Netgear Introduces Linux-Based NAS Devices

drewmoney writes "A LinuxDevices.com article introduces several of Netgear's Linux-based NAS devices, technology they acquired with the purchase of Infrant earlier this year. (Here is Netgear's product page.) There are models from 1.5 TB, at about $1,100, to 4 TB, topped by a 4-TB rack-mount version. They are geared towards the professional home user and small and medium businesses. The NAS devices come complete with the usual RAID features, file-system access, and a built in USB print server. All are controlled through a Web GUI and some even offer SSH access."

Comments

erm....

[flewp]

They are geared towards the professional home user...

Professional home user? How do I get such a job? I'd love to get paid for downloading porn, playing video games, and generally being lazy.

Re:erm....

[ceoyoyo]

Marry a doctor, executive or heiress. Or heir, if that's the way you swing.

OpenVPN

[b0s0z0ku]

I hope that they include something like OpenVPN that allows clients from almost every platform and is very flexible as far as setup. Secure remote access is very important.

-b.

Re:OpenVPN

[mcpkaaos]

You could always throw a cheap router in front of your NAS and install DD-WRT, which has offered OpenVPN support for quite some time.

RTFA, asshat.

[jay-be-em]

"Supporting NFS, rsync, SMB, ftp, and http file access, the ReadyNAS devices have a featureful Web GUI and, apparently new in the Netgear models, SSH access (although SSH may, as in the past, be limited to use as an rsync tunnel)."

Re:RTFA, asshat.

[b0s0z0ku]

ftp, and http

I hope this means sftp and https -- insecure WebDAV and FTP over the public Internet is one thing we do NOT need. Or maybe they should include a VPN server since some OS's don't have good support for WebDAV over HTTPs (XP tsk tsk).

-b.

Re:RTFA, asshat.

[arth1]

Sorry, no, they don't have a workable NFS solution, despite what the sales blurb claims. NFS without basic features like famd and posix attributes would be about as useful as Windows 3.11 would be for sharing SMB -- useful only for a single user environment where users don't take advantage of built-in features like setting permissions on network files or do naughty things like accessing the same file at the same time. In other words, slightly less useful than nothing for a business environment.

Re:RTFA, asshat.

[Professor_UNIX]

NFS without basic features like famd and posix attributes would be about as useful as Windows 3.11 would be for sharing SMB -- useful only for a single user environment where users don't take advantage of built-in features like setting permissions on network files

Did you even bother to read the blurb? The devices are geared towards home users, not business environments. I couldn't care less if everyone on my LAN at home can read/write anything on my NAS. It's just there to store ripped DVDs, music, pornography, and other shit that is nice to store centrally.

Re:RTFA, asshat.

[Bazman]

"Supporting" is a wonderfully vague word.

We bought a 1TB NAS (can't remember the model) that 'supported' NFS. We had it connected to our server via ethernet, and mounted it using NFS. Ooh look, I copied a file. Ooh goody, I copied it back. Now let's copy half a terabyte of our backups onto the NAS...

  Wakey wakey. Hello? Anyone in there? Oh dear it seems to have stopped after 200 megs. Try again. Pretty much the same...

  We upgraded the NAS box to the latest OS, we asked the supplier who was no help. I even hacked root on the box in order to see the log files to find out what was going on. But my conclusion was that the system was built down to a price that wasn't capable of supporting some real NFS thrashing, and that they hadn't tested it. We sent it back.

  These are probably fine for simple home use, but don't hammer them...

A Slashvertisement by any other name

[giminy]

There have been dozens Linux-based NASs for years now. Infrant sells bare-bones ones, Buffalo Technology sells them, heck, D-Link sells a (crappy) little NAS with a linux kernel. How is this news? Or was this ad sponsored? :).

Reid

Re:A Slashvertisement by any other name

[giminy]

I own a DNS-323 too. I loaded it up with two 500gb hard disks. It sucks. I still use it, but it sucks. The standard firmware only lets you update the device with D-Link digitally signed firmware. The D-Link firmware is buggy as hell, still, even after the thing has been out commercially for over a year.

