 500GB. You don't get blazing speed, but you're not likely to find that in any prepackaged NAS system. It's certainly cheaper than you could build a box (with equivalent capacity) for. http://www.lacie.com/us/products/product.htm?pid=10844 If you need more capacity, there's also the 1TB ED Big Disk ($299), though that's a two-drive unit, and somewhat more prone to breakdowns. http://www.lacie.com/us/products/product.htm?pid=10882
I've been using a ReadyNAS NV from Infrant (company bought by Netgear) for a year and a half, and have had no troubles with it at all. It just works. When I wanted to increase capacity by adding another disk, I just hot-plugged in the drive, and it rebuilt the RAID array and increased the capacity automatically without any intervention other than a reboot after a couple of hours. And it sent me an email to let me know when to do that.
For crying out loud, it is Micro$oft W*ndoze, not just "W*ndoze"
I have a CS407 from Synology, and it really is very good and very flexible with handy features including an iTunes server, printer sharing, website hosting, etc and it will run torrents as well, so you don't need to leave your PC on overnight, just the NAS box.
It does look like it's a bit out of your range though by the time you buy disks, but they proide smaller NAS boxes with the same software - I wanted RAID-5 though, so had to pay for the larger model that could take 4 disks. I haven't had any problem with it, and I strongly recommend you take a look if you're in the market for NAS boxes for the home.
Cheers,
-- Pete.
Monochrome - Probably the UK's largest internet BBS
The DriveStation Quattro is in your price range and provides you with 750GB of storage using RAID 5 and it's in your price range.
I just got a 2TB buffalo terastation pro II for 1K and it's awesome. Here's a review of the 1TB model. They offer other options, but this seemed like the best one for me based on price, capacity, and reputation. True reliability means you probably want RAID 5 and that means 3 or more drives. If you don't want to fight with raid cards and configuring it from scratch, then this is a great option.
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
I've had good luck with the two Ximeta NAS devices I've bought in the last couple of years. They have a proprietary architecture that allows you to put a standard low cost, high capacity drive onto your home network for file sharing via either Cat5 or USB (through a PC). The network connection provides superior performance. I've used these drives in Windows & Linux environments succesfully. I believe you can pick up the external enclosure (that only needs a drive; already contains power supply and interface hardware) at Radio Shack for ~$60 and then put whatever compatible drive you want in it. Read more at: http://ximeta.com/
For cheap, reliable, unlimited storage you can't do better than http://www.jungledisk.com/
i would go for the cheap PC with 2 or 3 large harddrives, and since it is just for backup purposes you dont even need to go with RAID, and should get by with a PC that uses IDE disk drives (3 harddrives and one CDRW drive - in case you want to burn something to CDR) install something small & simple that wont take up much disk space like Debian or Slackware or maybe FreeNAS and just connect it in a LAN configuration, then use rsync or some other similar back up method...
http://www.freenas.org/
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
I concur - I picked up a 323 a few months ago and couldn't be happier. Very small physical device so it takes up virtually no desk space.
So I built a debian box (after looking at FreeNAS and OpenFiler and concluding that they were inadequate for the hardware I had already bought ...).
I used: SilverStone GD01 case (it has room for 7 HDs and big, quiet fans), an Asus AM2 board with 6 SATAII connectors and 2 x gigabit ethernet, I installed a low power Athlon X2 BE-2350 and 2GB RAM as well as 6 Seagate SATA disks with 250GB each. I partitioned the disks to contain a small (2G) partition for RAID-1 and swap (2 x RAID-1 for the root/boot fs - Linux can't boot from software RAID 5 yet, 4 x swap partitions) and the rest of the disk is used for a 5+1 disk RAID-5 setup.
Performance is very good, I can saturate at least the gigabit ethernet LAN connection of my desktop PC both at reading and writing (it chokes at 44MB/s - local speeds are much higher, mail me if you want a benchmark run) and I can also run various server stuff on the box that a normal NAS wouldn't support. The box is extremely quiet, so I'm very pleased.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
I took an older Compaq iPaq (small toaster) Pentium 3 computer off of eBay like this one: $34.96
/etc/apt/sources.list):
sudo -i
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get dist-upgrade
Then I tried FreeNAS, but it didn't have that usability factor that I wanted, it was TOO toaster-ish. I wasn't able to install a lot of popular backup programs with this.
So,
I put in an inexpensive but long-lasting 500GB disk from Seagate (5year warranty).($85.00 @ Fry's)
I downloaded Ubuntu Server 7.04 as a LAMP and SAMBA server
I did the usual command line updates (I disabled getting APT packages from the cdrom in
Then I installed Webmin: sudo apt-get install webmin-mysql
I can now control everything via a web interface.
For the icing on the top I installed "backuppc" on the box also (which can be controlled using its own web interface as well): sudo apt-get install backuppc
So now I have a NAS, controlled by a web interface, that can automatically backup data to an external disk or CDROM and can be extended to do alot more.
$34.96 + $85.00 + 2 hours of work = happiness and lighter some 120.00 worth of drinking money.
Oh yeah? Well, I bought one and it totally sucked. There! Your positive review is refuted.
Posting anonymously just to further emphasize the point.
Um, what zapped the MBR again? Was it... Windoze? Yes, I do think that it was.
I use an old PC, running Ubuntu Server, with two 320G drives in a software RAID 0 configuration.
I also use the box as an SSH and FTP server for external access to my stuff.
Every 6 months or so, I buy a new hard drive, pull one of the RAID drives, replace it with the new
drive and let the RAID rebuild the new drive. $120 for a new drive, minimal backup hassle.
I alternate the drive I replace, so hopefully, I'm dealing with any drive lifetime issues at the same time I backup.
I personally don't have that much data that I deem irreplaceable so I simply back up my important files to my web host. I pay about $3/month and I get 100GB of storage. I created a .htaccess file and turned off directory browsing so that only someone using FTP can access the contents easily. This is security through obscurity, I know, but it's pretty darn obscure.
This solution is only palatable if you don't have too much data and you have a decent uprate with your ISP.
I bought a Infrant ReadyNAS before they were bought by Netgear from NewEgg, without disks for around 650$
http://www.infrant.com/products/products_details.php?name=ReadyNAS%20NVPlus
I used to think this thing was awsome, that was until I had a issue with it and lost all my data not long ago.
I had 3 500GB disks running thier own XRAID configuration, similiar to Raid5 but allows patitions to be resized whne you grow all disks to bigger sizes.
I was planning on changing all 3 disk to 750GB disks and adding a 4th 750GB disk.
When I pulled the first drive out and replaced the new 750GB disk it started to rebuild the new disk and after some time locked up. giving me a error of some kind of process panic on the front screen.
After I rebooted the thing it then told me the new disk was dead, so I swapped it with another of the new disks I had thinking that all the information to rebuild that new disk was on the 2 untouched drives still.
After that the thing was acting very strange and would never show the volume info right and after calling Netger and waiting almost 3 weeks for them to tell me if they could get my data back, since they can SSH in to the box, but do not allow ssh for customers in to the machine BTW, they told me all data was lost.
I had lost hundreds of GB's of pictures and videos it really sucks to lose all your data when you go through so much to protect it.
you can read more about my expeience on thier forums here
http://www.infrant.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=13312
I redid the whole NAS and now it is just over 2TB in size, and works ok, sometimes very slow, but seems very stable unless you have a real issue like above.
i find it more offensive that some little prick had to mod this down as overrated. just goes to show that it's just a bunch of fud.
All you need is a cheap Linux box (Debian works well) with one or more large disks. The disks and disk controller don't need to be particularly fast either since backups happen during off hours. If you are worried about disk failure put in two drives, use software RAID, and forget about it.
I second that suggestion.
I just completed a very extensive review of both the hardware and software for Windows Home Server. It is a fantastic backup solution and you can build a machine for very little cost. Not only do you get a great backup solution, but you also get a lot more. Windows Home server has a built in web server that will host all your files online for free. From the website you can also Remote desktop into any of your Windows boxes that support remote desktop. You can also stream all your media content from the Home server to any machine on your network. There are some problems with the Media Streaming, hopefully those will be fixed. Last but not least you have the ability to use add-ins which can add tons of extra functionality.
The biggest limitation of Windows Home Server is that it will not backup anything but Windows machines, but that does not mean someone won't write an add-in that allows other operating systems to be backed up.
JusTech'n - Where Technology comes home
Get a cheap wallmart computer ($200?). Put it somewhere you can get at but not nearby (I place mine in my paretns' house. Run linux and install ssh and rsync. Run rsync over ssh. The first run will likely take a few days. Set up a script to run rsync over ssh every night.
You end up with a mirror copy that is only a day old (at most) that can survive your house burning down.
It won't save you from stupid mistakes (ie: you delete a file and realize it a week later). If you want something like that, maybe run the remote backup with something like subversion. (?)
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
Again the freenas solution seemed ok with me. I was using it for a time, untill my mb died.
I also found a link from techdirt, discussing the new ideas for a new torrent spec. There was a link in there for a seperate NAS box from Asus if I am right. It sells for about 40$, it has a built in os, and it has a torrent client. The only thing it doesmt have is drives.
Im sure if you did a google search for bittorent nas server box you probably will find it. The ones i am seeing are aronudd 300$.
As mentioned above, its not hard to create your own backup solution. If you've got a fat pipe, there are plenty of online backup solutions you can use to keep your data safe. If you're looking for hardware, the WD Mybook drives come with software to automate backing up of data. If you want a true NAS, the cheapest units I know of are available from www.iomega.com but they're mostly based on windows raid - an anyone who's worked in a datacenter knows that windows raid = chancey at best. CDW sells HP DL100 NAS units, and DL320 NAS units for pretty cheap (the 100 I believe sells for about 700$, though I could be wrong). Google "cheap nas" and see what you can come up with. You're looking mostly for a BBWC (battery backed write cache) so your data doesn't get lost, and nice fast drives. Stay away from IDE raids, they're slow, and prone to errors. Oh, if your mbr gets horked again, just boot into a bootdisk and do fdisk /mbr. Your problems should be solved.
Don't use RAID as backup. RAID is not backup. Hear me now, believe me later (when you lose data).
The consumer RAID solutions just introduce more points of failure. Even the expensive enterprise RAID systems sometimes fail in "interesting" ways. Btw, it is only "interesting" when you have backups.
Copy your stuff to a second drive (rsync is your friend). Seriously think about keeping it offsite to prevent loss in the case of theft or fire. Assume your drives will get stolen if anyone breaks into your place.
I have an old P4 running Debian with a couple of external USB hard drives. The hard drives are a RAID0 set. You can save a lot of money on external hard drives by assembling them yourself. Many companies online have enclosures for $20-$30; you just need to buy a hard drive to put in it. That's complete quality control. What I'm looking for now is a Mini-ITX chassis with about 5 hot-swappable SATA drive slots.
The title and summary do not explain what NAS is. Nor have the comments so far.
Of course, any geek worth his/her salt must know what NAS is. Since it must be a very common term for people to use it without explanation, I looked it up on Wikipedia. Now I no longer need to turn in my geek card, because I know that NAS is a 34-year-old American rap musician. It would surely be awesome to invite him home to perform over the network, thus solving problems of scrambled hard disks with the Best Home Network Nas.
Of course, NAS might stand for any number of other things including Network-Attached Storage, Network Access Server, Non-Access Stratum, Network Audio System, or of course that shining epitome of disk failure prevention, the New American Standard bible.
Anyway, I'm glad I'm done scratching my head over this, because I'm developing a bald spot.
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
The biggest problem I've seen using USB drives is they don't spin down, so it shortens their lives. I know a few of the Western Digital external cases do, but most don't.
Yeah! It should be referred to as "Winblowz"
While it may save you from a catastrophic drive failure, despite popular belief RAID generally cannot detect or repair corruption*... you really need ZFS (part of Solaris 10 and being integrated into OS X).
* - the short answer: because it reads only one side of a mirror and does not checksum. Drives and controllers do not reliably report errors and nor can RAID do anything about hardware issues such as RAM, cable, controller, or firmware bugs. (ZFS has other features further improving integrity, such as COW.)
you had me at #!
But then I also prefer SCSI disks.
... just in case it works too well and you don't think about it for the next 6 years.
That is because I can get them hot-swappable and with lots of nice lights.
I have a new SATA server that has fakeRAID, and the drive lights are not supported and they aren't hot-swappable.
For a home environment where YOU know what you have and how it is configured, I'd say go with whatever you're comfortable with. Just make sure you document what is what and where
Two Linux machines with RAID-5 in each. Put them in different physical locations and synchronize them across the network.
Last year, I bought a LaCie 250GB NAS drive for $120 (runs on Linux) and a Western Digital USB 250GB drive for another $100.
My wife and I get all that NAS convenience for our 4 PCs, it takes only 20 watts (instead of the 80-100 for a full PC), and I don't have to worry about running updates or replacing much of anything.
That USB drive? Every week or so, I take it out of my locked cabinet at work, bring it home, run a full backup, and bring it back to work the next day.
I can appreciate a RAID approach, but honestly, if we generate something that critical we back it up on our local box anyway.
Try the Buffalo Linkstation NAS device. If you base your backup solution on RAID drives, you are still susceptible to electrical problems within the box, as well as data corruption. RAID only protects against physical errors in the hardware media. If your box gets zapped, all of your RAID drives are probably toast, as well. If your disk is corrupted by Windoze (happened to me last week), the corruption just propagates through your entire RAID chain. What you need is an external networked solution. Personally, I use the Buffalo Linkstation, but there are others available. Run your weekly full backups and daily incrementals, and turn the device off when it is not in use. Additionally, other family computers can store their backups on the same device in different shares. I use Acronis True Image Home as my backup solution, FYI.
The Linux $200 Linux box plus FreeNAS or OpenFiler would work just fine.
When I looked at the board it had two IDE and SATA ports You could use the IDEs for the CD and the a boot drive then use the SATA ports for a software raid.
It should work just fine. You could also use a USB drive to boot from if you use FreeNAS.
Openfiler will give you an enterprise grade solution. FreeNAS would work just fine and dandy for a home solution.
Heck with Openfiler you could add a 1000-base-T card and a Giga-E switch and make a SAN.
