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

OpenFiler

[morgan_greywolf]

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.

As for the botched MBR, boot an MS-DOS or even a FreeDOS boot disk and do a fdisk /mbr. That should fix it.

Re:OpenFiler

[jmahler]

If it's vista, follow the directions here to recover your MBR.

Re:OpenFiler

[steeleye_brad]

Another option for the trashed MBR: if you have a Windows CD lying around, boot into recovery console (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314058), and run fixboot, then fixmbr.

Re:OpenFiler

[kryptkpr]

Why add the additional point of failure? Or was I supposed to buy 2 identical RAID cards for when one failed and it turned out the array it built isn't compatible with anything except the exact same device with the exact same firmware revision?

With software (Linux) RAID the actual RAID set is just partitions on the physical drive, not the whole entire drive. My /boot and root partition is mirrored on all of my drives, so even if the array completely disappeared I can still boot up. To gain access to the rest of my data (RAID5), any recent kernel with RAID support will do..

Hardware RAID controllers may have made sense 10 years ago when commodity hardware was much slower (and so a dedicated CPU for RAID was a must), but unless I'm missing something they no longer make sense today.

Re:OpenFiler

[dberger]

That depends on your priorities. "Real" RAID cards lock the raid meta-data to a specific vendor (sometimes to a specific line). So if your card dies, you're forced to buy another one. If you want to upgrade (more ports, better RAID processor), same story - you're vendor locked.

Software RAID is slower (though a reasonable system doing just software RAID has no trouble outperforming a cheap "real" RAID card) but you can move the drives into another system running the same software and have access to the data.

Re:OpenFiler

[PinkyDead]

There's also a free yoke called mbrfix, that you can download. It works quite well when you have to return a laptop to the M$ bitches that you work for.

However, just because you can do a thing, doesn't mean you should.

Re:OpenFiler

[imipak]

Why not use £50 NSLU2? Dinky little ARM box with a Cisco logo on the front - it comes with a cheap as chips web UI, supports SMB and various other ways to push/pull data. And of course you can nuke the default firmware and blat it with a proper full-blown Linux installation and install software galore (Asterisk, even!) I've got my root fs on a flash stick, which makes booting pretty fast - the other USB slot has a single 500Gb drive, but you could easily make drives 2.

You have to buy the drives as well of course, but I paid less than 70 quid for my 500Gb EISA drive. In my specific setup, the main drive could of course go bang, but I'm using it for network attached backup rather than primary storage. No reason you couldn't do it though.

Re:OpenFiler

[rsbaxter]

IMO RAID, NAS and the like are not necessary for this person's problem. My backup plan consists of a bunch of shell scripts that backup my databases and files to a second hard drive on my server. rsync is then used to copy the files to a USB drive of the same size with an encrypted file system. Each month, the removable, encrypted backup drive is exchanged for a third of the same size (also encrypted) from my office. It's not hooked up to anything at my office - it just sits there as offsite, encrypted backup, such that if my house burns down I still have my data. The three drives I use for my solution are WD 320G IDE drives. The solution provides a secure, offsite backup solution for approximately $300. It's not fancy, but it meets my needs and the original posters just fine - we're not talking about enterprise level backup here...he probably needs to backup his ogg files and such. I would be happy to elaborate on the solution and even send you the shell scripts I use to accomplish this if you're interested.

Re:OpenFiler

[jargoone]

With software (Linux) RAID the actual RAID set is just partitions on the physical drive, not the whole entire drive. Linux software RAID uses a block device, which can be either a partition or the entire disk.

Re:OpenFiler

[Chelloveck]

Why add the additional point of failure? Or was I supposed to buy 2 identical RAID cards for when one failed and it turned out the array it built isn't compatible with anything except the exact same device with the exact same firmware revision?

In fact, I just had a RAID controller die. Fortunately it would still let me mount the disks read-only and recover the data. That pretty much convinced me that RAID is not what I want for home.

To replace the RAID (and because I needed more storage anyway) I went out and bought two 500GB drives. I have them mounted as two plain ol' ext3 drives -- not RAID, not even software RAID. Just two drives. I have a cron job that rsync's one to the other every night. I took a cue from this page and keep a week's worth of backups as hard links. This gives me seven days to recover anything I accidentally deleted before it's gone for good, but doesn't take up much more backup space than just a single copy. My data is mostly unchanging files like CDROM ISOs and MP3s, so after the initial 5-hour mass copy was done the nightlies only take a few minutes.