- It has a bad version of Samba on it that will cause your files to magically disappear if you decide to copy files larger than about 20 gigs, or if you copy large numbers of files at the same time.
- It uses the ext2 filesystem, which not only lacks journalling, but has no nice way to fun fsck (only option is to enable telnet via a fun_plug and run fsck on your mounted filesystem...blech!).
- It *still* has piss-poor unicode support.
- The current firmware does funny things if one of your drives dies and you have a RAID-1 array, such as not rebuilding the array. Some users have reported that it won't even detect a drive failure in raid-1.
- Its user/group and volume management simply doesn't work. You can't set up multiple shares and give different users different permissions to the shares. User/group management is a mess.

All of these problems exist in the 1.03 firmware, which is the latest version. My unit has also been blessed with a common hardware problem -- one of the "drive okay" blue led's died. Quite a few folks are reporting this (probably cheap leds).

About the only way to make the 323 usable and safe is to solder a serial port on it so that you can use redboot and overwrite the stock firmware. IMHO, if you're going to take the trouble to solder and manage the thing via the command-line, you may as well just plunk down a bit of extra cash and have an actual warranty. Or save the money and put two hard drives in an old computer/install linux distro of your choice. It certainly shouldn't be considered a reliable nas, and I certainly wouldn't be saving copies of anything important on it (unless you're backing the data up somewhere else).

Re:If a buy it, I legally can ask for the source c

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep... here's the code....

ftp://downloads.netgear.com/files/GPL/readynas_gpl.zip

1.5 TB for $1100 !

[this great guy]

That's $0.73/GB for this Netgear product. Almost a year ago I built a 2.5 TB OpenSolaris fileserver using ZFS for $950, that's twice cheaper: $0.38/GB.

I understand Netgear market this product for endusers without the time or the ability to build and configure a NAS themselves, but this reminds me that some of us are privileged people, because we don't have to be victims of such horribly expensive proprietary gear... We have the choice to build it ourselves and save real, big bucks.

This also shows that the storage market really have room for more competitors. At a time where the raw cost of disks is $0.20/GB and where you can build storage servers for $0.36/GB (proof: I did it), the only explanation behind the high prices in the storage market is pure lack of competition. This is one of the reasons why Google build their servers themselves: they figured out all the "professional products" out there are overpriced.

I'm sick to death of four stupid drives

[JoeShmoe]

Good grief, can someone please explain to me what the fetish is with four drives in every single freakin NAS system on the planet? And every vendor gets the same thrill annoucing it as a "4TB" solution when only a complete moron would run these things as a single JBOD volume without any fault tolerance.

Why not five drives, guys? It's not like we are back in the late 90s when every motherboard had two IDE controllers supporting two devices. I routinely see motherboards now with five or six SATA ports. There are even splitters and repeaters that can change one SATA port into two. So why not break out and distinguish yourselfs with five drives so I can actually get a 4TB (3.8 actual *sigh*) solution AND a spare drive for the RAID set or even hotspare (if i'm feeling nervous).

Why not an even eight? How about a eSATA port so you could connect two NAS units together for expansion or redundancy? How about something like iSCSI and then let me chain as many NAS units together on a gigabit switch as I want?

I finally had to stop buying NAS units and get my hands dirty and build my own so I could actually break the REAL 3TB ceiling. I went with a SAS RAID card and an enclosure that supports 8 SATA drives out of the box. Down the road, I can get a SAS repeater and add a second 8-drive enclosure, or a third, or a fourth. Online volume expansion folds new drives in like butter.

But it's ugly as sin. It's a cheap Dell server ($329 w 3yr warranty!) whose only purpose in life is to house the SAS card connected to this ugly black metal monolith with two very tacky plastic drive enclosure racks. I don't mind sticking it in the closet of my house but I really can't stand the idea of trying to sell something like this to anyone.

But until I can pop down to Best Buy and buy something that looks decent, or is modular or stackable, I guess I'm stuck with whatever FrankenRAID I can piece together.

Eight drives, guys, how 'bout it?

-JoeShmoe
.

Re:I'm sick to death of four stupid drives

[glwtta]

when only a complete moron would run these things as a single JBOD volume without any fault tolerance

RAID10 is a perfectly legitimate configuration for a great many applications; redundancy isn't the only reason people get RAID devices, you know.