If you have an old P3 or Athlon sitting around those would works just fine as well. If you have a case and Power supply you might want to take a look at this board http://www.clubit.com/product_detail.cfm?itemno=A4842001#
For $500 depending on what old hardware you have laying around you could build pretty nice NAS.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I recently looked into the issue as well, as I realized that I had 4+ computers on all the time just to give me firewalling, NAS, PBX (Asterisk for Voip and a landline - no landline here natively) ....
... we will see, if I print I have a machine on anyway so not cruicial .... I am about to eliminate all the wireless crap from my home...
.....
....
To cut the story short I was looking for something that could remedy multiple of these issuea and I stumbled upon Linksys's (Cisco's) NSLU2 network attached storage device.
I will be honest, the device interests me because it is an extremely cheap Linux box, so take my recommendation with a pinch of salt if you wish.
I heard it was an OK NAS: you can attach 2 USB devices ower 100Mbit ethernet.
I am planning on doing the following on the box:
NAS: kinda obvious, but with a twist: I need a low power nas, so probably USB stick (4/8 gig)
Asterisk (1 line, 6 extensions, 1 main IAX trunk to my always on server)
Print server: 1 printer, nothing extra
X10 control: plug in a module and run Heyu, act as PBX enabled security (maybe with a CAM too)
Soho gateway : OK, we will see that, maybe I just leave my openwrt'd WRT54G for that
Originally the NSLU was ordered to give NFS mounted storage to my openwrt and my old IPAQ, but as I am looking more and more into it, I can see that the opportunities are endless..
Then again, if you want a fast hardcore raid enabled sata/scsi nas, look somewhere else. If you want some hacking fun, get an NSLO, $82 from Amazon, and you can get lucky on ebay too
I have to admit that I am talking out of my 'back' my device is still in the mail, but I am excited and thought I would share it because it came up
Other tip: you should look at ebay, I saw $1000+ NAS devices for under $300... you might get lucky there as well.
just buy yourself an external hard drive and use flyback:
http://code.google.com/p/flyback/
http://kered.org
It is not really a NAS, but I use the Maxtor OneTouch III Turbo RAID and set the RAID to mirroring that way I have a fail point and I can get the data via USB or Firewire for all my Mac and Linux systems.
Looks interesting, but does it support media streaming so that the Xbox and Playstation 3 systems can use it to run movies remotely? An irritating features of these systems is their refusal to play nicely with regular NAS devices.
May the Maths Be with you!
The QNAP TS-101 is has been pretty good I've been using it for over 1 year with no problems in a biotech laboratory, currently backing up 14 desktop and instrument running PCs everyday and file sharing experiment data, pics, between PCs. Yes we have other backups. The best parts: you install your own hard drive of your choosing. We put a 500GB disk in ours. It looks good. It's easy to set up. It's small. It's fast. It's quiet. It has Gigabit network support. The software is pretty straightforward, and hasn't given me any problems. I also like that it will back up the contents of a USB thumb drive with the touch of a button. Just stick it in and hit the button labeled copy and it copies.
I had a fire and lost, along with a lot else, my NAS and other backups. After that I started using offsite backup. I put less emphasis on the flawless local solution, and more on safe off site backup integration. For windows I'm doing mozy.com - well integrated.
I've been playing with this type of idea for a while now and I think I may have just the thing:
Buy a Linksys NSLU2 and a pair of USB drives of equal size.
why the NSLU2?
The NSLU2 has its own O/S and can be administered on a Web GUI, it's a breeze to set up.
It draws very little power.
The official firmware has everything you need, no hacking (or Linux skill / support) required.
why not?
The device has only 1 problem that I know of:
It can only push 5 MB/s (those are 5 MegaBYTEs, though)
Setting it up
Once the device is set up with one disk, hook up the second disk and look up the "Disk Backup" option in the interface.
Here, you can tell it to backup Disk 1 to Disk 2 at a given time of day (or, preferably, night).
I have even told my laptop to wake up early (6am), so my NSLU2 can automatically back up my documents
Both of these functions are part of the official firmware, no hacking required
Disaster recovery:
If the device burns out, you can buy a new one and configure it.
If you're desperate to get your data now, hook it up to a Linux machine or install a Windows ext2fs driver.
If Disk 1 burns out, swap out the disks and replace it.
If Disk 2 burns out, replace it and check the Web GUI.
I am in no way affiliated with Linksys.
My other NAS is a Asus WL-500g, which has been 'tweaked' and now feeds my PS3 (TwonkyVision), Pinnacle (Wizd) and various other Media Devices
A word on disks
If you're putting it a home situation, I recommend using a silent drive (LaCie or Seagate) as main drive and using a drive which automatically powers off (WD MyBook) as a secundary drive.
That way, you ears and power bill won't even notice the NAS is powered on!
"I was in love with a beautiful blonde once, dear. She drove me to drink. It's the one thing I am indebted to her for."
Last time I had a hard drive failure, I bought 5 identical 80G hard drives.
/dev/hda and a blank drive and make it /dev/hdb
and clone it. /dev/hdb and put it on the shelf. /dev/hdb then boot up from /dev/hda and copy everything that I did since my last clone to the new drive (mostly email and some programs).
I build one drive until I "get it right", then I place anoth drive in the system as slave. Then I boot Knoppix 3.8 or DamnSmallLinux or something similar from the CD drive (I found some Live Linuxes make this process take much longer).
Then I issue the command
dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb bs=512M count=160
I have 1G of ram in the machine so I am assured of getting full 512M reads, then 512M writes, so the OS does not have to do extra buffering.
It takes almost exactly 1 hour and 8 minutes to totally mirror a drive. This copies the MBR, all partitons, even the blank, space byte-for-byte from one drive to another. It ignores files, folders, etc (so those long filename errors NEVER happen) it just copies RAW data.
I then take the second drive out of the system and place it on the shelf.
In the event of a failure (I am down to 4 working drives now.)
I take the good drive off of the shelf, make it
I then take
I take the failed (or failing) drive and make it
After the new drive is happy and in place for a few days, and I am sure I got everything I needed off of the failing drive, I re-clone the good drive and put it on the shelf.
So, far it has been the most hassle free disaster recovery plan I have ever used.
You can get 5 identical 80G hard drives for less than $200 with a very short search.
- I live the greatest adventure anyone could possibly desire. - Tosk the Hunted
Nice easy to setup software: http://www.freenas.org/
Its FreeBSD based - so potentially very secure indeed, but your perimeter should take care of that in any event.
Good opportunity to re-cycle any old PC's that are lying around.
Trull
-- NSY - SY OOT - Doric signs on local shop doors.
I use a cheap method because I can't afford an extra computer and a raid controller and 2 high end drives. Instead I use Maxtor 500GB network storage ( http://www.maxtorsolutions.com/en/catalog/MSS_II/ )(260$ at local fry's) and attached to it is 500 GB USB drive ( http://www.maxtorsolutions.com/en/catalog/OT4/ ) (160$ at local fry's). I use the main network drive for storage and every week I mirror the content to the second 500GB usb drive. I also only have about 2GB of stuff I really care about and that gets written to DVD every month, so I have lots of backups.
This is a very simple solution but it only cost me 420$ (actually only 160$ since I already had the network drive and was using it to share data between several computers). This has been running for about a year, no problems (network drive has been running for about 2 years); maxtor uses linux as the OS on the network drive and confgurable via web browser. I use a cron/rsync to mirror the drives by the way (you can use windows scheduler and some file sync program like cygwin's rsync or python version of rsync; whatever you like). You can also rsync daily but I personally don't change stuff that often.
You can also look up Western Digital, they have a similar set up (and I assume Seagate and Fujitsu too), but I have had a lot of good exteriences with Maxtor so I chose them.
You can build one for $500 dollars easily enough. Seriously, buy one of those gOS PC's Walmart is selling for $199, and buy a few larger hard drives to replace the standard 80GB(?) one it comes with. Set up a 1GB software (yes excessively large; I know) mirror'ed /boot on two of the drives and use 1GB on the third for your swap partition. Set up software RAID 5 across the three drives with the remainder space. I did this with 3x250GB drives in a Shuttle mini pc, and also put a slimline DVD-RW drive in it using the two internal bays, as well as a special bracket to house a 3.5" hard drive and a slimline CDROM drive in the 5.25" bay.
Things are tight, but in the big ole' gOS case you should have plenty of room to manuever.
I have Fedora installed (8 now, had 7 prior, and 6 before that), but you should be able to use just about any distribution you want. Samba works like a champ for network access both via my Mac OS laptop and my wifes Windows Vista computer. Same with Xsane and CUPS (albeit with turboprint which I bought) providing access to the Canon PIXMA MP170 printer/scanner; we print and scan over the network as if it were locally attached no problem.
Also use mediatomb to stream media to my PS3 when its booted into the game OS, and I'm working on getting pulseaudio working properly so that I can stream audio from internet radio sites that use Flash to the PS3 from this 'server' as well (right now I use rdesktop to connect to a vmware server virtual machine which runs Windows XP in order to stream the audio from the 'server' to the PS3)
You really, really, really can get so much more for so much less money if you do it yourself... no NAS would do all the things I just listed, even for $1,200. Your own PC for $500 probably could though. Yes, setting it up will take some effort. I smashed my head against the wall, particularly with the udev permissions to get my scanner to work over the network, but now that I recorded what I have to do for a rebuild, each time a new version of Fedora comes out it takes me about 30-60 minutes of configuration after the install is complete to get her flying again.
Wow, a lot of RAID fanboys on here. Didn't anyone hear that RAID is not a substitute for backup, and frankly not what the op really needs/wants.
RAID mirrors one drive to another, yeah that's real useful if you get disk errors and it mirrors them, or you accidently delete a file and the deletion gets mirrored. A backup is where you have somewhere to get files back from, not just a copy of the useless drive you already have!
Just buy a cheap NAS (NSLUG or Walmart PC) or a USB/eSATA/Firewire enclosure and a big drive, and use rsync or whatever you fancy to backup your files to it. If you're really a risk taker you could just burn your data to DVD every now and then.
Does it really take an AskSlashdot, and haven't we already been through this?
#include <sig.h>
Its a bit more work, but it works well, and it scales. I have an system, biggest expense the case and ps, holding half a dozen drives in Raidz.
WD has a true NAS system on the market called the My Book Pro. it comes with two drives, they are standard WD drives so they can be replaced easily. the raid configuration allows you to mirror the two drives or combine them into one partition. web based administration of the raid etc, etc. the biggest one they have is 2tb (2 1tb drives) so mirror those and bang, done. i saw a guy selling them on ebay for $580 last week
*** I suffer from a colorful array of psychological problems
You might consider one of these:
MV2010: http://www.shopping.hp.com/store/product/product_detail/PE592AV%2523ABA
MV2020: http://www.shopping.hp.com/store/product/product_detail/PE591AV%2523ABA
EX470: http://www.shopping.hp.com/store/product/product_detail/GG795AA%2523ABA
EX475: http://www.shopping.hp.com/store/product/product_detail/GG796AA%2523ABA
I have the MV2010 myself and am happy with it. There is a yahoo user group for it, a detailed unofficial FAQ by one of the people on the product team, and I think there are some hobbiests developing various extra (unofficial/unsupported) capabilities for it.
Check out the Kuro Box at http://www.revogear.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=KURO-BOX%2FPRO
Compared to running a PC, it uses less space and electricity. You won't RAID, but it's pretty good at what it does.
FreeNAS - www.freenas.org
NexentaStor - www.nexenta.com - This would be my choice - built on the opensolaris kernel, with gnu software, add in zfs, cifs, amanda, nfs v3/v4...
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
HUH?
I just bought, for about 500 dollars, one TERABYTE USB attachable storage. I set it up as RAID1, so it comes with its own reliability and, if ti comes to that, i might buy anotherone and software raid them with linux.
NO SIG
I wrote this up recently as I was going through the same research. You don't "need" FreeNAS, as really you can just setup a standard Linux distro and use standard file sharing. However, I really enjoy the configuration interface and it's quite simple to make it compatible with any and all operating systems. http://huntersdad.com/?page_id=23
This machine is virtually silent, can be expanded almost indefinitely with eSATA / USB, will automatically backup your Windows boxes (both image and differential), provides data redundancy, has remote access (terminal services and file shares) via your myhomeserver.homeserver.com free domain name, has the ability to do online backup with unlimited storage for about $70/year, and can stream media content to an Xbox 360.
In other words, it's a LOT better than a standard NAS.
Total: $878.00 + $165 for WHS
Mostly SATA, with 1GB LAN interfaces, good reputation for solid firmware. You have to supply your own drive(s). Certain lower models have a reputation for running hot, but not to the point of failure.
While it's not the greatest thing ever, the Western Digital Worldbook external network drive works for me. It's 1TB if you use it regularly or 500MB if you mirror raid it (which I do). There are 2 of these though, so you want the older version that is actually 2 drives in the case, not the newer slim one drive unit (which can't obviously mirror raid).
The best part is Best Buy recently clearanced these guys for super cheap for some reason, so this unit was actually cheaper than buying the equivalent bare drives!
I've had good luck with the Simpleshare NAS. Take a look at the firmware revisions. Depending on what you want, you might not want the latest firmware. The new version is good at sorting photos, songs and such dropped into a special folder. This is nice. This version dropped the support for encrypted drives. Grrrr. The NAS is inexpensive, runs Linux, has 1 internal drive and has 2 USB ports which will do raid with a couple external drives.. Nice! I use the older software which supports drive encryption as I use it to back up my taxes and banking stuff. It supports both SMB and NFS, so it is very nice to both Windows (except Vista), Apple and Nix. The only downer is it doesn't yet support gigabit ethernet, so a large drive back-up on 10/100 could take a while. They come with a 3 year warranty except the discontinued 160 gig model.
The truth shall set you free!
First, I'd not heard of Openfiler and will be reading up on it but for now I'm using unRAID from Lime-Technology.com and it's working well. Here's why I like it and why I think it's better than standard RAID:
:-O
1) It doesn't stripe and it easy expands to as many as 16 disks.
2) Because it doesn't stripe disks that aren't being used can goto sleep, much less power usage, noise, and heat trust me.
3) One disk is used for Parity and must be as big as or larger than all others but all other disks can be any size you want - they need *not* be identical. JBOD indeed!
