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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."
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.
/mbr. That should fix it.
As for the botched MBR, boot an MS-DOS or even a FreeDOS boot disk and do a fdisk
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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...
$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.
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
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
... 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.
More Twoson than Cupertino
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.
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.
Support Eachother, Copy Dutch Property!
You must be new around here, right?
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.
We've secretely replaced the Enterprise's dilithium crystals with Folgers crystals. Lets see if they notice.
pshh, 1, 0, computers barely know the difference.
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...
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
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.
JusTech'n - Where Technology comes home
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.
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
"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.
throw new NoSignatureException();
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... :)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
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.