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

[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

[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

[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.

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

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.

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...

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.