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

Drobo?

[Old Man Kensey]

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.

FreeNAS?

[hlt32]

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.

Been said a lot already, but...

[Penguinisto]

I have an old Celeron box with four 500GB hard drives in it running Fedora Core 7. It has RAID 5 (software RAID), two network cards (I get one NIC, and my wife gets the other one), Samba, and NFS (for my Mac and Linux machines - much faster than Windows sharing). The whole wad was made from spare parts, and the biggest cost was the drives (but w/ ~1.5 TB of storage space, no problemo).

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.

/P

Re:Build / buy a Windows Home Server

[Richthofen80]

HP makes a Windows home server for $600. Half a Gig, with hot-swappable trays for SATA, etc. just plug into your network and voila.

http://www.amazon.com/EX470-MediaSmart-Server-Sempron-Processor/dp/B000UY1WSK/ref=pd_bbs_sr_3_s9_rk?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&s9r=8a585b431588ae070115f9650cd90da1&itemPosition=3&qid=1195658849&sr=8-3

BackupPC will solve all your problems

[SteveJohnson]

BackupPC (http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/) will keep versioned backups of any network file shares including SMB and NFS. It just Does The Right Thing (TM) for using the backup storage efficiently. Throw in a web i/f for admin and file restore and it's hard to beat. I have used this to backup a small office (around 20 workstations) using a really old Compaq PC w/ an upgraded disk drive.

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.

Re:Airport and USB drives

[dhartshorn]

It's working well at my house, with read/write speeds comparable to a direct attached USB device. So well, in fact, that I'm about to buy a MiniStack drive case with the USB hub I mention (size and color matched accessories, gotta love 'em). And I really don't care about CPU utilization on this particular box. For backup purposes, I'd care even less.

Leap Frog

[kcdoodle]

Last time I had a hard drive failure, I bought 5 identical 80G hard drives.

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 /dev/hda and a blank drive and make it /dev/hdb and clone it.
I then take /dev/hdb and put it on the shelf.
I take the failed (or failing) drive and make it /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).
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.

unRAID FTW

[BLKMGK]

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:

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. :-O
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.

Re:OpenFiler

[magarity]

I just know how to spend wisely; $150 - $200 on a proper raid card, $40 ea for 3 or 4 80GB drives (more than enough to back up the 120GB in question) leaves $200 for a PC from a second hand shop with a 90 day or so warranty. Plenty. Unless he needs a new dual core system that's going to sit idle practically all the time except for backups? The project is for online backup storage which puts the emphasis on the disk subsystem. Good raid card in second hand system fits that bill better than a new mb/cpu just to run software raid. It's also more power efficient.

BSD and Linux based NAS

[Agripa]

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/

Re:OpenFiler

[SillyNickName]

Openfiler requires the use of a network directory server (NIS, LDAP, Windows Domain Controller or Hesiod) somewhere on the network. Most home networks probably do not have such a server and adding one increases the cost and complexity considerably.

Re:OpenFiler

[Machtyn]

How could people be missing an opportunity to promote the wonderfulness that is the Ultimate Boot CD 4 Windows. You can even put the Ultimate Boot CD image on there. I have a disc that can boot into either. If you are opposed to the MS Windows version, or don't have an extra XP license laying around, the Ultimate Boot CD has the wonderful utility called Test Disk by Christophe Grenier. It can recover MBRs and potentially rebuild tables and/or indexes for crashed drives.

External Drives

[CopaceticOpus]

A fairly thorough and cheap solution is to use external USB drives. This plan protects you against pretty much every conceivable failure, including theft, fire, accidental deletions, and double hard drive failures. It would take extraordinarily bad luck to lose data. The weakness is that it requires regular human intervention, but the required work is very easy once it is set up.

