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

[Rogerborg]

If your maiden aunt asked you what a good cheap commuter car would be, you'd recommend a Porche, wouldn't you?

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

[Anonymous Coward]

"software raid chip"

You really don't understand this, do you?

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

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the Place in Fronte of the House where my Maidene Aunte sits and drinkes her Minte Julepes.

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

[mortonda]

I just recently made a backup server from parts off newegg:

• inexpensive AMD64, mobo with built in Gb nic and 4 SATA controllers
• 1GB RAM
• 4 x 500GB WD Caviars
• case and misc parts

All for just under $700. If you really want to rock and roll, get some of the new 1TB drives!

I don't use the raid chip on the mobo, just Linux Software Raid all the way. For a home backup system, it's the way to go - I can always stick the drives in a new system and have it recognize and reconstruct the array. OTOH, I have had a hardware raid card go bad, and man, that's a world of hurt unless you have an exact duplicate card on hand. Not good for a file server! The performance of a software raid is more than adequate, given that the CPU has nothing else to do - it's a file server! The cost/risk/usefulness balance is very heavy in favor of software raid.

I divided the drives into 4 partitions each: a small one mirrored across all drives for the /boot info; a swap mirrored across all four... the third partion had two drives mirrored for the root partition and another two for the /var system. I also made sure to pair those across separate ide controllers - sda3/sdc3 and sdb2/sdd2 so if a ide chip goes out, it may still have some limited functionality. Of course, it won't help with the raid5 below.

The remaining partition on all four drives is used for the (raid 5) actual file storage, I put it on /storage, though you may have a better preference. This yields a useable storage space of nearly 1.4 TB. If you really want redundancy, you could do a raid1+0 on it, at the cost of a third more of the storage space.

For software, I see some turnkey systems that people are pushing around here, but I just went with a basic Ubuntu server 64 bit. That way I can install any number of packages from Ubuntu's massive package repository.

For backup solutions, I went with backupPC, though I am also experimenting with Bacula. Samba and Webmin round out the file services and maintenance.

The best part of the whole thing? Since I implemented this, I have had 2 complete system losses ... but I didn't lose any files. Just fix the hardware, reload the OS, and restore all the files. Sweeeeeeeet.

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

[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.

Re:OpenFiler

[Gordonjcp]

Depends. You can pick up a sound but scruffy Porsche 924 for a couple of hundred quid. Sure, it's not the hottest, newest thing out, but if it says Porsche on the back and it goes and stops, then you're onto a winner.

Re:OpenFiler

[raddan]

Skip the RAID. RAID is for availability-- you don't need high availability at home. What you want is a fast, easy backup procedure. RAID arrays increase your likelihood of failure-- you have more disks-- the difference being that failure no longer [necessarily] equals downtime. Done right, it is expensive. This is worth it if downtime costs you more than RAID does. If you're using RAID in a machine which requires you to power off and disassemble the machine to replace the disk-- you're wasting your money. That is, unless you're running RAID 0, in which case, you're not doing anything at all to make your data more reliable-- just faster.

Since you seem to want to go the NAS route, you should just set up a file server. Get into the habit of making backups. You can automate this process somewhat. If you go the Linux or BSD route, there are lots of good, free utilities out there to help you with this. On my fileserver, I use "dump", and I dump the whole disk to another one, and for certain data, I use rsync. On my Mac at home, I use SuperDuper. My girlfriend uses Acronis. I have multiple backup sets, since disks are cheap. At work, where backups are very important, we use tape-- but that's another thing like RAID. Tape is more reliable than disk, but slow and expensive. Do you really need it?

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

[profplump]

It's a question of application. For a home system, where you plan to keep the disks for a long time, maybe even moving them between computers, where you run only simple RAID configurations, where you don't have the backup capacity to create a complete archive, and where you don't have the budget to have a spare controller, software RAID is probably the right choice.

But there are still plenty of applications for hardware RAID.

For one thing, most RAID cards have 512+ MB of RAM cache, which is nothing to sneeze at, particularly when it can be safely used as persistent, stable storage, which the main system memory cannot. For another, hardware RAID cards are bootable in arbitrarily complex configurations, whereas software RAID requires a RAID-1 partition for booting. And while linux software RAID works in any modern version of linux, it doesn't work very well under Windows, BSD, OS X, or any other operating system, which is a problem if you want to boot more than one OS, or need to recover data from the disks under another OS.

And they aren't mutually exclusive. On systems with lots of disks I commonly run a combination of hardware and software RAID, with hardware RAID at the bottom level to tie all my disks into bigger containers, and then tying together two such containers with RAID-1 in software. That setup gives me the flexibility of software RAID in placing those containers on different controllers (or even different hosts) while ensuring that I can recover a full data set from the low-level RAID setup even if there's a problem with the RAID-1 host.