4) If you lose a disk you still have access to the data, if you lose TWO disks you will lose data - two disks worth and NOT the whole array! Yes I know RAID can protect against multiple disk failure but only with hot spares or schemes that mean you get to use even LESS of your disks for data. I get to use ALL of my disk space save just one disk. I'm actually running sans a Parity disk right now since I had a hardware failure, I have access to ALL of my data and am hoping a second doesn't die on me while NewEgg ships.
5) It boots from FLASH memory on cheap hardware, you do not lose storage space to an OS.
6) The trial version supports two data disks and a parity disk, perfect for testing. The full version isn't super expensive. The product has decent support.
7) The disks use standard ResiserFS as their F/S. Want to pull one and take it someplace to mount to a Linux box? Sure, go for it. Need to do a data recovery for some odd reason? It's ResierFS so whatever works for that works for this.
Doing this for just $500 won't be easy without some spare hardware around. The Asus P5B V0 M/B runs about $106 at NewEgg and has 8 SATA ports (one is eSATA) and GigE. That and two 4port Promise cards (SATA or IDE) will get you up to 16 drives but obviously I'd start with just the M/B. Buy some cheap memory, no more than a gig. I spent $25 on the RAM I bought and $60 for a 2.4Gig Celeron D and that's WAY more than enough. Slap all that into a case you have laying around with a decent P/S and you're good to go on the cheap sans drives. Spend the rest on drives, I find Seagates work well and their 5yr warranty rocks! Oh you will need a FLASH stick too, 512meg is WAY more than enough so figure $25 here too.
Some things you might NOT like about unRAID:
1) You aren't going to turn this into a NAS\WEB server\Mail server. It's storage stupid, use it for that. To do all of those things you'd need a swap space and out of the box this doesn't have swap - nor is it needed. It can be added but....
2) Each drive is it's own share. I address them using UNC naming and there are ways to access files across multiple drives as a single share but it's not like RAID with one big fat volume. IMO the advantages outweigh this downside, more details can be found on the unRAID site.
3) It ain't super fast. Yes, it will max out a 100meg NIC pretty good but not the GigE. You're getting the throughput of a single drive with some overhead so there's no aggregation of disks to improve speed. It IS fast enough to stream HD and multiple SD streams are no biggie either. I *do* back my machines up to this without issue using Acronis. Do use a GigE NIC however, it bursts above the 100Meg mark and testing has shown advantages to having it, it just cannot max it out continuously.
4) unRAID doesn't YET support NFS, Tom is working on it. SMB is what I use.
5) The driver is open source but the controlling software is closed source and yup Tom makes some money on it. Source is available for the GPL'd driver software he's modded so you could go around this but frankly I think his pricing is reasonable, zealots might not think so.
Check it out, if nothing the ASUS board is a good base for damned near anything else you might want to build for a NAS and is supported under Linux, it has onboard video on it too. More details about the M/B, HD deals, or other hardware like SATA cages can be found on the unRAID support forums and in the Wiki.
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Do you have $500 worth of data to begin with? My entire "My Documents" folder, despite all of the crap in it, I don't value at $500. If I lose it, yeah it sucks, and no I don't value time at 0, but it's not data that is earning or costing money to begin with. The only actual data that has a value associated with it is what I've bought off iTunes, and it's not cost-effective to spend $500 for backing up $50 worth of m4p files.
It is based on a recent version of the kernel and has good support for hardware RAID controllers and Gigabit NICs. The cost is very reasonable. If you don't want to spend the bucks for hardware RAID, it also supports once-per-day disk mirroring. I'm using it with an old Pentium III box with excellent results.
http://www.serverelements.com/
"For every positive review I can find a negative that refutes it."
Welcome to the net, new here? Everyone hates something, even the best stuff that never fails someone has a problem with.
My 'dream NAS' would support 3.0 Gb/s SATA transfers, support RAID 0-6 + JBOD, use a Linux-mountable filesystem on the drives (ReadyNas uses EXT3), have iTunes and DLNA media streaming support, firewire 800/USB 2.0 connections for the currently-direct-connect-only OS X Time Machine, support and use 1 GB transfer speeds.
The Thecus 5200B is sinfully fast, but doesn't have the iTunes or DLNA servers (it is a SMB box, not a home server, after all).
Opinions?
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
OK, I've been over and over this home/small business NAS thing quite a bit in the last few months. Let me tell you, the best NAS is a Debian box with Samba running.
I looked at the set-top, semi-cheap NAS boxes on Newegg, they all have reviews saying that they've either failed prematurely, or the transfer rates are way too slow. With that in mind, I bought a cheap barebone PC for the customer, and ran FreeNAS on it.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure if FreeNAS is the problem, or the barebone was the problem, but the machine started to lock up at random intervals. At first, I could solidly blame it on power loss, because APC Powerchute was showing brown/blackouts at the same time as the outages. So then, I fought with the cheesy BIOS on the cheap board to get it set to power on after a power outage and not fail a post without a keyboard (wasn't very obvious and the cheap barebone didn't ship with a manual, company's web page doesn't carry information about this box anymore). I got it home and found that memory slots DIMM B1 & B2 were both bad, the board wouldn't post with memory in either one, but works fine in A1 & A2 (no dual channel). FreeNAS being in beta, I also decided to replace it with Debian/Samba, because the customer is becoming a little short fused over this fiasco.
The Debian box has been purring like a kitten on my desk for about a week now, and backups go off flawlessly. If you're interested, I've also found that Acronis True Image Home 11 is probably the best available option for their backups. Windows backups just aren't doing the trick, in my tests, a System State restore was causing a BSOD right after restoration, which doesn't even get me to the point of being able to restore data. The customer uses Peachtree Accounting, which has its own backup solution, so I've also advised her to do a backup in it and store it on the NAS share periodically, even though we're creating image backups. Acronis TI 11 restores have been perfect and effortless in my testing.
Admittedly, some of this is my own inexperience. I've never done this at home, and this was the first of my handful of side-business customers who requested a backup server. I'm sure more experienced people would have known to do a full backup at least every week with incrementals every night, since last time we had a disaster, I had to click through hundreds of incremental backups on the same full backup for data. I also shouldn't have used beta software for a business environment. Then, I shouldn't have trusted included Windows software to be reliable when the time came to perform.
I've got a Synology CS407 . I like setting up a linux server just as much as the next guy, but I find that having reliable storage and a nice server to twiddle with are different things. I've put in 4 SATA2 drives of 500Gb each, and rolled RAID5 on them. Never looked back :)
Ah. He wants a network NAS. As opposed to the other kind.
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
Dear article author,
"It's" is "It is"
"Its" is "belong to It"
I realize this is fsckin' trivial, but please try to look literate in English, so you don't constantly get showed up by H1-B folks who have actually learned the language.
Ive really liked this product but don't use the network cords they sent, usually they are crap. Its easy to manage and if you so need it can convert a USB printer to a networked printer.
Maybe there is more of a learning curve than I'm allowing for here, but it costs me far, far less than $169 of my time to setup a Linux server with Samba and BackupPC on a RAID. RAID implies that everything is on more than one disk, whether you remember to flag it or not; Samba gives you filesharing and media streaming (or lighttpd if your media clients only support web); BackupPC supports as many PCs as you want, with incremental and full versions, allowing you to restore a file, folder, or an entire backup (or browse without restoring).
Presumably, then, your Windows Home Server does something for you that my Ubuntu Server doesn't. Whatever it is, is it worth $169? Specifically, if it's ease of use, are you paid enough that $169 is cheaper for you than 2 hours or so (at most) following some Linux tutorials? I imagine most people would come away with money to spare on an extra drive or two.
I realize, for many people, Linux is not going to work on the desktop, much as I wish it would. But Linux excels on the server, and with neither of them preinstalled, the cash cost of Windows is suddenly very obvious. The only better OS for this might be Solaris or BSD, and they're both free, too.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Why would you need a NAS for a backup solution for 120GB drive? Why not a simple USB or eSata with some imaging software? NAS, for you size drive, sounds like a lot of tech for a little problem.
I use FreeBSD running ZFS on 3 500 GB hard drives. If you want reliability use ZFS.
now that's just stupid, by writing Unicode instead of bits you can only use 1/16 the paper.
Any sufficiently simple magic can be passed off as mere advanced technology.
I use one of these at home - not sure if it's what you need
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSLU2
it has 2 USB connectors and a LAN connector, so it sits on top of my fridge (where the phone line comes in) next to the wireless router and has a WD mybook 500GB guy plugged into it - I also plug my ipod into it sometimes - then I can see everything from all my machines and its reasonably fast - my music collection is in apple lossless format which has fairly large file size (compared to mp3) so editing tags over the wireless is real slow in itunes - not sure why
calling all destroyers
Buy a bog standard machine (just check you can get solaris drivers), a couple of cheap SATA drives (size doesn't matter, you can upgrade them or add more drives later), and install OpenSolaris. Mirror the drives with ZFS and you're done, or use raid-z if you have several drives.
If you've not heard of ZFS, go read this: http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/zfs.jsp. I found out about it 4 weeks ago and it's pretty impressive.
Some of the benefits:
- Guaranteed data integrity
- Unlimited, instant snapshots for backup & recovery
- Samba gives access to windows users (and Sun are just adding CIFS in Samba too)
- With Samba, and Microsoft's Shadow Copy Client those snapshots integrate straight into explorer. Just right click a file or folder to restore previous versions. It's not quite Time Machine, but it's not bad.
- ZFS means adding drives, or upgrading to bigger drives is a piece of cake
- You can also export snapshots to an external disk for backups
- You can check the whole disk for errors, which will be automatically repaired
All of you are forgetting that the submitter is operating under the completely false assumption that added redundancy (NAS, in-box RAID, whatever) is a substitute for periodic backup to optical media. It is not. That is all. :-)
Your suggestions for NAS are good, as such, but in a way you are answering the wrong question -- or not giving the full answer; which would include "oh yeah and burn valuables to DVD often enough".
Even RAID arrays fail. It's not "if" but "when". You can easily lose two disks before you can fully rebuild your array, especially if the drives are from the same manufacturing batch. And you can lose a controller card and have real trouble finding that exact same model with same firmware to read yoru array again -- tons of data has been lost that way. The bottom line is, hard drive storage is never, in any configuration, completely safe. Neither is optical, but periodic backup burning is easily the closest approximation.
I'll add another plug for the NSLU. Got one of those handling image data from remote security cameras. Works great. Note that you have to have USB hard drive however, as it does not have SATA support directly.
Also, I did mod the box so that it powers back on automatically after a power failure.
Like pi? Try 10,000 digits.
i HAD one of these: it was slow and unreliable. sometimes it wouldn't recognize my disk. i had to plug it into linux to recover my files.
--- widget evolution: enhanced, plus, super, ultra, extreme, exxxtreme, ultra-extreme,
i'm purely taking this at "Network Attached Storage" verbatim word definition, i'm not sure how this jibes with everybody else's definitions...
i run openWRT on a linksys wrtsl54gs. installed the usb storage drivers, installed samba, attached a hub and multiple usb hard drives. no need to keep a pc up and running all day and still have easy local and remote access to files. i also attached a thumb drive purely for use by the router's os since you can fill up the flash on the router pretty quick installing your favorite extensions.
i haven't tried any of the rsync, etc. stuff for backups, so my ass is out in the wind as far as data reliability. ymmv.
The IRS is the one organization that you don't want to fuck with. Remember, these are the guys who took down Al Capone.
Something that I found not to long ago was LaCie's Ethernet Big Disk http://www.lacie.com/us/products/product.htm?pid=10882. Its an external usb hard drive that also has a built in gigabit nic. As a bonus feature, an additional external usb hard drive can be connected through a port on the drive itself. The software for the disk has to be run every time the computer is turned on to be able to see the drive(at least in windows, I haven't been able to test the mac or linux versions of the software yet), but the software doesn't install on your system. There are a number of sizes you can get, but the one that would probably work best for you is the 1 terabyte version that retails for 299.99. Hope that helps.
The last thing you want for backup is a home-based anything. If your backups are at your home, a single fire or theft can destroy the original and the backup at the same time. Don't buy new hardware, buy an offsite backup service of some kind -- I use Jungledisk.
You didn't use usenet?
I went for the openMSS2 from Maxtor,
NAS storage solution, i replaced the firmware, so 'can it run linux' yes it does and yes i've replaced the firmware with a better one, i can telnet/ssh into it, run ushare on it (so xbox 360 will play wmv/wma from it) etc etc, its pretty cool, not enterprise cool, but not bad for what i paid (about $200 for 320GB)
oh you can daisey chain a couple of other usb drives off the back, or printers too.
http://openmss.org/ is the project page
This looks to be a larger version (500GB) and i see theres a 1TB version too
http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?TabID=1&ModuleNo=218052&doy=21m11
i wouldn't know about any of those.
If you have a $500 budget then find an old PC. It does not need to be a high end PC an old !.0 Ghz box will do fine. Next buy two 500Gb drives. This should cost you about $250. Install Linux. OK that's it. Total price $250. If you need to spend the whole $500 then buy two more drives. Do NOT waste your money on any kind of "raid controler" we will do this in software. If you have tw drive mirror them, if you have four drives use RAID5
Linux on a 1Gh PC will out perform any of the home NAS boxes
If this were for a business and you ave a LOT more data I'd suggest going with Solaris rather then Linux. But for a new user Linux is easier to set up. Both are free.
Check out the Buffalo TeraStation Pro 1TB SATA array - $449.99 w/ free shipping from Buy.com. I own a couple of these and have been quite happy with them, although they cannot fully utilize their gigabit ethernet connection in terms of throughput. That's my only gripe. Linux OS internally, but work well with Windoze. You can get units with up to 4TB of space, but they cost about 4x as much...
Sometimes, real fast is almost as good as real-time.
I stumbled across this one day walking through Best Buy. (www.mirra.com)
Its a simple box that plugs into your network and makes copies of any folder that you designate as being copied to the mirra drive. Included in the price of the drive is one disaster recovery of data which is nice should the drive ever fail. It also allows you to access your data through their web interface so you can always have your data even when you're not home.
Cost was well within my budget and has never been a problem.
-Goran
Carpe Scrotum - The only way to deal with your competition.
I have a hammer myshare (seen http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822111012) that works well.
It supports SMB the best, but is supposed to have support for FTP and NFS as well.