Now if either drive craps out I can mount the other in any Linux box and recover the data. If anything in that box craps out, including the controller, I can take the drives and recover the data. Yeah, it's possible that the controller could fubar both drives if something dire happens. A RAID controller could do the same. If I had 500GB of storage off-site I'd rsync to there instead.

Re:OpenFiler

[Anonymous Coward]

Hardware RAID implements a number of necessary and/or nice-to-have features. These features include onboard caching (write caching with battery backup and read caching for everything), more efficient RAID algorithms, automatic hot-spare usage (though Linux metadevices can do this now too), notification and SPEED. They also hide the fact that you're using RAID from the OS, which can be important if using older hardware. All that being said, however, there is little to be gained from hardware RAID for home desktops, especially where SATA is concerned.

Benchmark testing using bonnie++ and comparing multiple LSI (onboard and PCI) Hardware RAID, Adaptec Hardware RAID and software RAID as implemented by Linux for RAID 1 (mirroring) shows that the performance gain for these consumer grade devices is negligible, or in some cases completely non-existent. Nevertheless, the right solution depends upon the needs of the individual consumer.

In the poster's case, it seems as though getting a couple of SATA disks and using software RAID 1 should be more than adequate. However, should someone want a performant system other RAID levels should be considered (RAID 5, RAID 1+0, etc) for those performance reasons, and more spindles (disks) should also be involved. At this point, it does still make sense to offload the work onto a separate board (e.g. a hardware RAID card), but don't buy a RAID card that is only compatible with itself!

Re:OpenFiler

[morgan_greywolf]

Yeah, I was thinking about a little nicer case like a server chassis with a SATA hotswap and such, nicer SATA 2 HDDs with a 16MB buffer, which tend to run $120 or so from reputable online sites. You can get the cases for like $150 or so. An Asus AMD64 board.

But, sure, if you go dirt cheap, you grab like an Athlon 64 x2 3800 board with CPU and memory for around $100, an el cheapo $60 case, and cheaper SATA HDDs with 8MB buffers for around $100 a piece. That puts you at like $60, but in the Firehose question, he wanted an integrated GB NIC, so you're looking at a more expensive board up in $150 range for the combo, $150 for the case, and $240 for the drives puts at $540, but you still almost always end up needing miscellaneous parts (extra fans, cables, etc. On one I just finished, I had to run out and buy a SATA power cable as neither the drive nor the mobo came with one, and a couple of fans). at which I usually figure out to be around $25-30, so that puts in the $570 range.

I just checked these numbers against Pricewatch, before I was just ballparking the 'under $750 part'.

Re:OpenFiler

[bendodge]

You're making this too hard:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&SubCategory=124&N=2000150124
Right there at the top is a 5/5 rated Lacie 320GB Ethernet Disk for $153.

If you want something a little more secure and flexible get this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822102007
And add some of these: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148261
If you use two of those drives in a RAID 1 array, you have 250GB of redundant storage for a total around $370.

Re:OpenFiler

[davemcp]

I started out in 1999 with an adaptec 2400a raid controller and 4 ata120 drives. Yes I have also lost raid cards and after replacing the card the raid array complete with data comes right back up. As a side note when I purchased my first 2400a it cost around $260 I just found the same card online for $58. Is it obsolete? Maybe. But it has saved me from the wrath of Wife and saved a lot of priceless family foto's. My recommendation is to start out with what you can afford. $500 is doable for a backup system. In two or three years upgrade. Put some better faster storage out there but make it hardware based. Just my opinion, but born from trying both and not being happy with the results of software raids. Dave

Re:OpenFiler

[Omega996]

I second Solaris / OpenSolaris and zfs - zfs support on FreeBSD is pretty flaky, and there's not going to be kernel-mode linux support for zfs ever, unless a license change is made somewhere. Seriously, zfs is awesome.