Re:OpenFiler

[davemcp]

If your data is valuable enough to use raid, then hardware raid is the only way to go. If you have a problem with the os the data is lost. I have had the os go out on my home storage server several times over the years but have not lost data because I was using hardware raid. Siig puts out a nice little 4 port sata raid and Adaptec and 3ware also put out some great cards. A 500Mhz system with a gig of ram, a gigabit card and a raid card will serve you far better than a 3ghz system with less ram and software raid. Dave

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

[jarich]

Serious question then (not flamebait)

When your RAID card does die (2 years? 4 years?), what will you do? If that card isn't being made anymore, are you out of luck? Or can a different card read the disks? I don't think they can. I know a few people that ran into this.

With a software RAID, you do lose some performance, but any Linux distro will be able to read the disks. If the OS bugs out (an infrequent occurrence), you might lose a little data, but not a ton... I'm actually not convinced you'll have a good linux distro w/frequent kernel panics anyway. If you lose your card, will you lose it all?

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

[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.

Re:OpenFiler

[Sancho]

I don't understand why you lost data. Were you not able to reinstall your OS and then re-access the drives?

With hardware RAID, you need to be able to replace the RAID card with an identical one in order to guarantee that you'll have access to your data. With software RAID, it would seem like all you need is a compatible OS (i.e. the one you were using before.)

If the OS trashes your data, you're screwed, but this can happen even with hardware RAID.

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

[Elledan]

You might want to reconsider putting such a cheap PSU in that system. From everything I've seen in PSU benchmarks such as those posted at hardocp.com (including such budget PSUs), PSUs for less than $90 are quite likely to be a hazard to the rest of the system. Together with the mainboard, the PSU is one thing you really don't want to go cheap on. Don't forget to read benchmarks, though. Some manufacturers like to put some really horrible junk up for sale at really inflated prices.

Buy responsible, buy informed ;)

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.

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.

Re:OpenFiler

[Gordonjcp]

Bits are cheap and easy to get? You have obviously never owned a porsche.

I know parts for European cars are a little more expensive in the US, but a Porsche 924 is pretty much just a mixture of Golf and Passat bits, with an engine worryingly similar to the LT-series vans. Bits really are cheap, as long as you're not looking for a Porsche sticker on the box. Those AP brake pads are just the same. You're paying a lot for a sticky label...

cheapo walmart linux box

[freedom_surfer]

I'd get one of those cheapo walmart linux boxes...stick it in a closet....then just use rsync or rdiffbackup....with a real box you'd have the luxury of being able to add additional storage easy...you can even setup a software raid for extra protection...

Re:cheapo walmart linux box

[nolife]

But some 300-500GB USB external hard drives. They are like $70-$100 now. Plug it into your Linux/Windows machine and share it out. Not as sexy but it will work. You can use rsync or the windows equivalent ntbackup or robocopy to back it up to another drive somewhere on your network. Hell, $100 for a 500GB external, buy two and plug one in periodically and copy one to the other with your scheduler.

There is no raid controllers and setup to worry about, no elaborate "recovery process" to follow if there is a failure, never a need to open up the computer, nothing special needed for installation (plug them in and share them out), and the external drives can be plugged into any USB port on any computer and mounted. Total cost for 500GB of "network" storage backed up to another 500GB drive on your desired schedule will be about $200 +tax.

As with any NAS or backup solution for the home... Speed, Reliability, Cheap. Pick any two.

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

[spyrochaete]

pshh, 1, 0, computers barely know the difference.

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...

Re:I've got the DNS-323

[LaughingCoder]

I bought one of these about a year ago. I populated it with two 500GB SATA drives. I chose to stripe for speed, not redundancy. I am very satisfied with this box. It just runs 24x7, takes up very little room, and is fairly quiet (there is a fan). Another bonus which was a big deal for me was that it has a GigE connection. And best of all, you'll only spend about $450 to build a fairly fast 1TB NAS.

The only downside I have found is that the DNS-323 does not correctly implement the Windows Archive attribute in the file system. I have some simple batch files that I use to back up my data by coping all files with their archive bit set from the drive to another external USB drive, and then clearing the archive bit on those copied files. But it seems the DNS-323 for some reason does not persist the state of the archive flag, and so every time I run the script it copies all the files on the volume.

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.

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.

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.

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....

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.

Re:Drobo?

[michaelepley]

I'll second this...I hadn't even heard of this device until this post, and spent some time looking over there material in more-or-less awe in that it looks like a practically perfect device. Except the ethernet connection. I don't know how they missed that one; I'll wait for v2.0.

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

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.

For the record...

[Applekid]

... you'll always need backups. Even the most reliable systems will eventually fail. Routine backing up is essential.

You don't need enterprise storage solutions: great. That means that you probably don't need to do nightly backups.

The lesson in you losing your data is not that you needed NAS, but you needed to make better backups.