It runs Linux internally, but telnet support is technically disabled (although possible to enable if you work at it).
I use the 500GB version, which has 2x250GB HD's in RAID level 1 (mirror). This enables me to have two hard drives that have copies of all of my backup data.
There is a good review of this product at smallnetbuilder (http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/content/view/30056/75/).
It is also quite inexpensive, as it runs about $260 on newegg (link above). Just my $.02
I picked up a 500GB HP Media Vault recently, and it works great. Runs BusyBox, has 2 drive bays for up to 1.3TB, and only cost me $180. The new Windows based Media Vaults are coming out, and a lot of places are clearing out the older versions for a song.
"As with any NAS or backup solution for the home... Speed, Reliability, Cheap. Pick any two." I always say good, fast, or cheap. Pick two with ANY project. And maybe add EASY as an added requirement to the good, fast, or cheap for the home user. Focusing on a network storage for the home. If your Linux savvy or have a friend who is, then for a home NAS I'd go with a cheap PC with as much disk space that you can afford, RAID, and Openfiler. Another option is BackupPC on cheap PC with added disk space, and your favorite Linux disro with LVM or RAID (so that you can expand the file system). And...M$ offers the Windows Home Server for someone set on a Microsoft solution. Now this doesn't address the problem of theft or your house exploding. I feel that off-site storage for the home user is another good topic to discuss.
-- Wondering how long until the internet becomes fully corporatist, like television.
Like everyone else said, if you want it cheap, DIY. If you want a packaged solution though, I'm liking Netgear (formerly Infrant)'s ReadyNAS NV+. http://www.netgear.com/Products/Storage/ReadyNASNVPlus.aspx
It even comes with a pre-installed version of slimserver inside the NAS (for serving up your music library from your NAS to Squeezebox players).
11*43+456^2
The Linksys NSLU2 *might* be a good idea, although make sure you do not have any existing data on the USB drive you intend to attached because it will wipe them out with a Linux ext2 filesystem. You can buy a hard drive and a USB 2.0 enclosure to attach to the NSLU2 for a descent price or just go with the WD My Book external USB 2.0 HD for 130$ from Dell's small business website (that's what I did) also Check newegg.com, Amazon, pricegrabber etc.
If you want a more NAZZY feel go with the Linksys NAS200 (or similar) for around 130$, which you can throw in a couple of SATA drives and/or attach additional USB storage devices.
Or do what a lot of people are saying and throw a few drives in a spare PC and turn it into Linux NAS machine using http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASLite distribution.
There are so many options!
Good luck!
to perform a backup of my main rig.
Dell GX270 (P4, 256 RAM, 40GB HDD) - £99 (which included a 17" TFT I promptly sold for £60)
Seagate 320GB HDD (single one, as this is a backup of my main machine - Mirroring being applied to my main system. I therefore already have redundancy) - £45. This replaced the 40GB HDD, which was promptly sold.
A gig of memory I had lying around - worth about £40.
A dual-layer DVD-RW (so I don't tie up the burner on my main device) - £20. This replaced the CD-Rom, which has gone into the spares bin.
Second NIC (to face the Internet) which was lying around, worth about £5. I wanted the onboard NIC to communicate exclusively with my main rig.
Fedora Core 7 - free
SAMBA is a snap to configure on recent Linuxes (no more having to edit smb.conf to enable encrypted passwords, thank god). The Dell ain't much of a performer, but it's quiet enough to run 24/7, and has a gigabit ethernet port - which I hammered while transferring data across.
Total cost to me has been about £150 - maybe $300. While it's early days yet, and I haven't yet got something to do an offsite backup (which will probably be best served by an overnight job onto an USB drive, cost maybe another £70), I'm now reasonably assured that all my important stuff is on three separate discs and is unlikely to be killed by regular disc failure.
Hope this helps.
F_T
FreeBSD also has support for ZFS.
I've been researching the same thing this week. I've narrowed down my list to three potential commercial solutions; I could go with a home-brew one, but I need something with easy access so that I can insert a 2nd drive, copy the contents of the primary to the secondary, and then put the secondary in a safe deposit box.
:)
The three I've narrowed it down to are the D-Link DNS-323, LinkSys NAS200, and QNAP TS-209.
Both the DNS-323 and QNAP TS-209 have an extra feature that I am intrigued by: They can also double as print servers.
The jury's still out on whether any of them will fit the above needs I specified (re: manual duplication), but I'll eventually check one of them out.
unRAID from http://www.lime-technology.com/ is what you want... and the 3-drive version is free.
It is not as *fast* as RAID 5 but it is 1) more reliable (since in a multi-drive failure, data from other drives is still readable) and 2) more flexible since you can add more drives when you need, and they do *not* have to all be the same size.
And it spins-down the drives if you want, and they stay spun down until needed... unlike a Windoze box. And it runs well on the $200 Wal*Mart PC, but is a little slow when building the parity disk at the beginning on a slow CPU. But after that, it is fine.
Only you can decide what's right for your needs. With that said, here's what I did. Shopped around on the used/surplus arena for a nice Compaq ProLiant server (in my case, a DL380 G2 with a gig of RAM and twin PIII 1.4giggle CPUs). Loaded it up with 18GB drives. and made a RAID-5 array out of it.
That took care of a reliable data dumpster. Now, for backup, I shopped around some more and found a nice ADIC tape library with three DLT8000 drives. Paid about $210 for it all together. That, coupled with another $300 or so for the server and some odd change thrown in for tapes and mounting hardware, and I had a nice data stash for around $700 all told, pretty close to your figure. Not bad for enterprise-class hardware.
Granted, the server's a bit noisy. I eventually relocated it to the garage, and remoted the tape library via fiber channel SCSI. Paid less than $100 for the hardware to do it, again on the surplus market.
You can do some pretty amazing things with the right bit of scrounging.
Happy hunting.
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
My wife and I have a $100 500gb USB drive at my mother-in-law's house. We don't even rsync, we just take our laptops with us and synchronize every time we're there. Presto - off-site backup, with real life "nagware" when I don't visit my mother-in-law enough. :)
Of course, if you think you hate backing up NOW, wait till you combine it with your in-laws!
**** You never REALLY learn to swear until you own a computer. ****
I am going to be looking at NAS for my home network soon and am leaning toward a BSD or Linux based NAS solution using software RAID:
http://www.freenas.org/
I've got a terabyte and a half of storage under my desk, on 2 old Pc's that would otherwise be useless to me.
Whenever anyone I know upgrades their machines, I get the old ones. Take a Celeron 400 and an pold P3, throw in $120 500-gig hard drives and boot with NASLite. (NASLITE overrides the BIOS of old motherboards, so even dinosaur boxes can boot huge hard drives. I've run it on 486 boxes).
So I have about 600 gig of storage on one NAS box that I use for music, movies, photographs and anything else that I want to have accessible to all the machines on the network. The other NAS box is just 2 500 gig disks that are used for backups of the first NAS box.
I'm using SyncBACK freeware to schedule backups from one box to the other.
Works like a charm, and all for the measly cost of NASLITE+ and the hard drives.
Use http://duplicity.nongnu.org/ and Amazon S3.
I got one of the first consumer-grade NAS boxes (D-Link DSM-G600). It has been pretty rock-solid for me, although rather slow.
Quite honestly, for occasional (weekly or so) backup, you could use ANY NAS box. The only thing that I would recommend is to get something that supports SMB so that you can use any OS you want to connect to it. Some units (like the DS-101) use a proprietary protocol where you have to use a driver (Windows only, of course) to talk to it. Avoid those.
If your useage model is to turn the unit on, back everything up, and then turn it off, you could use any decent box out there. On the other hand, if you want to leave the box on 24/7, here is a list of other things to look for:
* Must be able to spin down the hard drive (a lot of NAS's don't do this)
* Reasonable fan noise (better if the fan is temperature-controller) (smaller fans make more noise)
Everything else is optional. For weekly backups, performance might not matter a lot (especially if you do the backup overnight). For daily use, you will want something fast. Gigabit is a nice. Jumbo frames is nicer. RAID is also nice, but not really necessary for a backup that is used once per week (what are the odds of your NAS drive dying at the same time as your desktop drive?). For 24/7 use, however, RAID would be very nice to have. Do you want something that can complete FTP and torrent download for you? Some do that. Do you want an FTP server? Some do that. Do you want something that can be a media server? Some do that (with varying levels of success). What level of user-access control do you want? I find that the network sections of Tom's Hardware to have a lot of great reviews.
As others have mentioned, you can also build your own PC to do this, possibly even with parts that you have lying around. The only problem with this is that it will be a lot larger, and probably take more power than a pre-made NAS box. It might also be more expensive if you have to buy everything, but if you can recycle parts that you have lying around, you could save a bundle. Pick your poison.
Also, don't put too much faith in user reviews. Any idiot can post a review. Some of the comments that I enjoyed for my DS-G600:
* You cannot pop in a NTFS drive and have it just work (duh, NAS runs linux)
* You cannot take the drive out and mount it in a windows box (same as above)
* Performance is slow (this is a NAS, not a USB hard drive)
You have to maintain reasonable expectations for a NAS. A lot of negative reviews were for people who exptected too much.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
I work for a small business, and we've gone through nas boxes and external hdd's like you wouldn't believe.. here are some of my favorites, but it depends on what you're trying to accomplish. You specified NAS, so I assume you have already determined that's actually what you need and you know why you need it (not necessarily a safe assumption, as true nas isn't always needed).
We're currently using a lot of Buffalo Linkstations (100+ (we put software on them and then sell them)) and I've had a total of 1 go bad, and that was a firmware thing for the embedded linux that failed, so I removed the hard drive (and voided the warranty) and got my data off with no problem. A 500gigger is on newegg right now for $270, http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822165021.
These have a few nice features you might like: 1- you can put two of them on a lan together and do some simple replication between them, and 2- you can attach a USB hard drive to it, and have the nas device back itself up to the external hard drive (or expand capacity by adding shares).
If you don't need a NAS device, we also use a lot of Maxtor usb hard drives, and we've only had two failures, one of which was again recoverable by removing the hard drive, but the other was actual data corruption which we did not figure out what caused it, and we had to use recovery software. That could have been Windows, though..
You could also go with a hot swap sata bay like this one: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817364016 and just buy oem hard drives when you need them.
Then there's this thing, and it has got to be the cutest raid backplane I've ever seen, but I don't know if it would fit your needs: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816119006 ($62) It's a regular hot swap sata enclosure, but it takes 4 laptop hard drives and fits them in an exposed 5 1/4 bay.. Then get 4 of these 160gig hard drives for $90 each http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136071 and a cheap 4 port raid 5 pci card like this one http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816132013 ($35), and there's 480 gigs of raid 5 goodness in a 5.25 bay.
in case you think of getting an embedded NAS box which can be modded later look at this page:
http://nas-central.org/ALL_COMMUNITIES/Collection_of_NAS-Hacking_communities.html
i tried to gather all NAS-hacking communities on one page and i think i was quite successful.
-- mindbender
http://nas-central.org/
http://foonas.org/
Use AmazonS3 or www.rsync.net
I have a QNAP TS-209 Nas at home. I absolutely love it. It cost me less than $500 on NewEgg.com. However, it doesn't come with any drives. It accepts 2 SATA drives. There is a list of drives compatible on QNAP's site. I bought a couple of "opened-box" drives from newegg that were 750GB each, so my NAS is 1.5TB. Costing me a grand total of about $750. My primary reason for getting it was the fact that it was RAID capable and that it has a 1 Gb network card. Its loaded with features at a damn good price.
Heard of Lacie? I have had good experience with there NAS hardware.
I bought a Linksys NAS200 with two 1TB drives and use it. If needed you can attach additional usb drives to it. Not crazy expensive, and it even has a nifty pushbutton syncing system. I know I could do that with rsync, but I'm lazy.
I interviewed both FreeNAS and OpenFiler for my own home NAS. I started with OpenFiler - I was intrigued by iSCSI and after reading the feature set was convinced it was the best thing since sliced kiwi. But my home hardware was meager - a PII 350 running a variety of SCSI disks. OpenFiler technically worked, but it was sluggish - the user interface took ages to use. So I looked a bit and found FreeNAS. Install was easier and faster than OpenFiler - but was stunned me was how screaming fast the web user interface was compared to OpenFiler. My PII 350 was giving the instantaneous response I had hoped it would be able to provide. FreeNAS has been running my NAS with 8 different SCSI disks in one giant concatenated logical disk (don't remind me how unsafe this) for a year now. The software RAID is easy to use. I like that it does AFP sharing for my Macs really seamlessly. With no UPS, I was worried about power failure, but I've lost power multiple times and it worked fine afterwards. It is highly responsive on the network and all of my home computers can leech off of it with little problem. I played with OpenFiler at work on a more powerful machine and did like its iSCSI capabilities - but FreeNAS has those now as well, so I can't see any reason for a home user to bother with OpenFiler.
The only reason I've stuck with Firefox instead of switching to Opera is because there are Firefox extensions that I absolutely depend on. I tested out Firefox 3, and I would switch to it this instant if the extensions were compatible with it.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
The unit comes with a single 500Gb disk and has room for a second one. You can also add disks to the external USB. The big limiter of this box is that it can only support about 1.3Gb total worth of RAID protected capacity. You have the flexibility of partitioning the disks to support all or part of the disks as RAID. My unit has the pair of 500s as RAID disks which I use for high value(my photo and video collection) and a couple of USB drives for backups that don't need the full performance. The unit supports ftp, CIFS and NFS. Because of its small RAM it cannot efficiently support rsync.
Optionally, if you want to tinker it has the linux source available and you can build new firmware images. I played around with the tool chain but did not have any overriding need to modify anything. I have had one in my closet for about a year with no hassles. I previously had a pair of NSLU2's but they were very slow and did not support true RAID capabilities.
The FAQ site is http://www.k0lee.com/hpmediavault/
Hard Drive - 250GB @ 5 X $65
Power Supply - 500w @ $40
Total: $490
All you need now is an case, CPU, and Linux. Case and CPU you can probably salvage from on old PC, or a reused PC dealer for damn cheap. Linux is free (as in speech and beer).
- I voted for Nintendo and against Bush
LaCie has a 2 Disk RAID system that is local (USB/Firewire). I just hung one off of my home server and all our backup needs are taken care of. It does RAID 1 with hot swappable drives and will build a new drive to match other drive.