Otherwise, it's pretty easy to build a DIY NAS for right around $500:

• $80 - GA-MA69GM-S2H motherboard (has 10/100/1000 ethernet)
   
• $56 - 1GB DDR2 800 RAM
   
• $43 - Sempron 64 3600+
   
• $40 - 500W Power Supply
   
• $220 - Total before drives
  

WD Caviar SE 16 500GB 3.0Gb SATA drives run about $105 each, so another $210 for drives, and you've got a DIY NAS for under $500. Still enough to pick up a cheapie Rosewill case to put it all in, or you can just mount it on a DIY rack using threaded rod and plywood base.
You can get Solaris 10 Dev Edition free from Sun - they pay the media and postage cost, and it took me only two days to get a DVD. set up your NAS pool with zfs, and you're all set. If you need more storage in the future, you can add disks and extend the pool with no hassle whatsoever.

If you want to go REAL low-budget, though, and are just interested in having some sort of NAS device - I'd suggest you pick up an Airport Extreme, and attach an external 500/750/1000 GB hard disk or two through the USB connector. Easiest setup yet. The Airport Extreme runs about $180, and you can get 500GB USB/eSATA drives for $130 each. Total cost for the AE and two 500GB drives - $440. Plus you have 802.11a/b/g/n-draft, and three Gb ethernet ports.

Re:OpenFiler

[Guspaz]

4x80GB drives for $40 each? That's a waste of money.

Your cost is $240 and you get 320GB of storage.

Consider that 500GB drives cost about $100. So raise your cost by 25% (3x500GB for RAID-5) and you get 467% of the storage.

The time where 80GB drives are cost effective is long past; they can't compete with larger drives for cost-per-gig.

In fact, you suggest (for some reason) spending $200 on a RAID card, which may be a bit overkill for a bunch of tiny 80GB drives. I'd suggest that you're better off shifting $60 of that to drives. The 500GB drives will be MUCH faster (areal density), and because you've got only 3 drives (so 1/3 parity), the array will be more reliable.

You might even try to save more money by ditching the RAID card altogether and using ZFS/RAIDZ on OpenSolaris or whichever BSDs supports it these days. You may lose in performance in certain performance cases, but you'll gain in reliability over hardware RAID, and save money by ditching the extra controller.

Re:OpenFiler

[TheRaven64]

The computations involved in RAID are trivially cheap. For RAID-1, you're just issuing twice as many DMA requests. For RAID-5, you need to xor every block. At most, it's a load-load-xor-store operation and any relatively modern CPU can easily handle it as long as it has enough memory bandwidth.

RAID-5 suffers from the write hole problem; if your power fails in the middle of a write then you lost the entire stripe. Worse, if a single block on a single disk is corrupted, you lose the entire stripe since you have no idea which block contains the error unless you add some extra checksum information. You also have the problem that you have to read an entire stripe before writing any data to it in order to do the parity calculations, potentially exacerbating the problem of corruption.

An expensive hardware RAID card alleviates some of the problems by maintaining a log in battery-backed RAM, which can be replayed when the power comes back up. Unfortunately, hardware RAID cards expose the array as a single drive and often store data in a proprietary volume format making the data inaccessible without it. If the OS dies with software RAID, you need to replace the OS. If the card dies with hardware RAID, you need to replace the card with one from the same manufacturer, which is typically more expensive than reinstalling the OS (I'd recommend keeping the OS on a flash drive mounted read-only to anyone building a NAS).

With todays' processors, I would be more inclined to recommend ZFS / RAID-Z than any hardware solution. RAID at the block level just doesn't make sense.