Define "reliable"

[jimicus]

Try and work out exactly what you're protecting against before you worry about solutions.

Do you want data to survive a hard disk failure? RAID. (Though I make no guarantee that any of these things have implemented RAID terribly well, particularly if a disk fails 2 years later and the replacement you plug in has totally different geometry).

Do you want data to survive your own mistakes? Then use the NAS as a backup for your own PC(s).

Do you want data to survive poor implementation in the firmware? For best results, you'll probably need two totally different devices and some means of keeping them synchronised. (Though a number of Buffallo's Linkstation products can support a separate external USB disk for backup of the NAS itself).

Do you want data to survive a house fire? If you've got immense quantities of data, you'll need a unit you can take offsite. If not, perhaps a subscription-based internet backup provider is the way to go.

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.

Re:Build / buy a Windows Home Server

[didde]

You must be new around here, right?

Inexpensive backup

[Caltheos]

Go to office Depot or Staples or whatever the local office supply store is, buy out their entire stock of paper and number 2 pencils. Proceed to copy down bit for bit the content from your hard drive. If you write really small, you might be able to fit it in under $500 worth of supplies. For even greater redundancy, you can use clay and chisels, but thats just too time consuming for the average user.

Re:Inexpensive backup

[rubycodez]

now that's just stupid, by writing hexadecimal instead of bits you can only use 1/16 the paper.

Re:Inexpensive backup

[griffjon]

However, they clay tablet is probably the only storage media which is only hardened by fires...

Re:Build / buy a Windows Home Server

[Richthofen80]

Either that or I was a beta-tester for Windows Home Server, during which it saved my bacon when I accidentally blew away my Quicken data files.

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

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

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.

Re:Build / buy a Windows Home Server

[Nos.]

You've added $169 to his base cost, and haven't really given him a solution. The various open source products out there will more than likely compete just fine with your Windows software, and not cost the $169. On a budget of $500, if you're spending almost 1/2 that on software, you're not getting much for hardware.

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.

Re:Build / buy a Windows Home Server

[BlowHole666]

It sounds like this guy is a noob. So how long will it take for the OSS to be setup and configured correctly. When the Windows software is probably point and click. Some of the $500 is going to hardware but I am sure some is also going to keeping his sanity when setting up and maintaining this system.

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: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

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.

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.

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.

What is "NAS"?

[KWTm]

The title and summary do not explain what NAS is. Nor have the comments so far.

Of course, any geek worth his/her salt must know what NAS is. Since it must be a very common term for people to use it without explanation, I looked it up on Wikipedia. Now I no longer need to turn in my geek card, because I know that NAS is a 34-year-old American rap musician. It would surely be awesome to invite him home to perform over the network, thus solving problems of scrambled hard disks with the Best Home Network Nas.

Of course, NAS might stand for any number of other things including Network-Attached Storage, Network Access Server, Non-Access Stratum, Network Audio System, or of course that shining epitome of disk failure prevention, the New American Standard bible.

Anyway, I'm glad I'm done scratching my head over this, because I'm developing a bald spot.

I prefer them for an office environment.

[khasim]

But then I also prefer SCSI disks.

That is because I can get them hot-swappable and with lots of nice lights.

I have a new SATA server that has fakeRAID, and the drive lights are not supported and they aren't hot-swappable.

For a home environment where YOU know what you have and how it is configured, I'd say go with whatever you're comfortable with. Just make sure you document what is what and where ... just in case it works too well and you don't think about it for the next 6 years.

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.

flyback

[deander2]

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

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:Build / buy a Windows Home Server

[Toreo asesino]

"I can't imagine this taking more than half an hour to get working."

Jesus. The number of times I've said that and regretted it.

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:fdisk /mbr.

[silent_artichoke]

servicing Vista.

Ugh. I just threw up a little in my mouth.

NSLU2

[swg101]

I'll add another plug for the NSLU. Got one of those handling image data from remote security cameras. Works great. Note that you have to have USB hard drive however, as it does not have SATA support directly.

Also, I did mod the box so that it powers back on automatically after a power failure.

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.

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:Linux is actually cheaper here.

[Penguinisto]

Dunno about all of them, but most of them are very easily addressed:

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

Task Scheduler to copy files from client to a network share? Can't be all that complex to set up a basic data backup routine...

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

Samba has a pretty easy GUI setup, even in Ubuntu. It's also already installed, I believe.

Ubuntu requires raid hardware or software.

Software RAID is already built-in. If you use Fedora instead of Ubuntu, you can use LVM's GUI tools to do all of the dynamic partition sizing goodness.

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

Use the Package manager to install rdesktop, which allows remote desktop access to any Windows box. Done.

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.

Ah, now there's one that you've gotten perfectly correct (IIRC), and why I use Bacula on my home network (which is admittedly not something for the casual user).