I drank what? -- Socrates
Using it at home. Nice stuff
Mine both run full installs of Debian for arm. They're great, very reliable. Not a lot of processing power but one of them happily does web/mail/samba/ssh and a couple of other bits, whilst the other does media serving and torrent downloads. Oh, and the second has a wireless card now too.
QNAP's TS-209 Pro (The Pro adds NFS support!) is the funnest piece of hardware I've seen. RAID support with hot-swappable, automatic array rebuilding, plus all the server stuff:
It goes for about $400. It only draws 8watts when idle (and the drives are asleep).
I plan on getting 3 500GB hard drives for it, and use the auto-rebuild of the arrays to do backups. Just yank a drive out for offline storage, and plug in the 3rd drive and let it rebuild the array on the fly. 2 weeks later, rinse and repeat. Data is available during rebuilds too. ;)
Did I mention it runs linux, and you can get ipkg on it, so you can load almost any linux apps on it, like svn, etc?
I don't want an old computer pulling 100watts from the wall with freenas. This fits the bill!
Don't steal. The government hates competition.
The biggest problem with USB is filesystem compatibility if using with multiple OSes. With all linux machines, I don't bother with a MBR or parititions, and just put a volume group on the drive. But Windows doesn't understand that without special drivers (which do exist, BTW). Conversely, putting NTFS on the drive is problematic for Linux (it being an undocumented format). FAT32 is compatible, but way too inefficient for such a large drive.
My goal for backup is a encrypted distributed filesystem, where you share your 500GB USB drives with random people over the internet in a tit for tat arrangement. Pieces of data are encrypted and distributed over many locations, such that it can be recovered and decrypted when only XX% of the pieces are obtainable (where XX is configurable). Nobody can read other peoples pieces stored on their drive, and people can join/drop out at any time without jeopardizing anyones backup (unless a large percentage drops out at once).
Services like Amazon S3 are ok for putting encrypted tarballs on their server (including differential tars).
Probably not what you want to hear, but my best NAS experience has been with the WD NetCenter series... (320GB with a 160GB drive attached to it by USB)
The new airport extreme wireless routers have a USB port that you can connect a disk to and share it on your network. You can easily add storage to your network for less than $500 if you do this. I use a hub and have several drives hooked up.
Although not ideal, it gets the job done fairly cheaply. I have a media server that utilizes LVM, spanning across multiple disks. I also have an external enclosure with a drive that is large enough to hold everything that's stored on the server, plus some more. The external enclosure has both an eSATA and USB 2.0 port. I back up everything on the server to the external drive via rsync utilizing the eSATA port (I had a cheaper enclosure that only supported USB 2.0 that I was using before, until the USB-ATA bridge crapped out during a restore and I almost lost all of my data, so I only use eSATA for backups/restores now). Whenever I run out of space on the server, I buy a new drive that is larger than the drive currently in the enclosure, move the drive in the enclosure into the server, add it to the LVM volume group, extend the logical volume to include the newly installed drive, and extend the filesystem to use the newly created space in the logical volume. It works for now until my data on the server uses over a terabyte, since that's the max my enclosure will support..then I'll have to come up with a different solution for backing up.
One problem with running disks off of, say, a Linux server is there is a limit to how many of them you can stuff in there. Usually I hit that limit right around day 1. Moreover, the PC eats a fairly large amount of juice even just doing nothing. My back-up strategy was to avoid RAID entirely and use plain disks (external drives) as backups. I would just clone the live disk to the backup on a regular schedule. There are lots of reasons why I really wanted it to be a different unit, though, and I didn't want to maintain another Linux box. Eventually I decided to get a Buffalo TeraStation, a 1TB unit. The original unit I have had only one major defect, that being that it really couldn't feed gigE at full speed. In effect there was no point in running it faster than 100baseT. When I needed additional storage I bought another Buffalo product, this time a TeraServer 2TB. It fixes the performance issues with the older unit and is generally better designed. Both units together only eat about 100W; less than my PC-based server at idle. I like 'em; low effort, not expensive, work well. YMMV, of course, but so far (three years of heavy use on the TeraStation) they have been great. So far I haven't had to do disaster recovery but it's Linux ... not going to be worse than a Linux RAID array, I figure.
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
1. M2N-E Asus Motherboard + 1 Gbyte DDR2 + AMD X2 5000+ CPU with unlocked clock multiplier. No Graphics card.
2. Antec Nine Hundred case with 450 watt energy efficient PS. 6 Seagate Sata2 500 GB disk drives.
3. APC backup unit with 1000+VA, like the XS1200. APC is the preferred brand, since driver install is easy.
Assemble hardware, and temporarily install a DVD-ROM, keyboard, and graphics card for installation of Ubuntu server. I've used 6.10, 7.04, and 7.10 successfully. Boot your favorite version of alternate install CD of Ubuntu AMD64 server and install it, after partitioning all the disks with small partitions of 1024 cylinders as partition 1, and the rest of the disk as partition 2. Then create RAID1 arrays on partition 1 (partition type FD) of disks A & B, and another RAID1 array on disks C & D. Partition 1 of disk E is a swap partition, and partition 1 of disk F is spare. After creation of the RAID1 array on A & B as /dev/md0, then use this for the root mount point. /dev/md1 on C & D can be used in the future for upgrading to newer releases without having to trash the original on /dev/md0. I don't bother with a LAMP installation, since I want pure file services. I do add DHCP, TFTP, SSH, NFS, and Samba services either during the installation, or after. After a successful install and reboot, then modify the grub menu to set up a serial console. http://www.howtoforge.com/setting_up_a_serial_console
Yank out the DVD, graphics card and keyboard, hook up a serial cable, and verify that it reboots with output directed to the serial port. The whole point of making the server headless is to remove all temptation to run an X-Server on the machine. This way lies madness and disk corruption. Preservation of the data takes precedence over convenience. You can do everything you need via SSH, or in a pinch, with the serial port. After beheading the machine, I usually continue configuration via SSH from another box on the network. Next, create a RAID6 array on the 6 disks using the 2nd partitions, which will give you a little under 2TB of usable storage. RAID6 may seem a bit of overkill, but RAID5 arrays usually have their moment of truth during a rebuild after a drive failure, and this is when unreadable sectors usually rise up and bite you very hard. With Raid6, you still have a margin of error after a disk failure, and we all know it's not a matter of if, but when.
Now install loop-AES. This always requires a build from source code, and instructions can be found on the ubuntu forums . Loop-AES is more complex to install than LUKS, or other linux disk encryption schemes, but the performance and security are the best available. This is why the OS should be in 64 bit mode, since this gives a little faster speed to the AES256 encryption. Creation of a suitable encryption key is covered elsewhere, but I strongly recommend 65 keys, a good random salt value, and a high iteration count on "losetup". I use an iteration count of 2,000,000, which takes about 2 minutes for the CPU to perform. The keyfile & salt value should be stored on an separate USB key, stored in an encrypted filesystem with a different salt value, a high iteration count, and a 20 character strong password. This combination is military grade, and places the weak link of the security chain squarely in your head. In other words, your password and the USB key become the only possible method for recovering your data, so making copies of the USB key is strongly recommended. I keep a copy at the bank, in a deposit box, as well as
Do you really need a NAS? I bought the Thecus 2050 RAID box (http://www.thecus.com/products_over.php?cid=10&pid=3). It's fast, expandable and transportable (i keep a second one in a safety desposit box). Supported harddrives are limited, but you can get two solid 500GB's and slap them in there, run RAID 0/1, and it just plugs into an included eSata 2.0 PCI card. I have 2 of these boxes, they are about $130/piece and they are faster than my internal Sata drives. IF you need to have availability to them on the network, just share them over the computer you have them plugged into. You can get 2 WD 500GB's for 100-130/piece: http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&DEPA=0&Description=WD5000&x=0&y=0 I never understood why non-enterprise networks ever would need NAS? just use network sharing from your main (server) computer.
Maxtor makes a set of these drives called "Shared" (try www.maxtor.com/shared). I bought a 300G one for the church a while ago, and it works well. It's actually Linux, using Samba to manage various shares, and comes with a Winblows auto-backup utility for the clients on the network.
I'm using a My Book(TM) World Edition(TM) II - 1TB from Western Digital URL: http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=340 It was only $ 400 at Best Buy. Works fine, a little nosy and a little slow on it's 10/100/1000 interface. WD now has 2TB of NAS available. Later, Bruce ;-)
Get an Apple AirPort base station. Buy two external 500GB HD's and plug em in to the AirPort. Run Leopard and use Time Machine to back up to your network drives. Works soo sweet.
I know there are probably a thousand people out there that'll argue, but here is my solution...
I bought a Buffalo "LinkStation Pro". It cost $210 for the 320GB NAS drive. It supports SMB network sharing and has a web interface. It also supports plugging in USB Printers and/or USB Disks for additional storage.
Here's the link:
http://www.buy.com/prod/buffalo-320gb-linkstation-pro-network-shared-storage-sata-2-x-usb-2-0/q/loc/101/202973094.html
The best part? If you plug in a USB disk the web interface allows you to tell it to backup the internal disk to the USB disk... and if you have more than one linkstation you can have one backup across the network to the other. Honestly, this is the best (and most simple) NAS setup I've found and I am very satisfied.
I also have a SimpleTech NAS drive that supports SMB and NFS, but have found it to be less robust. For all the rest of you do-it-yourself'ers, I have set up Raided drives in the past (had 6 x 250GB Raid 5 for a total of 1.2TB of storage space) and found that the Linkstation is the "no-brainer". You can do it yourself and spend the time and hassle with configs, but ultimately the easiest solution (and cheapest) is to buy it off-the-shelf.
Argue all you want.
I've used an old linux machine with two drives in software raid1 over the years, and it's been great. I even had three hard drives fail, and each time it recovered nicely.
The old machine was too loud and not worth the time upgrading to latest versions of stuff... so I went to Best Buy, and crossed my fingers and bought a MyBookWorld which is a small enclosure with two 500MB drives. It comes in raid 0, but it can be switched to raid1 (it takes about a day to do the conversion.)
I was very pleasantly surprised to find that it was linux, and I could enable ssh and use rsync + ssh to move stuff onto it.
It's not as quiet as it could be, and it's got silly ass restrictions on usernames (must be at least 5 chars) and passwords (no symbols) and it insits on making your shares UPPER case. Otherwise... it's great.
If you really get annoyed at it, there are some people who have just installed debian on the thing...
There's a forum on hacking it at wikidot:
http://mybookworld.wikidot.com/forum/start
The throughput is a little slow, It takes about 6 minutes per GB for me. It also lights up the room with some of the breathing bright blue leds. I keep mine in the basement next to my switch & DSL... and am very happy with it.
Celebrate Excellence!
I did some research into this when my old file server was on the south. As for the mixed reviews on NAS solutions, I saw the same thing. Since I'm not doing anything that intensive at home, the speed of the Thecus N2100 (aka "Yes box") is more than enough for me. I liked the fact that it is "BYO Drives." I stocked mine with 2 Western Digital Raid edition 500 GB drives in RAID 1. I am very happy with this setup... had it up and working quickly and no messing with OS install/config, etc. Also looked into building my own (like my last file server) using something like FreeNAS or just a standard Linux distro. I decided against it, as I didn't want to spend money on a new case, MB, CPU, etc and then have to spend time configuring it.
you mean 1/10 the paper?
Buy a couple of these:
http://www.ximeta.com/web/products/ndenclosure1_en.php
and a couple 500gb drives.
Get up!
Ok so Drobo (www.drobo.com) is not a true NAS, but it just works so fine that its worth the investment, and it works perfectly accross environments (macosx, winblows, linux, etc).
Drobo combines up to four hard drives into a big pool of protected storage. Start with two, grow to four, then upsize smaller drives-get Terabytes of protection.
Just connect Drobo to your Mac or PC. No RAID levels. No management or configuration. Drobo does everything for you. Get rid of multiple external drives. Avoid the complexity of RAID. Attach a Drobo storage robot to your system and let it manage your storage so you don't have to.
Add drives to Drobo at any time. Mix 'n match capacities, brands or speeds. No downtime, data migration, or waiting to access new capacity. Drobo works the way you do.
Hard drives get bigger and cheaper all the time. Don't buy storage capacity until you need it. Buy capacity "just-in-time" possibly saving you hundreds of dollars.
My TimeMachine Drive is a Drobo unit. It just works... I dont have to worry about anything... At work we bought a Drobo unit to try it out as an IT unit for storing images for our rapid deployment. We have never had an issue. I know the company that makes Drobo is in the works of building a NAS. Maybe you dont need a Nas... you should give Drobo a whirl.
Nom de dieu de putain de bordel de merde de saloperie de connard d encule de ta mere.
One thing I've learned from speccing a few enterprise backup systems is that you really have to be specific with your needs. The reason everyone on this board isn't just recommending the same thing is because there are so many trade-offs associated with backup systems.
For example, how easy do you need it to be to set up?
Do you want something with a command line, web interface, or dedicated monitor?
How much space and ventilation do you have for the system?
Does it need wireless or wired connections?
How comfortable are you with the various technologies that you could use in a DIY situation?
How much space do you need?
How much reliability do you need?
How much availability do you need?
These are all factors that are essential to choosing the right solution.
My current setup is more of a NAS than a backup box. It's an old box, Athlon 3000+ with 1GB of RAM, running OpenSolaris. Solaris is a pain, but ZFS is worth it. It makes managing all those disks painless. In return I get redundancy in the form of mirrored disks, speed in terms of ZFS caching and mirrored disks, infinite constant-time snapshots (I do hourly), and a host of minor options. I export these disks via NFS to all the systems on our home network and it is generally faster than a single native disk. All in all it has cost me $120 for a new case and $40 for a new SATA card when I needed to add more disks, plus the cost of disks. Now I have 80GB of OS/web space and 750GB of storage, all mirrored. That means I'll basically never worry about losing stuff.
If you really want quality storage, look for ZFS. It's in OpenSolaris, FreeBSD, and OS X now. Also, if you ever get more systems it is nice to have a NAS to share files and allow for centralized management.
RAID is most definitely about reliability and recoverability as well as availability. It all depends on the level you choose. Your argument that multiple disks increases your likelihood of failure is trumped by one simple fact: how do you know that the single drive you buy for the job will be more reliable than the one next to it?