Re:OpenFiler

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually yes I do...I use Fedora religiously at home on non mission critical things since I started using Red Hat when Red Hat linux 5.1 was current. And I use CentOS (RedHat Enterprise free rebuild) for all mission critical applications for work and I've used both LVM and linux software RAID in RAID 0 stripes, RAID 1 mirrors, and RAID 5 parity arrays. And in the years I've used that, I've found that in comparison to hardware raid cards I've had the misfortune to work with, I could even get ATA disk drive based software linux RAIDs to outperform hardware SCSI RAIDs at work (if done properly as regular PATA has some inherent quirks that hinder raw RAID throughout performance with master/slave combos not having dedicated buses like SCSI drives thus requiring only one drive per cable for pure performance and added reliability should a cable turn out to he the cause of a failure). This like many have stated brings about the original reason why RAIDs were ORIGINALLY developed...to facilitate Redundant Arrays of INEXPENSIVE Disks, not independent as modern usage would have us say. So I could throw up a cheap rackmount SATA based server and buy 4 250GB SATA3.0GB drives for like $50 each and have 3 of them running a mirrored /boot to ensure I could boot from any drive with grub installed to the master boot partition on all 3 drives as well and the / and remaining partitions as RAID 5 arrays. If a drive failed since SATA unlike PATA has dedicated buses for each drive I didn't have to worry about one drive inadvertantly knocking offline another still working drive thus trashing the RAID or hindering performance when two drives are being accessed simultaneously thus causing contention on a bus that only supports one drive at a time. But since I bought cheap $50 drives that are bigger than those sad 36GB SCSI drives for more money...I don't care if a drive fails, I got the 4th drive on hand to swap out the failed drive with and rebuild, buy another cheap 250GB or larger drive to keep on hand and in the end I only really loose out on seek time for not having 10K or 15K RPM spindle speeds, but if you really need that much horsepower, chances are the price of SCSI drives and a GOOD hardware RAID controller are no longer an issue, but for home use, software RAID on modern GOOD linux distros and modern hardware and hard drives is really more cost effective, customizable, and overall probably better performing than most "hardware" RAID controllers until you start spending a pretty penny.

Just as an anecdote, I once had a cheap whitebox server from a previous admin I replaced that had a drive on an IDE (PATA) interface that for some nasty reason couldn't run UDMA in linux at least and ran better when I simulated a failure by killing the power to that drive and letting linux calculate the missing data via parity because the first two drives could run in UDMA mode just fine...imagine that!!! Really the overhead that software RAID5 costs on the host system is so negligible no one will ever be able to convince me to spend $500 on a hardware RAID card. That 3 drive (4 drive capable) SATA rackmount server with 250GB 7200RPM drives with CentOS 4.5 Final cranked using hdparm -Tt /dev/md0 over 105MB/s from cheap ass drives...beat that.

Sincerely,
The RAID freak...

Re:OpenFiler

[nolife]

But it has saved me from the wrath of Wife and saved a lot of priceless family foto's.

If I'm reading this right, I do not agree with your theory at all. RAID is not a backup solution, it is for availability and/or speed. One slip of the mouse, one accidental save over, one virus, one power fluctuation, one random controller anomoly, an OS issue (assuming your RAID setup also contained your boot drives) and the list goes on.. and your RAID setup will happily wipe out the data across all of your drives leaving you with nothing. Okay, your RAID setup does save you from a single HD failure but nothing else, there are many other problems that can cause data loss that you do not seem to be considering.

RAID 0

[spyrochaete]

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.

Re:RAID 0

[vally_manea]

he said mirrored - so probably he meant RAID 1 :-)

Re:RAID 0

[filbranden]

assuming your motherboard supports software RAID

AFAIK, you need motherboard support if you want to do hardware RAID. For software RAID all you need is OS support, and both Linux and FreeBSD have it built-in.

I've got the DNS-323

[ThatDamnMurphyGuy]

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.

Re:I've got the DNS-323

[giminy]

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.

I also own a DNS-323, and I can't recommend it so much. The 323 is *not* debian-based, it runs busybox. You can install debian on your hard disks, chroot a shell to the debian install directory, and start services like a separate http server, ssh server, etc under debian. It isn't quite the same thing, however...

The kernel that comes with the 323 is a huge problem, and the chroot debian can't fix that. There is a hack to load a new linux kernel image on top of an already-running kernel (akin to the way that you used to use LoadLin to boot linux from DOS, if anybody was doing that way back when). This method of replacing the kernel is highly experimental though. As it stands, nobody knows how to create a custom firmware for the 323 and load it without hardware hacking -- the firmware update interface checks new firmwares for a digital signature from D-Link.

I should also point out that even the latest version of the 323 firmware, 1.03, disappears files. It has also been reported that it will not rebuild RAID-1 arrays correctly. To demonstrate the former bug you try to transfer a file bigger than about 20GB to the NAS. It will report to your operating system's SMB layer that it took the file fine, but the file just won't be on the filesystem. I have tried this using Windows XP, Mac OS X tiger and leopard, and my stock Feisty Fawn boxen, using two different switches. The 323 exhibits the same behavior to all of them. The earlier firmwares are also really notorious for dropping files if you transfer large numbers of small files in batches (like, say, backing up your filesystem).