Anyway, I think it's a fairly limited audience that wants more than 3TB in a cheap-ass desk-side thingy. Seriously, you'd want an 8x1TB RAID5 array on a single, "consumer grade" power supply? Might as well run it as JBOD (actually, that would probably be safer). By the time you get 8 drives in there, you probably want something along the lines of this, with crazy things like a real RAID controller, redundant power , etc. (and doesn't put your 8 drive array behind a dinky GigE interface). It's five times more expensive (sans drives), but you get what you pay for (all things considered, it's still cheap and far from "Enterprise").

Since those who want the maximum amount of space for the absolute lowest price can build their own so easily, who are they going to sell these to?

So, my guess is that they just can't make these things as expandable as you suggest and still be able to sell them for ~$500 to the majority of their customers.

Re:I'm sick to death of four stupid drives

[JoeShmoe]

RAID 10 *has* redundancy so I don't really understand that example as a counterpoint. Yes, there are some high-end desktops that come configured with RAID-0 arrays for performance but nobody could possibly want to do that with a NAS. I'm pretty sure the network would be a chokepoint well before you reached the performance level of unstriped drives.

I think there's a decent-sized audience that wants a *practical* way to get a couple of terabytes. Who wants to spring for three or four brand new 1TB drives to populate a NAS? Most people I know are swimming in 300-500GB drives. If there was a NAS that could support more than four drives, you could get a couple terabytes out of them. Power isn't a problem either. If you string devices together, chaining them or using eSATA, then they can all have their own consumer-level power supplies.

eSATA and SAS were built to be expandable, so I think it's really just a "640K is enough" attitude that because the first NAS devices were probably IDE and limited to four devices, every come-along company to jump into the NAS market decides to copy what's out there instead of realizing that with the switch to SATA, the four-drive limit just doesn't make a lot of sense.

These things also cost a lot more than ~$500 because most come with drives and not bare-bones. So, if someone is going to plunk down $1000-$2000, I think they might like to pay a few bucks extra to get an external expansion port or extra drive bay.

-JoeShmoe
.

Re:I'm sick to death of four stupid drives

[stderr_dk]

You can fit five 3.5 drives vertically in three 5.25 drive bays, the same amount of space as most four-bay enclosures use. Yeah, you could do that, if you don't care about the heat produced by the drives.

Re:Infrant's ReadyNAS?

[eagl]

Yes. These are re-badged Infrant ReadyNAS units. My NV+ works like a champ. You definately want to read the FAQs if you get one however... Depending on the firmware revision, they do not work well with certain hard drives and for a certain range of serial numbers, they recommend pulling out and reversing the fan to help with cooling.

Also, these do not provide terribly fast speeds no matter what kind of drives you use, so for drive selection you're better off going for the drives with the lowest heat and noise profile, vs. the absolute fastest drive on the market. I put 4 500 gig samsungs in mine and it runs quiet and cool, while performing within a percent or so of how everyone else's is running.

A popular mod for these is to drop in a higher capacity ram sodimm. I happened to have one lying around from a previous laptop upgrade, so it was a no-brainer for me. The extra ram supposedly can boost speeds by up to 15%, but I have not measured it either way. I just put in the bigger sodimm, ran the internal memory checker a couple of times, and haven't worried about it since.

So sad...

[TexNex]

Before Netgear bought them Infrant was the best NAS out there. Great price for what you got and some excelent support & firmware updates that truly enhanced the product. I was hoping Netgear would change their direction and move towards the Infrant product ideals but, it seems NG is no better than Microsoft in this regard and has chosen to buy & cursh the competition.

Infrant ReadyNAS

[RedBear]

Netgear hasn't "introduced" anything. They are just re-branding the Infrant ReadyNAS products that have been on the market for at least a couple of years already. I'm not aware of any actual changes they've made to the devices themselves, so handing them complete credit for this is ridiculous.

The ReadyNAS NV+ is a pretty interesting unit, by the way. I have been looking at it a lot lately. It's one of only a handful of midrange consumer NAS devices that include features like Gigabit ethernet (so it's not slow as molasses) and support for not only SMB/CIFS and FTP but also the native Mac file sharing protocol, AFS 3.1. (Yes I'm perfectly aware that Mac OS X has no problem with SMB/CIFS, but it's a more pleasant experience to connect with AFS, and it also works with the Classic Mac OS. Believe it or not, some people do still use Mac OS 8/9 for various reasons.)