You can't, and that's why using at least something like RAID1 is a smart way to go. When one drive fails, your data doesn't all go with that one drive. I've seen drives from batches fail literally within a couple of days of each other. If you're smart and rebuild offline as soon as a failure occurs, your chances of losing all your data are very small. Reliability engineering is all about probabilities, and the mirroring and parity concepts of RAID facilitate this reliability. The only place where your argument holds sway is on RAID0, and that's a pretty specialized application to be sure.
If you want to swap drives without disassembling the machine, get case with enough 5.25" bays for the drives you need and buy some removable trays for $10 a piece. When one drive fails, you turn a key, pull the tray, swap the drive and back in it goes for a rebuild.
I did it, and you can too! For my setup you need five things:
1) Second-hand hardware - I just got an AMD 3800+, SLI mobo, and 1GB of RAM for $125 on CL.
2) A _good_ PSU - I recommend the Antec EarthWatts 430 for its quiet running and 80%+ efficiency - $60
3) A dirt-cheap case - Frys has a dozen workable cases for $50 or less.
4) 3+ drives at the lowest $/GB price point you can find - 3 250GB drives at Frys for $180 a year ago
5) A simple, easy-to-use Linux distro like Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Mandriva, etc. - Free!
Total: $415 ($500 gets you a dedicated drive controller and a separate boot drive of 80-120GB as well)
You can go el cheapo on the mobo, CPU, and RAM because pure performance is not your main concern. The PSU has *got* to be good quality, however. If possible, use a separate fourth drive as the machine's boot and swap partition so that a failure of a RAID drive doesn't jeopardize the host machine's operation, and vice-versa.
I started my RAID server with a P3-900, 512MB of RAM, 3 250GB IDE drives and a two-port IDE drive controller to complement the mobo's, a 40GB IDE drive I got free from work as the / and swap drive, a $40 aluminum case, and the Antec PSU. All told I think my outlay was around $370 because while I got the CPU, Mobo, and RAM for free (in exchange for volunteering at interconnection.org, check them out) the PSU was more expensive then.
Setup is fairly straightforward, although not intuitive: you have to install Linux, prepare your RAID drives for mdadm, format them, create the RAID array, and then mount it. Finally you have to create your NFS or Samba shares and create users and set permissions for the raid. Actually, setting up Samba might be the single most annoying part of the whole process! Luckily tutorials for all of these steps exist on the 'Net.
The reason I emphasize the non-RAID boot drive is ease of maintenance: my little 40GB drive bit the dust a couple weeks ago and I was able to swap it out, install a new version of Kubuntu, and reassemble my RAID just a few minutes later. If I'd thought about it, I could have been backing up my original server configs *to* the RAID for just such an eventuality, which would have made restoring the system even more trivial. Essentially, if you separate the components of the server itself as much as possible from the
If you have the time and are willing to put in some effort, I believe this will yield a more flexible and cost-effective solution than most commercial SOHO NAS solutions: I was able to use this machine as a RAID server, a web server for an experimental flash video hosting site, a backup workstation for working from home and for school projects, and as a quiet bittorrent client. The only caveat is that the less powerful your CPU is, the longer automated RAID checks will take, but you can schedule those for early in the morning and usually never notice the CPU being used. Software RAIDS are usually as performant as hardware versions for non-enterprise needs, and being able to swap the drives into better hardware without needing a proprietary drive controller is a godsend.
Hope this helps!
-- Let him who is without spelling error ignite the first flame --
Totally OT I know so flame or or mod me down or whatever but grow up people.
Have office PC with SATA drives as follows: 1. Base operating system (xp) plus backup work files from Drive 2 2. Removable. Contains all work files. Frequently use MS addfiles to backup files in Drive 2 to partition in Drive 1 Periodically remove Drive 2 and use Acronis to copy Drive 1 to spare drive in Drive 2 removable slot. Remove that clone of Drive1 from Drive 2 and store elsewhere. If Drive 2 fails, all file copies have a backup in Drive 1 partion If Drive 1 fails, mount Acronis image stored copy in Drive 1
...a couple of IDE cards, 3x250GB IDE drives, barebones console install of Linux, software raid, Samba and mix well.
Instant 500GB raid5 file server...it's been working great for 3 years now.
Just make sure you one drive on each port...all masters, no slave drives!!!
The same recipe should work for SATA as well.
Hedghog
If you're looking for a small RAID-ready NAS box for your home network, this is a good bet.
MyShare is basically a 2-hard drive NAS bay that can be bought with pre-installed hard drives (mine is the 1TB version with 2x500GB drives). I've been really happy with this thing: it supports both NFS and SMB/CIFS, so it works great with heterogenous/non-Windows environments, has a bunch of RAID config options: level 0, 1 and JBOD, and has a quiet fan. In fact, the fan is off during light usage, unlike most other NAS boxes.
I payed around $400 for mine.
Why so much trouble? On my home machine I've got a 500GB drive that set me back about $150 USD (things are expensive here), in addition to the main 160GB unit. The root file system is on one partition of the 160GB drive, /home is on another, and swap on a third. Every night I rsync /home/user to the 500GB drive (mounted as /home/backup though that is arbitrary) and once a week I rsync the whole system. No seperate computer to make noise, waste electricity, and possibly fail.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
"Real men upload their backups to FTP and let the world mirror them." --Linus Torvalds
But then upgrading the firmware and installing linux isn't everyone's cup of tea.
You should look into the QNAP TS-209 NAS unit...works great!
Software RAID is certainly not slower, and has in several instances been shown to outperform all but the best of dedicated RAID controllers.
There is a CPU hit, that's true. There's also the issue of scalability, with hardware obviously scaling far beyond what software can do, depending upon what interesting RAID hardware you stock up on. Then there's the additional features of some hardware, which is just plain cool if you ever get to play with them.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
wow. not one comment for Freenas?
http://www.freenas.org/
I am a Microsoft person and run this. 4x250G drives, a raggity machine with around 128MB of RAM and an spare hour of time. It has been running flawlessly for months. Works like a brick. Shove it is a corner and forget it. Will serve you with minimal downtime.
I though at least one of you unix fruitcakes would mention it.
nslu2-linux.org
It's a goldmine of data on the NSLU2. I installed debian on my tow, but there are other good things to do with them as well. Unslung is supposed to pretty good if you want to keep things simple. But if you're as much of a Linux FanBoy as you say - go for the Debian.
I have one doing mailserver/webserver/samba/ssh tunnels etc running off a 4G flash drive (if you're putting swap on there, try to get a fast flash drive like a corsair voyager or something). The other does media serving and bittorrent via torrentflux.
I do not use backup programs that store the backup in a proprietary format (I've been bitten by this). Instead I use a program that copies files and directories as plain old files and directories. One such program is Karen's Replicator which copies only those files that have changed. http://www.karenware.com/powertools/ptreplicator.asp -- Carey
FreeNAS is a minimal FreeBSD distribution that provides NAS (network-attached storage) services: CIFS (Samba), FTP, NFS, RSYNC, local user authentication, and software RAID. It may be booted and run from compact flash or CD-ROM. It also features a full Web-based configuration interface.
Get a piece-o-crap machine from the dump, several cheap drives and a NIC - you're in business.
"Straddling the sword of technology..."
I know this isn't geeky enough for most commenting here but I really like the HP Media Vault I bought this summer for about $350. It comes with one disk and you can add another if you buy it. It's been solid, easy to setup, and a breeze to operate. I didn't want a 'weekend' project or any command line stuff required.
Last year, I bought a used B&W G3 Tower on eBay (~$50). Added two 200GB drives into an external closure (that was something like this). Used OS X 10.4 to do software RAID. Wrote a simple shell script that runs once a day to email me if one of the drives goes bad ($> diskutil checkRAID). I back up files from my XP work laptop as well as my son's MacBook quite easily. And I can still SSH or VNC into the box when I'm not at home.
At some point when the G3 dies (I can connect the enclosure to any Mac running 10.4), I think I'll replace the G3 with a used Mac Mini - it will cut down on the electric bill and save some space, too.
I worked on one of the most high performance disk access applications ever made, and the consensus among those in the know was that software RAID is faster and better than hardware RAID, unintuitive though that may be.
The notion of a dedicated RAID controller being faster is a myth. It's a 166 MHz (or whatever) dedicated processor versus a multi-processor multi-gigahertz set of CPUs?
There are many other advantages to software RAID, and virtually no disadvantages that I can think of. The business exists because it's easy to sell the idea of hardware RAID to non-techies.
So do you (or anyone else listening) have any good ideas or suggestions or warnings of pitfalls if I need to install W2K to a HD which already has Ubuntu?
I meant to do it at the beginning when I bought my new HD, but didn't have my W2K CD on hand when I started the process, and wanted to go ahead and get it loaded. So I've got a 5GB part set aside for the W2K part (and no, I don't need any data size on the partition, just enough for windows to feel happy with itself and run) but from what I'm reading here, W2K is not likely to install since NTFS isn't on #1?
If it should run no prob, then that's fine too. I hear I've gotta go back to my live and re-run GRUB to let it reinstall, and that I can do that from a term off my HDA1/boot once I've got the live running.
2^3 * 31 * 647
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
You jumped from realizing that you need a backup to NAS. NAS might use RAID for hardware protection, but you can still wipe it out with a mistake or a virus. My favorite approach is to buy a cheap USB-HDD enclosure and back up the internal drive on the PC (which needs to be powered on whenever you use the PC anyway) to the USB. Then, switch off the USB drive's power and it is safe.
Once in a while, yank the drive out of the enclosure and drop it in your safe deposit box and put a new drive in.
Advantages:
1) Easy approach to off-site storage
2) Protected from errors and viruses
3) Doesn't cost much
4) Doesn't waste power
5) Can restore on other systems
Disadvantages:
1) Not a very impressive geek toy
2) Not particularly fast
I use my Linkstation Pro as my primary NAS (on 24/7), and my old PC as a backup system for the data on the Linkstation. The Linkstation only uses 12W with the single drive always spinning, where the old PC runs at 80 to 100W. The old PC is stuffed full of my old hard disks, and runs ubuntu with the storage as software JBOD. The old PC has a BIOS wakeup feature that wakes the box up at 3am to backup the Linkstation, and powers off when finished. The log is written to the Linkstation, so I can see if the backup ran without powering-up the old PC.
I also have a usb drive at work as my off-site backup. It connects to the linkstation over SSH and rsyncs it.
I think I have all my bases covered, all for $300 ($200 for the 320GB linkstation, $100 for the 500GB USB drive).
The Linkstation also serves as a remote proxy, so I can surf the net as much as I want over a SSH connection at work.
I did the same as you, built up home NAS box, and yes it worked for backups. Then I found out about Amazon S3, and with the available s3cmd scripts, it's pretty easy automating backups to S3. Good news is, I spend about $.50USD/month - that's fifty cents per month on this backup strategy. It's offsite, which is good. It's as fast as your broadband connection, and it's available globally. IIRC, they also offer storage in other countries too, and offer an API to develop your own software to S3.
Well worth it, IMHO.
With a little bit of time and research you could probably re-write the MBR back to the original values. You said that the data was all still there so you are probably just missing the Partition table. I did this once to recover some Netware servers. It takes about a day to research it and figure it out from scratch. I used a tool that came from Norton Utilities at the time but I'm sure there's another free tool out there these days. Wiki should have all of the values on Partition types that you need.
This signature would be better if I was creative.
How would you make the USB-RO system work? What about syslogs? /var? I get /home etc, but would you put the other to the raid as well?
2^3 * 31 * 647
Yeah, it's heresy to Linux fanboys.
Tough.
For a cheap NAS, it's hard to beat a cheap used x86 box off EBay, a few 500 GB SATA drives, and OpenSolaris. Use ZFS for a software RAID mirror across the SATA drives, and Samba to share it out.
FreeNAS is a freebsd based NAS software solution. I use it here at home. For the lower power side of the world, i use a VIA EPIA 533Mhz with a 2-PCI slot riser card. Mobo only draws about 20w. I have 6x 500gb drives attached to it via a 4ch IDE PCI card (old promise controller i had laying around) and 2x on the onboard. Use a 128mb CF to IDE adapter for the "OS" and a DVD ROM drive for serving up DVD data content (usually images of OS's for net-installs). Granted it has a 600w PSU in it, and I mad a custom enclosure for it, but it runs headless sitting under the stairs in the basement. Also has GigE card for a whooping 20 bucks. Works just peachy. 500gb drives can be had for about $80/ea if you dig, and the EPIA 533 boards are about 80 bucks as well. The riser card i had laying around from another project. You don't need horsepower to serve and backup data at home. 533Mhz, copying 20gb of data across a gig-e network takes about 20 minutes, which isn't horrible. Freenas also has a UPnP server built into it, so it serves up my media around the home. (works fantastic with the PS3 and the D-Link DSM-320/520) Been told you can hack it to work with Xbox 360s as well.
I've been very happy with my ReadyNAS from INFRANT. I think Netgear has bought out the company, but it appears that the ReadyNAS team is still making the boxes. ReadyNAS is a truly solid piece of hardware. Drop in the drives and choose what configuration you want. Data is accessible via rsync, ftp, http, ftps, https, smb, cifs, and others. Automated backups via rsync (just need to fire up an rsync server on any windows machine).
My choice is FreeBSD + ZFS.
6x 500MB seagate barracuda + Cheap ASUS P5B-VM DO motherboard + 2GB RAM + Core2duo 6600
ZFS guarantees data safety level no hardware RAID can even provide, because of it's checksumming mechanism and ability to recover corrupted blocks. Also it has no `write hole' problem unlike cheap RAID5 controllers (AFAIK controllers with battery-protected cache which don't have this problem are quite expensive).
It gives you quite good speed, I've got 240 MB/s write and 320 MB/s on read (contiguous 10gb file) on above mentioned disks in RAIDZ pool. Though this comes with a price of moderate CPU usage (50% of my C2D, but dunno was it single core or 50% of both cores).
I've also had several power failures recently, and ZFS survived them perfectly. Of course, no fsck or anything like that is needed.
So after all I trust ZFS even more than any hardware stuff. ZFS is robust and extremely easy to use as file system, and very reliable as RAID solution, so it's definitely my choice.