Also, the 323 only supports ext2 as its underlying filesystem. This probably explains some of the problems that it has when working with terrabyte-sized arrays? Also, the 323 does not provide a safe way of running fsck (you can do it via the command-line if you set up ssh/telnet, but only if you are willing to fsck a mounted filesystem [eep!]). In any case, it has been over a year, and D-Link has not got the kernel right on the 323 (and all they have to do is compile a kernel > 2.6.6 and ship it in a firmware), so I would suggest avoiding it...

Build / buy a Windows Home Server

[Richthofen80]

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.

Airport and USB drives

[dhartshorn]

$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.

Freenas

[Anonymous Coward]

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

How many computers?

[Nimey]

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.

Re:On the cheap

[Skinkie]

If you do it with OpenSolaris and ZFS, you make it very simple for yourself. The amount of administration needed using Linux and *iSCSI is huge. While OpenSolaris provides iSCSI/NFS on the fly. Including snapshots of snapshots. So you can have 'raw' volumes, and managed data. I'm using OpenSolaris now to boot my Xen Linux Nodes now from OpenSolaris NFS. Yes I know xVM exists, but it is not as mature as the Linux version. Use the best tool for a problem.

linksys nslu2

[nsupathy]

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.

MyBook World Edition 2

[armer]

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...

Re:RAID 0 != Mirrored!

[Chas]

RAID0 = Striping
RAID1 = Mirroring
RAID5 = Striping with parity
RAID0+1 = Mirrored Striping
RAID10 = Striped mirroring

Linksys NSLU2

[powelly]

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.

Selected models

[olip]

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.

Have you looked at the LaCie ED Mini?

[MajikJon]

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

ReadyNAS from Netgear (was Infrant)

[Sarlok]

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.

Re:ReadyNAS from Netgear (was Infrant)

[Roskolnikov]

Just out of curiosity (morbid as it may be) were the drives on the supported list?
Infrant has had some problems with WD disks dropping off as they have (by default) an intensive scrubber built it that runs every few days, this typically drops the
drive out of raid sets; this gets worse when you follow the recommended practice of matching your drives....This problem isn't infrant alone, WD has released a firmware
update for the drives as they tend to drop from any raid controller; I know this for fact as I am using the 'unsupported' ys drives right now in mine, after flashing them the drops stopped.

Their tech support (in the past) was great, they seem to have been on hold for the past year (netgear bought them, that tends to dampen response at least in the short term)
but I have seen a flurry of firmware updates recently (beta 4.0 code) NFS is much improved as they have moved to the 2.6 kernel.

sorry to hear your experience, several of my friends have these and we have all been very pleased with them, shame about netgreat buying them as it has driven the price up $100 or more.

Buffalo is the way to go

[squarefish]

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.

personal experience: ximeta

[psbrogna]

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/

Re:Drobo?

[jbarr]

I've read a LOT Drobo looks like an EXCELLENT choice, but there are two things to consider:

1. It isn't cheap at $499--without drives.

2. It is not a NAS as such. Drobo is a USB-attached external drive system. Yes, its volume(s) can be shared over a network, but it is not a standalone, network-connected device.

Now, if Drobo had a gigabit Ethernet connection, I would seriously consider saving up for one....

I built a debian box ...

[Lazy Jones]

I looked at various reviews and concluded that all existing NAS solutions had major drawbacks for my intended use (next to my desk). The Buffalo Terastation are good & silent but the software seems to be lacking a bit. The Thecus boxes should have high performance but are very noisy according to SmallNetBuilder.

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.

Re:Drobo?

[jbarr]

Understand that for the $500, it will hold NOTHING, because out of the box, it comes with no drives. Your limitation on space is in how many drives you install (up to 4) and what capacity drives you install. Using their Drobolator page, you can see how capacity is affected by the number of drives and capacities. For example, installing 4 1TB drives gives you 3TB of protected storage.

Windows Home Server Review

[justechn]

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.

flyback

[deander2]

just buy yourself an external hard drive and use flyback:
http://code.google.com/p/flyback/

My thoughts...

[Muad'Dave]

I've been doing research on this very issue. Here's an excellent site that has performance statistics and ratings.

• The Thecus 4100+ is rumored to be extremely slow.
• The Infrant/Netgear ReadyNas NV+ is the one I'm looking at. It has an iTunes server, a DLNA server, and a USB connection for TimeMachine.
• The Qnap TS-401T seems to have a USB port, but it is not for computer access to the filesystem - it's for backing up files to external drives!