1. For every drive in your computer, buy two external drives of the same capacity.
2. Label one set of external drives "A" and the other "B".
3. Give the drives from A and B the same names so that when they are plugged in, they will mount to the same location. (Assuming you have automounting turned on, like Ubuntu does by default.)
4. Write a script to backup your internal drives to one set of external drives.
5. Run the script with set A plugged in, then with set B.
6. Move set B to a convenient remote location, perhaps your office if your employer allows.
7. Every week or so, backup your files to the external drives currently at home. Then take those drives to your remote location, swap the sets, and bring the other set back home.

mdadm software raid 5 on cheap COTS hardware

[Sleet01]

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!

Re:OpenFiler

[Anonymous Coward]

If only it were that simple. A lot of programs won't run without admin rights (many games), and users generally get tired of logging into an admin account when they want to install stuff, play a game or use their mp3 player or camera etc, etc, so they eventually ignore the standard user account altogether.

Not all of the blame goes to microsoft - though the default user account SHOULD NOT have admin rights - but the numerous software and hardware companies who have, traditionally, expected admin rights for the users of their software. This has changed a bit in Vista, I understand, but there are still too many programs that cause UAC to go mental (from what I have seen). Frankly, the whole software development culture on windows seems to be irreparably screwed.

I spend a lot of my time dealing with any Tom, Dick or Harry that gets a computer and then inevitably screws it up. I have a lot of sympathy for these people - safe, secure computing practises take a large amount of understanding and effort for someone who just wants to browse the web, download some mp3s and play some games. I have years of experience under my belt, they do not.

I am seriously contemplating developing a version of Linux for absolute beginners. The problem is that some of my ideas that would help people require radical alteration of the way things have been done (for ever) involving interaction with files, the filesystem, windows and window managers, etc, that programs would have to be severely modified to work with it.

As I said, I spend a lot of time with complete beginners and I take it seriously when they get confused about things like saving files (why do some programs use your default home and others ignore it?) or finding files, or why are there so many programs installed by default that do the same thing (ubuntu), why do installers on windows have so many options with such little information about what they mean, why don't most programs tell you immediately if they need a port opened on a hardware firewall, etc, etc. It's easy to see why people become overwhelmed by too much information, little of it helpful.

I'm a big fan of taking ui queues from games - most of which don't just dump you into the game and expect you to know everything, but find ways of teaching you the basics from the start. This can lead to abominations like 'clippy,' but I'm sure there's a way of doing it competently. Ultimately, I'm tired of watching people grapple with the illogical conventions of wimp-based, dumb systems - I know they only make sense to me because I've used them for so long. There has to be a better, user- and task-centric, rules-based way of doing things.

Why use NAS when what you need is a backup?

[originalhack]

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

Re:Linux is actually cheaper here.

[TheRaven64]

It also has a nice feature that doesn't copy the same file twice (or more) if it's unchanged You know that's been a basic feature of rsync... forever, right? And that rsync will only copy the parts of a file that have changed? I wouldn't recommend Linux, but OpenSolaris or possibly FreeBSD on the server with ZFS and rsync on the client gives you everything you seem to want:

• Dynamic volume management.
• Incremental backup.
• Live snapshots to an arbitrary granularity (ZFS snapshots are O(1) in terms of time and O(n) in terms of space where n is the amount of data that has changed; rsync helps keep this nice and small).

It also lets you do a few things you didn't ask for:

• Arbitrary level of redundancy on a per-volume basis. You can keep important accounts stripped across multiple drives but have less important files on a less safe volume.
• NFS and AFP access for UNIX and Mac clients.
• iSCSI target support, letting you remotely mount volumes as block devices for clients wanting to run their own filesystems (e.g. client-side encryption). These are built on top of the same volume management as the filesystem volumes, so have the same abilities (e.g. configurable redundancy).
• No software costs.
• Auditable code.
• Unlimited number of clients.

Re:OpenFiler

[Electrum]

Plus, in the event of a sudden power off or crash, software raid can corrupt your disk if you're running with a parity disk.

RAID-Z is designed to prevent this.