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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."
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
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
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
Reason, free market capitalism, and individualism
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.
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
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.
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.
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.