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?

Re:I prefer them for an office environment.

[LurkerXXX]

So you bought a server that didn't support hot-swappable SATA. Why did you do that if you prefer hot-swap drives? All my servers I've bought lately (and PCI-SATA cards to add to other machines) have been hot-swappable.

They exist and work just fine. You can even get the nice blinky lights you like if you buy the right hardware.

Re:Linux is actually cheaper here.

[Richthofen80]

Whatever it is, is it worth $169?

Ok, let me break down the out of box comparison.

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

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

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).

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

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.

You'd have to write your own web service to access the machines from outside the network. You'd also have to configure the router yourself. WHS automatically configures routers (if supported) and has an IIS app that lets you access all machines and WHS content from the internet.

This is just a handful. 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.

Re:Don't use RAID

[Sancho]

RAID doesn't open you up to data loss from accidental deletion, it just doesn't help prevent it. ZFS, however, does. You can check it out on FreeBSD (which has much better SATA controller support than OpenSolaris).

Although FreeBSD 7.0 (the version with ZFS) is still in Beta, it's been in a feature-freeze for a long time, and it's generally rock-solid. Just read the ZFS guides from OpenSolaris and the tuning guide for FreeBSD:

http://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFSTuningGuide
http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/819-5461
http://www.solarisinternals.com/wiki/index.php/ZFS_Best_Practices_Guide

Note that ZFS really wants to be run on a 64-bit OS, and it wants a lot of RAM. If you've got that, though, it's fantastic, and it allows for easy snapshots (which helps protect against accidental deletion.)

Home-made NAS

[Luminary Crush]

...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)

Re:RAID 0 != Mirrored!

[jcoy42]

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.

Re:Software RAID FUD

[drsmithy]

I should have been clearer in my post. While the disk performance in normal operation may be comparable hardware RAID does have several key advantages. The first being that with anything other than RAID 0 or 1 the cpu hit from the RAID driver during heavy use will be high even on a high end machine.

No, it won't. Even a 500Mhz P3 has a RAID5 checksumming speed of ~1GB/sec. A current low-end CPU (eg: 1.6Ghz Pentium E2140) has a RAID5 checksumming speed of around 4GB/sec.

Suffice to say your average SATA array that's unlikely to even get much over 150MB/sec isn't going to put much load on any remotely modern CPU (at least not from the checksumming).

This is fine if you aren't using that machine for anything else but if it is a desktop machine or a server that is required to do anything else other than serve files then it does cause a problem. This is even more apparent if the array becomes degraded as it will take significantly more cpu time to perform all the parity calculations to rebuild the array.

I'm not sure why you think parity calculations when the disk is rebuilding are any different from parity calculations when the disk is being written to normally, but they're not.

The real hit you take from software RAID is to the bus bandwidth, not the CPU. Most amateurs compare a hardware RAID controller to software RAID on a dinky little 32bit/33Mhz PCI bus (and remember that those onboard SATA ports are probably hanging off a regular 32bit/33Mhz PCI bus), that's why they frequently conclude software RAID is slower ("especially during rebuilds"). When you have a system with ample bus bandwidth the situation is quite different.

If you do need to rebuild the array then a decent RAID card will handle it without putting a heavy load on the server and significantly without affecting disk perfomance.

This is impossible. There will always be a performance hit during a rebuild, no matter whether your RAID logic is running on the system CPU or the embedded CPU on a RAID controller. Further, that performance hit comes from the greater number of IOPS necessary while the array is rebuilding and has nothing to do with "parity calculations" (which even a 10+ year old commodity CPU can do faster than any normal (not to mention most abnormal) arrays could ever hope to be).

In a server that is in constant use this is a key point. Rebuilding a RAID 5 array in software often reduces the disk performance to very low levels, effectively denying access to data until the rebuild is complete.

The difference you are seeing is almost certainly because most hardware RAID controllers throttle rebuilds by default to be relatively slow, so "normal" disk access suffers as little as possible. Software RAID can do this as well - although most HOWTOs tell you to bump the rebuild speed up as high as possible, which is probably why you see the results you do. The downside, of course, that the longer rebuild means a bigger window where your array's performance - and more importantly, reliability - are degraded.