My solution is just grab a random Linux PC, and make sure Linux Volume Manager is installed on it.
Setup your volumes to be linear, and start buying as many disks as you want.
When you get home, setup two or more volume groups, one for your data, one for the backup (all linear).
Use reiserfs or another filesystems that lets you shrink and grow partitions, partition up the "data" and "backup" volume groups however you like (they'll probably be partitioned pretty much identically unless you have certain things you don't want to backup).
Format the partitions, and start using the data partitions. Setup rsync or a daily/weekly cronjob to backup from the data partitions to the backup partitions.
If you loose a drive, you have a 1 for 1 copy of it ready to copy over to the damaged partition once the drive is replaced. You don't loose capacity (e.g. parity drives) because the volumes are "linear", and although you have a somewhat inefficient 1 for 1 backup ratio, it's also simple, easy, and 1 for 1.
If you want to reallocate space between partitions, you can grow and shrink the filesystems without loosing data. If you end up buying extra harddrives, just add them to the volume group (again no loss of data or jumping through hoops buying identical drives, buy whatever the heck you want) and expand the filesystem. If you want to swap out a smaller capacity drive for a larger/newer one, LVM lets you migrate the data on one LVM drive to another with just one command.
Very simple, very easy. You'll never have to mount extra random partitions in linux because you bought new drives. Although the setup is vulnerable to drive failures, when a drive does fail, it's no problem at all to get right back where you started from once you add in the new drive. Plus, you won't loose access to your data since the other volume group will be fine. Drive failures are no longer "oh @#$%" moments. The only bad situation for this setup is if you have two drive failures, one on each volume group, then you're screwed. But once one drive fails, buy a new one and that window of risk is 1 week. Use the computer a bit less during that time if you can.
Share everything for your other systems via NFS, samba, and whatever else a full Linux install can support.
It's not a true 100% solid solution, but how many inexpensive setups are? It's MUCH better than just winging it, and is wonderfully easy to expand, maintain, and recover from a drive failure. Plus it's transparent and easy to understand. And quite cheap! If you really want more reliable backup write a couple copies of the data out to DVDs every so often.
How about a Kurobox? You could put a 500Gb hard drive in it, or even a 750Gb drive if you were inclined. You'll still have enough left in your budget for a secondary USB drive that you can use for backing it up.
http://www.datoptic.com/cgi-bin/web.cgi?product=tNASi&detail=yes
If your expansion needs are limited (read: nil), you can get the Hawking HNAS1 for $50 at newegg. It's a small 1-drive box that you plug in via Ethernet. Runs Samba and FTP. Draws about 15 watts. It's not silent (it has a fan that runs 24/7), but it's not loud. Complete setup takes about a half-hour, from adding your own drive to setting up passwords. No client-side software is required, unlike some other solutions which use Zetera's pathetic software (free to good home: Netgear SC101 Storage Central. Slight damage due to flinging from rooftop. Have hours of fun wondering why zeteraservice.exe is locking up your machine).
Many USB Hard Drives come with backup software that can back up several PCs, or keep several copies of a single PC. My local Fry's had a Maxtor 750 gig Triple-Touch system for $179. The down side is wiping a HDD to see if the backup worked.
I use Symantec Ghost, Linux commands, or EZ Gig 2 to clone disks from internal drives through an eSATA connector to an SATA drive in an external case. Then, I tell my BIOS to boot from that SATA channel to test the backup. BINGO! I've even considered only using an external HDD to keep backups simple (you want to pull the first HDD if running W*ndowze before booting the backup.) Figure $50 for an eSATA enclosure, and a (very small) cheap HDD. Figure $100 for a 500 gig drive.
For a NAS unit with backup software, I got my LaCie Big Disk 1TB drive, and I'm disappointed. The USB drivers mount it as a network drive. I expected a USB mass storage device. The USB drivers even flake out on an XP SP2 machine periodically, requiring power cycling. The USB interface is ONLY for administering the IP address, it seems.
Andy Out!
...was the way to go for me. Those little proprietary vendor NAS boxes, not generally being "open" open-sourced, make it difficult to deal with if there are problems. I'd say go for a little machine running either Linux or, in my case, Solaris. The hardware does not have to be super-fast if you are just serving files in a home network environment & I recommend RAID5 for the best usable gig/$. Even in a home system I want RAID - if my laptop or desktop hard disk fails I want a *solid* backup since I don't do tape B/U any longer.
For something super-reliable I went with an older Sun Blade 100 desktop machine - you can find them used on Ebay for $100 and they just keep running and running. They have a PATA internal interface, so toss in a couple of IDE drives (RAID as you like, use Sun ZFS and get enterprise-class features in a free NAS) and off you go.
I wanted something a bit bigger, so I installed an U160 SCSI controller & found a used external SCSI disk chassis for $20 (Ebay is your friend), stuffed it with 5x 500G SATA disks w/SCSI-SATA bridge boards (the only annoying part for me, since Solaris on SPARC does not support SATA) and it's been running rock-solid 24/7 since early this year. I serve NFS and CIFS (via Samba) as well as run my web server on it.
The next step would be clustering, when Sun offers a free option for that (not holding breath)
That is why you md5 or crc all your backup files and verify when the copy is done. IIRC, gzip does crc for you, so if you compress your backups, all you have to do is run gzip -t on the files to see if they are okay. In fact, if you have the habit of keeping your files compressed on your main system, you have an easy way to test if they are corrupted.
Maybe all file formats should have some sort of error checking/correction built in. Would make detecting such problems much easier.
With your handle, that just became a helluva lot funnier joke
2^3 * 31 * 647
The easy way to remember this is:
How many drives can you afford to lose?
RAID0: you can lose 0
RAID1: you can lose 1
RAID5: if you don't remember this one, you're hopelessly lost anyway, so sure... you can lose 5.
RAID6: RAID5 with an extra pairity drive.
RAID0+1: you've added RAID1 to RAID0.
RAID10: you've added RAID0 to RAID1.
Never trust an atom. They make up everything.
LaCie Ethernet Big Disk $299
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
I have a Thecus N2100, which is pretty neat. It also supports RAID 1, so with two disks in it doens't matter if one of them dies. Debian Etch even supports it out of the box.
I'm surprised you couldn't find anything for less than $1200, a few hours of searching gave me too much choice...
I can't believe I have to mention this AGAIN, but every time there's a discussion of home-RAID systems, 90% of /. jumps to the wrong conclusion.
Let me state something VERY VERY CLEARLY here:
RAID is not backup.
NAS is not backup.
SAN is not backup.
Snapshotting is not backup.
Backup is backup.
A "backup" means A COMPLETE COPIES OF FILES STORED OFFLINE.
RAID is a way of providing data availability and reliability. It doesn't provide backups. SAN and NAS are various frameworks for presenting the data in a storage system (generally RAID, but not necessarily) to an environment. It doesn't provide backups either. Backups consist of making COMPLETE COPIES (and yes that includes incrementals--ultimately, with a base copy plus incrementals, you have a complete copy) of files, STORED OFFLINE. Snapshots provide copies of files (and the smart snapshot systems do provide complete copies), but they're still online copies of the data. They will let you recover files to a point-in-time, but if your storage array goes T.U. for some horrible reason, you're still screwed.
RAID is fantastic for keeping your online data from being destroyed or taken offline due to hardware failures. SAN/NAS is great for making data available to a networked environment. However, if you want backups of your files, then back up your files--don't use RAID (and SAN/NAS on top of it) as a backup scheme, because it ain't.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
If I had a quarter for every time that I said it and that was how long it took, I'd be able to afford a hamburger. And not a very appetizing hamburger at that.
If I had to give anyone a quarter everytime I've said it, I probably couldn't pay rent.
I've just taken to saying, "meh, I can make it work, later"
2^3 * 31 * 647
Install duplicity (http://duplicity.nongnu.org/index.html - encrypted remote backup) on a spare PC running a POSIX-like operating system. Then let your router wake up your backup-server, using WOL and cron. Your backup-server could wake your normal computers, do the backup using samba and duplicity, shut them down again and finally shut down itself.
I bought five 500GB drives for $150 a piece and stuck the things in a box which is otherwise pretty high-end. If you had an old machine laying around that would accomodate it, you could get four 500GB drives and have a 1.5TB RAID-5 cluster.
It's easy to do with an old Linux box
I recently built a new fileserver (AU$):
Cheapie Mobo with 4 sata ports: $70
Cheapie 1G ram stick: $70
Celeron 1.8G: $80
2x400G HDD's: 2x$100
PSU: $150 (Antec craziness)
$650 odd. Then I run Linux on it, with software RAID-1. Hey presto: new fileserver. I run RAID-1 in my main machine, and back it up to the fileserver, and to my other workstation. So, my most important data is on at least 5 HDDs... plus backups to DVD.
I say screw this teeny-NAS-box and external-hdd crap. They're limited, they're not expandable, they're easy to steal, and did I mention they're limited? e.g. I run svn, backup software, and a few vmware vm's on my fileserver. It's easier to add another linux package from a real machine than a teeny embedded-ish system.
Fileservers are just much more fun than the small consumer NAS boxes / external HDD caddies.
Although, a full-blown fileserver will chew up more power and make more noise. Also, external HDD's have the distinct advantage that its simple to DISCONNECT them. A virus can't wipe a hdd that's not plugged in. But, then you can use optical backups for this sort of "offline" backup.
http://www.drobo.com/ No need to do or look for anything else. Thats it!
AMD NAS loooks interesting + new freenas with ZFS could be it.
http://www.amd.com/us-en/ConnectivitySolutions/ProductInformation/0,,50_2330_9863_13022%5E14814,00.html
Definitely: For example, you can increase the reliability of the whole solution by buying more disks (which makes it less cheap but still kind of affordable.)
For example I use 4 external harddisks with capacities between 500GB and 750Gb for backups.
In order to protect against theft or fire etc, two of these hard disks are always stored in a safe at a bank. I swap disks between the safe and home about once a month.
To rent such a space in a bank safe is very affordable: around EUR 30 per year.
With this backup scheme I have an investment in hardware of about EUR 400 for the disks and EUR 30 per year for the safe. This gives me protection against harddisk failures, user errors, theft and fire etc for a reasonable cost.
(Plus, my primary computer is a notebook which I almost always have with me, so in many cases there are 3 physical locations where all data is stored: notebook, home, bank safe.)
As to software: Using simple tools which are installed on each recovery CDROM makes it easier to recover the data. So I just use tar + gzip and some shell scripts to call tar + gzip.
Give the SC101T a second look. It's fanless, has a double hard drive and now (101 model T) a correct bandwith. Still these f*ckin' zetera drivers, but besides this, it's really nice. Redundancy, noiseless, low energy consumption, small, cheap. Just fcking zetera, but if you're running windows that should be ok.
glop
Linux isn't officially supported by anyone much, other than the linux companies.
Does that really matter to you?
I'm genuinely interested, 'cos the first thing I do when I buy hardware is hack the crap out of it and not worry about manufacturer support.
If you want relatively cheap hardware, you could just go buy a 2nd hand Xbox... and follow the directions here. Note that Part 1 is mainly about hacking the Xbox to run linux, and that Parts 2 & 3 get into the software setup... They're linked on the last page of the previous part (or you can click the 'NAS HOWTO' menu and you'll find all the parts towards the end of the page...
Get a couple of USB external drives. Put an encrypted filesystem on them. rsync your data onto them, and image your windows partitions onto them.
keep. them. off. site.
Using a NAS storage device in the same building as your primary data is just putting all of your eggs in a bigger basket.
**TODO** Steal someone elses sig.
I was in a similar bind not too long ago.
My dilemma was this, I need some kind of NAS/filer that is backed up, but the backup method should be such that every time my "liberal-arts-major" wife deletes something, she does not have to bug me to get the data back. (I don't want to spend all my little free time grabbing tapes, and then hunting and untaring just the right files.)
In a perfect world, someone like NetApp would make a cheep (sub $300) consumer head-end that USB drives could be connected to. I pick Netapp specifically because of how much I love their snapshot utility. But alas, no love for us.
While I was hunting around for solutions, talking to all of my sysadmin friends, and getting all of their cool scripts to automate backups, I came across the utility called rsnapshot. http://www.rsnapshot.org/
Rsnapshot is the same thing as netapps snapshot; it allows you to make a mirror of your current drive, and backup every X amount of time. (read the website, they explain it much better.) Basically, all you do is setup a second drive, and have rsnapshot mirror the data to it automatically. You then mount the second drive read-only, and within it there are directorys that are 5 min, 30 min, 1 hour, 8 hour, 1 week, 1 day, 1 year, etc. copies of the primary drive. So now when the wife wants to get data that was lost, all she has to do is go into the other drive, go into the subdir when the data was backed up, and get the file. - Simple!
Total cost:
Beater PC: free or $500
Extra IDE card: $20
Two "filer" disk drives: (how much do you want to spend?) 500GB for $200 each
A unix distro: free
rsnapshot: free
nfs and samba: free
I was actually thinking of setting up a home NAS myself. So I have a suggestion that is also a question to slashdot on whether this approach is a good one.
I was trying to set up a FreeNAS box. I used VirtualPC (it's free so I don't complain) to set it initially then did used dd to raw-write the virtual hard drive to a pen/flash drive. I was pretty sure that should work. But I kept getting getting errors referring to a missing kernel or a bad file system. So I put the project on hold.
Then it occurred to me I could set up a simple Windows installation with VirtualPC and just use that to run the FreeNAS install. This approach would have several advantages: I can use as many or as few physical disks as I want. I can back up the virtual disks to other media. I don't have to worry about FreeNAS being able to recognize the NIC of the PC I'm using for the FreeNAS. If something happens to the install of FreeNAS for some reason I can simply re-install in the virtual machine. I can even run other virtual servers along side it (like OpenFiler if I want to do a side-by-side comparison). You could even easily transplant the whole thing to a new computer without worrying about differing hardware.
Then I started to think about making a giant raid of ~4.6Gig virtual disks that could be backed up to DVDs, but that's probably pushing it.
So I offer this as both a suggestion and a question of whether this would be a good approach. I only mentioned Windows and VirtualPC because both are readily available (VMWare still costs money, right? I guess you can make the machine and use the free VMWarePlayer?).