The ReadyNAS can be configured in several different disk modes from JBOD to RAID 0, 0+1, 5, to some proprietary mode Infrant calls X-RAID which supposedly uses disk space more efficiently than RAID 5 (when you're using 3 or 4 drives). The last big positive I can think of at the moment is that it actually supports a list of UPSes so your home or office file/backup server will theoretically shut itself down safely rather than crashing hard when the UPS battery runs down after the power has been off for an hour in the middle of the night. How about that.

Unfortunately the ReadyNAS, like all the other NAS (and non-NAS) multi-drive RAID-type storage devices fails to impress me in one regard. The hardware itself that controls the drives is still a scary single point of failure. I may be protecting myself from a drive failure, but if the hardware fails you lose everything anyway! The chances of the important hardware failing is always greater than zero, and the probability that you will somehow be able to recover your data by sticking the drives into another identical device is much, much lower than 100%. So to be reasonably sure that you won't lose your entire array you need to get at least TWO of these expensive devices and keep them synchronized. This is tantamount to failure in my book.

So in the end I have kind of written off all these devices and I'm waiting for widespread ZFS support in Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, et al. It's coming soon (except for Windows, I don't hold out much hope for Windows ZFS support, third-party or otherwise). When that happens it will be possible to take some generic PC hardware and create a ZFS raidz2 array that can handle losing two drives without failing to protect the data, then if that PC hardware fails you can take that ZFS raidz2 array and hook it up to some other generic PC hardware and simply do a "zpool import" and go on about your business. No insanity like losing an entire RAID array because of some stupid little glitch in the RAID hardware. Eff-you-see-kay THAT, buddy.

Unless I am completely misunderstanding the capabilities of ZFS and raidz/raidz2, it would seem that we are currently on the threshold of the first and only truly resilient data storage method that won't cost a king's ransom to implement. Any supported generic PC hardware (cheap) with Gigabit ethernet, SATA and at least 1GB of RAM will be able to become a file server that will outstrip by a country mile the performance and reliability of all these regular RAID-based NAS devices that almost across the board have abysmal data transfer speeds. Even the very nice Netgear/Infrant ReadyNAS NV+ will be completely obsolete unless they jump on the ZFS bandwagon.

Mark my words. The entire data storage industry will be changing very soon. Most folks here don't seem to see it yet but I think ZFS is going to be big. Like, iPod big, or iPhone big. Everybody scoffed at those devices at first. Well, they aren't scoffing now. I think widespread ZFS support is going to do the same sort of thing. It seems like just another filesystem at first, but it ain't.

ZFS offers the same features + others

[this great guy]

With ZFS you can also dynamically expand your pool by replacing drives one-by-one with larger ones, no matter what the current pool configuration is: combination of stripes, mirrors, raidz, raidz2. You can also expand a pool by adding a new "vdev" to it. A vdev can be a single drive or a N-drive mirror/raidz/raidz2. There is one thing you can't do (yet): dynamically reconfigure a N-drive raidz/raidz2 vdev to a (N+1)-drive vdev.

Also, RAID-X doesn't seem to implement snapshots, quotas, reservations, compression, end-to-end checksumming, etc. I fail to see how RAID-X would interest ZFS users, did I miss something ?

Re:No mention of FreeNAS yet?

[cerberusss]

Can't beat it if you have an old PC laying about.

It's easy to beat. People often forget about the power usage of a PC. That thing is bleeding 100 to 300 watts and that probably makes the Netgear equipment much cheaper.

Re:No mention of FreeNAS yet?

[Kjella]

I doubt even fullblown gaming rigs draws 300W at idle unless you got a hefty SLI setup. Above and beyond the disks which the NAS has to power too, it's basicly CPU+GPU+mobo. Make that integrated graphics and the GPU goes away. The hardware came "free" in that it's used components with low resale value. Of course, if you don't plan to take advantage of anything else than as a file server it might be a close call, if you're slightly more advanced it's a no-brainer in my opinion.