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.

I'm not so sure I'd want any un-hardened machine to be accessible from the Internet; esp. a Windows one that both streams media and holds all of my personal data in one easy-to-reach location. That's just begging for a first-class arse-pounding from the first script kiddie to see that you've done that.

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.

I'm sure you probably have... but I don't think you had all the facts at hand when you did. Now know that I'm not knocking your choice at all - if you use something as a beta and like it, and it works for you, cool... but I think that you haven't really looked all too deeply into the alternatives, you know?

Personally, I find that spending $169 for just the OS (when I can get at least an extra hard disk with change left over at that price) to be a bit much. There is also the headaches specific to Windows - the high probability of being targeted, the EULA that says I do it MSFT's way or no way at all, the 'phoning home', the DRM, the extra overhead (I stick with runlevel 3 on my home servers), and the fact that there really isn't much I can tweak on it (at least by comparison)... But then, I do the sysadmin thang for a living - so my needs, skillset, and priorities are a lot different from that of the average home user.

And so it goes... :)

/P

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.

You need to phrase your question more specifically

[ShaperofChaos]

One thing I've learned from speccing a few enterprise backup systems is that you really have to be specific with your needs. The reason everyone on this board isn't just recommending the same thing is because there are so many trade-offs associated with backup systems.

For example, how easy do you need it to be to set up?
Do you want something with a command line, web interface, or dedicated monitor?
How much space and ventilation do you have for the system?
Does it need wireless or wired connections?
How comfortable are you with the various technologies that you could use in a DIY situation?
How much space do you need?
How much reliability do you need?
How much availability do you need?

These are all factors that are essential to choosing the right solution.

My current setup is more of a NAS than a backup box. It's an old box, Athlon 3000+ with 1GB of RAM, running OpenSolaris. Solaris is a pain, but ZFS is worth it. It makes managing all those disks painless. In return I get redundancy in the form of mirrored disks, speed in terms of ZFS caching and mirrored disks, infinite constant-time snapshots (I do hourly), and a host of minor options. I export these disks via NFS to all the systems on our home network and it is generally faster than a single native disk. All in all it has cost me $120 for a new case and $40 for a new SATA card when I needed to add more disks, plus the cost of disks. Now I have 80GB of OS/web space and 750GB of storage, all mirrored. That means I'll basically never worry about losing stuff.

If you really want quality storage, look for ZFS. It's in OpenSolaris, FreeBSD, and OS X now. Also, if you ever get more systems it is nice to have a NAS to share files and allow for centralized management.

RAID is NOT just for availability

[StandardCell]

RAID is most definitely about reliability and recoverability as well as availability. It all depends on the level you choose. Your argument that multiple disks increases your likelihood of failure is trumped by one simple fact: how do you know that the single drive you buy for the job will be more reliable than the one next to it?

You can't, and that's why using at least something like RAID1 is a smart way to go. When one drive fails, your data doesn't all go with that one drive. I've seen drives from batches fail literally within a couple of days of each other. If you're smart and rebuild offline as soon as a failure occurs, your chances of losing all your data are very small. Reliability engineering is all about probabilities, and the mirroring and parity concepts of RAID facilitate this reliability. The only place where your argument holds sway is on RAID0, and that's a pretty specialized application to be sure.

If you want to swap drives without disassembling the machine, get case with enough 5.25" bays for the drives you need and buy some removable trays for $10 a piece. When one drive fails, you turn a key, pull the tray, swap the drive and back in it goes for a rebuild.

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.)

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.

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.

NAS != backup!!!

[swordgeek]

I can't believe I have to mention this AGAIN, but every time there's a discussion of home-RAID systems, 90% of /. jumps to the wrong conclusion.

Let me state something VERY VERY CLEARLY here:

RAID is not backup.
NAS is not backup.
SAN is not backup.
Snapshotting is not backup.
Backup is backup.

A "backup" means A COMPLETE COPIES OF FILES STORED OFFLINE.

RAID is a way of providing data availability and reliability. It doesn't provide backups. SAN and NAS are various frameworks for presenting the data in a storage system (generally RAID, but not necessarily) to an environment. It doesn't provide backups either. Backups consist of making COMPLETE COPIES (and yes that includes incrementals--ultimately, with a base copy plus incrementals, you have a complete copy) of files, STORED OFFLINE. Snapshots provide copies of files (and the smart snapshot systems do provide complete copies), but they're still online copies of the data. They will let you recover files to a point-in-time, but if your storage array goes T.U. for some horrible reason, you're still screwed.

RAID is fantastic for keeping your online data from being destroyed or taken offline due to hardware failures. SAN/NAS is great for making data available to a networked environment. However, if you want backups of your files, then back up your files--don't use RAID (and SAN/NAS on top of it) as a backup scheme, because it ain't.

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.