"UNIX is very simple, it just needs a genius to understand its simplicity." -Dennis Ritchie
Here is something that I have set up for a friend of mine and his wife, who both have computers in their homes, and have huge drives that they barely use. Vembu makes a backup system that is pretty slick, but their "personal" version allows for peer backups. Mr Smith's laptop backs up to Mrs. Smiths, and vice versa, free.
While this does not solve your NAS problem, it DOES solve your backup problem, while you either architect a solid solution within your budget, or at least give yourself the opportunity to raise your budget.
Hope this helps.
Bob
I see a number of possible candidates on eBay: http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll?from=R40&_npmv=3&_trksid=m37&satitle=network+attached+storage&category0=
http://www.amazon.com/Iomega-StorCenter-Network-Hard-Drive/dp/B000UODGV6
For years I used ghost and loved it. Then DVD burners got cheap and they added support for them and now I'm committed for life. You can make a ghost to a DVD and make that same disc bootable itself. You don't know even need an OS or to install it. It just boots into some version of DOS and opens ghost for you. You can then make the image to a bootable DVD, or hard drive, clone a drive or whatever. And it even has compression to save space. If you can get networking working under DOS you can even batch it over the network. Or use Bart's PE via CD or USB thumb drive to make for easier network imaging. Point is Ghost (ignore versions 10 and later) is an ideal imaging solution for anything you could possibly want.
"UNIX is very simple, it just needs a genius to understand its simplicity." -Dennis Ritchie
This is what I did with my PS3 budget 3x500GB HDs a low end AM2 chip an ASUS M2NPV-VM motherboard, 1Gb of cheap ram, a cheap case with a good PSU, a spare IDE DVD rom and a spare small IDE HD for boot drive.
Set the 3 500Gb HD in RAID 5 and install the OS of you choice on the IDE boot drive, freeNAS is good
You may want to add a [HUMOR] tag in there someplace.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I have a 2TB Buffalo TeraStation. 2TB in RAID 5 config. It's so simple. Plug it in and away you go. The only bad think about it is that it only can create Windows or FTP mount points. But then, I just use Sampa client to mount them.
Costs around UAD600 in Japan (where I am).
A way to backup is nicely illustrated by http://antrix.net/journal/techtalk/seagate_freeagent.htmlDeepak though theres no mention about cost.
Sounds like you need something a little more serious then just plugging in a USB HD here. I have a couple of suggestions for you. The first is to set up a RAID^2 system. This is sometimes referred to as a RAID of RAIDs. Put simply, you make up three or more different RAID5 systems and then put those together in a RAID5 themselves. You loose a bit of data doing it, but you end up with a very robust system where it is almost impossible to loose data.
The other option is to set yourself up with ATA over Ethernet. This is a kind of SAN system and would require a dedicated network of the fastest network cards you can find. Myranet would be perfect for instance. One of the nice things about ATAoE is that you can grow your storage as you add new disks into the system.
Hope that helps! You can find plenty of data on both these systems by searching the net.. or just ask. I will do my best to help.
Commercial or homebrew NAS is a reasonable network solution.
If you're just backing up a single workstation, get either another HD of the same make/model or a pair of something else, put the second drive in a mobile rack (mine is for SATA, they also have these for IDE as well), and run that drive as a bootable drive mirror. This solution cost me $22.99 + S/H over the cost of the HD, and I recommend it (with software that works on your OS) to everyone who is backing up a single machine.
Remove the tray with the HD in it and put it somewhere else when it's not being actively used in backup. If the main drive packs it in, make sure there isn't a hard drive-eating problem, then plug in the backup and boot.
I use an rsync script running off a customized Knoppix disk on my Linux box, I'm not sure what one would use in Windows these days.
I can say that my backup solution has saved my ass more than once. I also back up to DVD+R archives, but thankfully, I've only had to test bare-metal restores, my backup mirror has made it unnecessary for me to actually use them.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Get the latest version 1.x of VMware Server (the new UI for beta-2 is Web-based and should be avoided), install the latest any-any patch if your distro needs it (since my Debian box does, I'd expect Ubuntu to), run the installation off the any-any patch script. Install VMware Tools from the iso you will create when you dearchive VMware in the install process.
.vmdk files and a .vmx config file. No separate disk partition is needed.
Then install W2000 as a VMware Server guest. After that, install SAMBA to make it possible for your Linux and Windows apps to work with the same filespace on the Linux box. Note that the Windows "disk" is one or more flat-files which exist in the Linux filesystem as
You get out of this a working shared clipboard between Linux host and Windows guest (cut and paste from your Linux web browser to your open copy of Word, for instance) and a stabler W2000 than you've ever seen running on native hardware.
I found dual-boot such a PITA that it drove me off Linux until I could get a virtualization app that worked. It's far easier and much more productive to have Windows as an X-Window in an integrated virtualization environment. It's a lot of work in initial setup, but you only have to do it once.
And when you back up, you can back up your Windows and Linux setup at the same time.
Tech Public Policy stuff
in the same box as the main drive is that there's a good chance whatever killed the main drive to begin with, whether it was a power surge or somebody knocking over the tower also killed your backup drive.
I keep my backup drive in a mobile rack that's unplugged when not in use. It's worth the extra $25 for the rack and the extra couple of minutes in carrying the tray to the computer and plugging it in is worth it for the extra peace of mind.
IMO, a mobile rack makes sense for a single workstation backup. Above that, it is indeed time to think of network storage solutions.
Tech Public Policy stuff
$500 is tight but do-able. Here's my recipe for very reliable and as simple as possible...
Buy two Linksys NSLU2 devices. Buy two 500GB USB drives. Buy PC backup software like EMC Retrospect Express (inexpensive and sufficient) for each PC. That's your budget if you shop around.
You get two network attached file servers because one can fail and smash all its drives (unlikely, but even raid cards have such potential). I lost 700GB of data from an enterprise-class raid fileserver at the office due to a raid controller that went bad slowly. Beware the single point of failure.
First setup one of the NSLU2 NAS machines with one of the USB drives. The NSLU2 doesn't come with a disk. Setup its shares to your liking before going further.
Next install your PC backup software and tell it to backup your data at least weekly to the share drive. You'll always have some data on the PC even if you plan to move all the important stuff to the safety of the NAS. Do the automated scheduled backups or the human forgetfulness potential in all of us will be the weak link in the plan. Schedule to run the backups when you know the PC will be on but you won't be bothered by the performance hit, say your tues lunch hour or saturday dinner time or 4am Weds.
Next setup the second NSLU2 with a 500GB drive. Configure it to do nothing but backup your first NAS nightly. If you're paranoid about theft or fire, maybe you can put it in a separate room/closet/cabinet on your home LAN. Use the daily email feature to notify you that each NSLU2 is working and the drives are ok.
If you have more $$ to spend, I like the Buffalo Linkstation over the NSLU2. You can expand them to handle several USB drives and you can hack them to do lots of linux and multimedia things (more hackable than the NSLU2, less hackable than an old laptop). This is only for real Linux DIY people, not your typical home NAS user, but hey, this is slashdot. Real DIY Linux folks can find other brands/models that do even more.
Another way to spend more $$ is to add raid or mirrored hot-pluggable drives everywhere. Mirroring buys you availability. Raid buys you speed and availability. If you're not doing hot-pluggable, you actually get less availability (more downtime for repairs) from mirroring and raid.
If the noise and power and space of an old PC/laptop that you never turn off is to your liking, by all means, it might save you some cash up front compared to a NAS device and its drive(s). Look into running freenas, which you download from freenas.org.
For still more reliability, add an offsite internet backup service. Alternately, add a 3rd backup-only server (with mirrored drives) and install it at your sister's house across the country with a pair of VPN routers to encrypt the traffic. The first option has a recurring $$ fee, while the second option has a fixed $$ cost and requires you to be on good terms with your family indefinitely. Mmm, lovely turkey this year!
--Mick
I know isn't directly related but what about backup software?
I use Acronis Trueimage (On xp, mostly for the compressed backups, incremental backups, and image cloning abilities). It seems solid but I kind of went with the quickest cheapest solution to my problem. It has seriously saved me several times already in one year. I just made a backup and just had the drive fail. I can upgrade to a roomier drive and just restore the files from the old drive now (something I just did with a new drive and my installation volume last week, minus the drive failure).
I just decided to go with an HP MediaVault and am glad I did - I'm a simple man and stuff like this I just want to work. Regularly backups my data (every other night) to the server.
You say you want to have a backup plan...what about Mozy or Carbonite instead of having to administer a NAS? Around $50 a year, unlimited storage. Mozy is a better with allowing you to have your own private keys to your data. This could be an option if you don't have problems entrusting your encrypted data to someone else.
I bought a Linkstation Live 250gig for about 150eur. The neat thing about it is that you can reinstall the firmware to be a full-blown debian system. Read more at NAS Central. The enclosed hard-drive is a normal SATA-drive and can be changed. Also the network interface is 1gig-ethernet for speedy copying in local network. Awesome price to feature and quality ratio.
How about this?
I mean, seriously.
(Of course, there is the danger that you might end up using your backup box as a surfboard, inducing some potential recursion, which could then be broken by scrubbing the MSWindows box and loading UBuntu on it.)
I just shipped a 250 GB HDD to my bro in another city. We created a VPN between us, and I use BackupPC to backup to a local drive and then rsync every over to him. Works like a charm.
See George Ou's ZDNet column: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=829
Fewer crashes and more inherent immunity to malware are things office workers might appreciate.
Tech Public Policy stuff
I have a powermac 300Mhz.
I added a £60 500GB disk and installed debian and spent 45 minuites installing samba. Job done.
even under heavy transfers, it never exceeds say, 3% CPU
I want more: especially format conversion
Why is parent moderated as informative? Go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID and moderate parent down (or overrated, or funny - but not informative....
Yes, do keep in mind that storing things in a more reliable place is NOT the same having a "backup" - that requires have 2 copies.
That said, here's some NAS type issues I've learned while doing the same research you're asking for.
1. Those external LaCie/Maxtor Drives? They're less reliable than your regular hard drive. They use 2 drives as one, making it so that if either drive fails, all the data on the unit is lost. As it uses 2 drives, it double the chances of failure.
2. As far as NAS's go, I've tried 2 - the ReadyNAS, and the Thecus NV 5200.
3. My company's tech guy did all the research available and settled on the ReadyNAS. The first unit literally caught fire. The second unit killed a disk within a week.
4. I used the same research sites, and went with the Thecus. I did this because it had 5 drive bays (almost no other one offers more than 4); and since you lose 1 drive for RAID 5 whether you use 3 drives or 5, I figured I'd go with something I could expand to maximize the benefit of that one drive I lost.
5. I didn't "trust" it do what I wanted, so I bought 4 four drives, and built it with only 3 of them. I pulled one out to simulate a failure, and it informed me - but still let me read the data (look up RAID on Wikipedia if that seems odd to you). Then I put in a blank drive to simulate a replacement, and it rebuilt the RAID no problem. Then I put in the drive I had removed to simulate an expansion, and it expanded it easily. I was happy enough with the unit that I went ahead a bought a fifth drive.
6. Just because I was very pleased with the Thecus over the ReadyNAS, there were still something I'd warn you about. First, RAID rebuilds take ages. If the power goes off during this, you're screwed. Make sure you've got a reliable UPS before using any RAID device. Second, the manuals are pretty stingy with information. There's lots of services that you'll have to play with before knowing what they do (such as the built in iTunes server) because they're not even mentioned in the manual.
If I had only $500, I'd first think about what kind of data I needed to backup. If it was really kind small, I'd load it onto my one of my public webservers and let the hosting company worry about backups. If it was largish - I'd probably just buy an external drive kit and the biggest drive I could, and then back up to that manually (unless you have back up software you really trust).
But, if you foresee the need to hold vast quantities of data eventually and just want to smooth out the financial hit - I'd wait until I could afford a NAS (and so far would still recommend the Thecus unit). If you can only afford 2 drives, mirror them; that's your back up right there. If you can afford 3, go RAID 5 - you can expand your storage later as save up. Then, either use that drive to hold your backups, or use it to hold both your crucial backs AND any large data sets (Handbraked DVD's) that you could lose without a serious blow.
Data back up is all about points of failure, you have to be realistic about what could go wrong in your circumstances. For example, when I worked at an Investment Bank after 9/11, they were worried that someone might blow up the building we were in and wanted to create a whole offsite network; which was a very pricey thing to do. I pointed out that if someone blew up the building we were in, having a fully functional off site network wasn't going to do us a heck of a lot of good; compared to what saving the money would.
The company I work for now also explored the off site option - as if the whole office burned down, it'd take our original data and our backups with it. But it's very expensive to off site backups. And if the whole building burned down, even having backups of our latest work wouldn't allow us to continue working - the money would be better spent *preventing* an office fire or boosting up on insurance.
In your case, what could go wrong?
1. You're computer's HD could die
You can protect against this by having a backup.
2 Your back up
The funny mod makes it look like I actually knew the answer, but actually I didn't know. It wasn't until after a while that I noticed the "network-attached storage" heading under Wikipedia, but even then I wasn't sure. Thanks for confirming it.
You know, even in the most advanced scientific journals, the readership of which is surely limited to only subspecialists in that field, all acronyms are preceded by an explanatory note on their first appearance. For example, before using the term "MI", a medical journal would mention "myocardial infarction (MI)" the first time, so everyone would know "MI" meant "heart attack".
Could we not do the same for acronyms in Slashdot, the readership of which is global and encompasses readers with all range of technical proficiency? Otherwise it could lead to unnecessary frustration and misunderstanding, such as the time I referred my patient to a psychiatrist who said that the patient "had no history of MI", when in fact he had had not only MI's but bypass surgery. Only later did the PsychMD explain that "MI" meant "mental illness". Stupid shrink.
Thanks again.
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
RAID1 mirrors the data across all drives. So you only need 1 drive to survive to keep all your data. You can lose more than one RAID1 drive if you have more than two drives total.
There are 11 types of people, those who know unary and those who don't.
I was in exactly the same position and finally went with a D-Link DNS-323 and two 500 GB SATA drives. It cost me less than $500, and now you could get even bigger disks within budget.
Joe Egan
MCP on XML Web Services with C#, MCSA, Security+, Network+, A+, Linux+
http://j0e3gan.blogspot.com