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."

Comments

Re:RAID 0

[tomknight]

Is that meant to be funny? I don't give a fuck that FreeNAS is BSD, I just know it works. OS zealots can just grow up or fuck off, I don't care which.

Re:OpenFiler

[Random Destruction]

spending $200 on a raid card is reasonable given a $500 budget?

I'd certainly like to know where you plan on buying the rest of the hardware, as you must get some pretty amazing deals.

Re:Linux is actually cheaper here.

[SanityInAnarchy]

Ubuntu does not come with client software for windows machines to automatically back up the windows box nightly onto the Ubuntu server. WHS does.

apt-get install backuppc

Ubuntu requires you to install Samba. WHS uses windows shares / web server interface.

apt-get install lighttpd

Or are you implying that Samba is somehow worse than a native Windows share?

Ubuntu requires raid hardware or software. WHS uses a 'storage pool' methodology and allows disk redundancy without raid, and automatic growth of the 'storage pool' by plugging in a USB drive or ESATA device(s).

How automatic? I wouldn't want it to automatically format my flash drive because I plugged it in temporarily.

Or if you mean "automatic" by "prompting the user to do something", well, we can do RAID 5 restriping easily enough.

Ubuntu would not give you Remote Desktop access to your windows machines without configuring Wine, I think.

apt-get install rdesktop

And you imply that Wine is hard to configure. It's not, not anymore.

Ubuntu requires you to install CVS to get versioning of files, which requires you to actively commit files. WHS automatically saves changes between versions and allows you to step back, all through the nightly automatic backup.

Did you completely fucking miss the part about "backuppc", which I mentioned before? Here, go read.

You'd have to write your own web service to access the machines from outside the network.

apt-get install openvpn

You'd also have to configure the router yourself.

Want to be the router? apt-get install firehol dnsmasq.

I thought this through, I run a small business (20 hours a week of development) and did my homework before making the decision to buy WHS.

Apparently not enough to even know about the existence of rdesktop.

Now, I never claimed that Ubuntu would support everything you need out of the box. I am, however, claiming that to install and configure what you need, including Ubuntu and these additional packages, will take far less time than $169 worth -- and you get free upgrades for life.

apt-get install backuppc samba lighttpd openvpn rdesktop mdadm firehol dnsmasq

Here's what you've said so far that I can't do with Ubuntu, under that configuration:

• Disk redundancy without RAID. You haven't convinced me this is a good thing.
• Automatically configure a router, assuming it supports uPnP But for 99% of home users, everything you need is right here, in fact, probably here.

If these are really that needed, redundancy without RAID can be done with ChironFS, and uPnP is actually kind of dangerous, from a security standpoint. But I bet I could add these features in very little time -- small enough that, hell, I could sell it for less than $100 as an instant NAT OS.