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What NAS To Buy?
An anonymous reader writes "Currently, I'm running an old 4u Linux server for my private backup and storage needs. I could add new drives, but it's just way too bulky (and only IDE). For the sake of size and power efficiency I think about replacing it with a NAS solution, but cannot decide which one to get. The only requirements I have are capacity (>1.5TB) and RAID5. Samba/FTP/USB is enough. Since manufacturers always claim their system to be the best, I'd like to hear some suggestions from you Slashdot readers."
definitely not the kind that has been doing all that warrantless wire-tapping. Make sure it is the kind that makes your car go really fast.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Something such as FreeNAS (http://www.freenas.org/) may work for you, if you purchase your own hardware. A quick rundown of what it provides: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeNAS
As a person who's suffered a RAID-5 failure and dealt with the poor performance I can say that RAID-10 is significantly better performance and significantly better reliability that is well worth it.
Don't make the RAID-5 mistake.
I've got the WD MyBook WE 2 TB drive a few weeks ago. I haven't installed any of the MioNet software on my computer because I heard complaints about it. I've got it set up in RAID 1 mode (mode 5 needs a lot more drives). Performance is good so far. Powere consumption is around 20W, as opposed to a desktop PC at around 150W. Since it's running OpenLinux, I was able to add SSH and do more configuration of the SMB server this way. The linux partition is 2 GB; the Arm processor is somewhat underpowered for most other applications.
Using Solaris Express with ZFS. There is an extensive set of articles on how to do this at Simon's blog http://breden.org.uk/
Since you didn't really say much about other requirements, I'll recommend the NV+. I just got one on ebay and it's awesome. It just works. Shows up on the network immediately, has lots of blinking lights and a nice web config interface. 4 bays expand up to 4TB. Plus, it's a shoebox and not a gigantic 4U rack.
... then you will end up with another Linux box. Not necessarily bad, but NAS devices in your range are what you already have. Just packaged a bit nicer, with a customised web gui.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
Try Vector Linux and with Western Digital 1 TB hard disk. Its very good. I'm planning on getting one myself.
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.. but unfortunately all the pre-built NAS cubes I`ve seen are way over priced. They usually end up costing about as much as a home built file server _without_ the drives.
The way I look at it, by building your own, at least you can also use it for other things (if it's just a personal file server). I have a 3 TB file server that I also host virtual machines on. Even in software raid, with many drives, there is not much resource usage. If you buy a NAS cube, you are paying the same price or higher, and _just_ getting a file server.
Before everyone tells you to go use FreeNAS or Openfiler, be aware that I spent weeks trying to get those to work.
If you want my advice on what to actually buy, do NOT go for anything from netgear. I bought a lemon from them which was advertised as a NAS solution, but was in fact a very wierd SAN implementation.
Consider trying an Airport Express basestation, with a big external USB drive. Yes, it's apple, so the feature set is "straightforward", but nothing beats having a working system instead of hundreds of dollars of useless gear.
Alternatively, I have tried a Lacie Ethernet Disk, but they used embedded xp on the damn thing and it kept borking itself every month or two. Since their software to recover the OS wipes ALL data, I don't endorse them at all any more. Waste of over $1k USD.
Final thought: buy reliable, and keep your receipts.
http://www.drobo.com/ Automatic RAID, hot-swappable and you can use any type/size/configuration of SATA drives. Upgrade as the price of drives go down. I've been using one for two months now and am very happy with it. I can watch a streaming movie while I yank out an 80GB to replace with a 500GB, and the movie doesn't even stutter once.
drobo and add to it the drobo share
I had an Infrant (now Netgear) ReadyNas. This is not the unit to buy. The processor is slow so it can't handly plugins very well without bogging down completely. Transfers are pretty slow compared to the compeditors. Its a nice little unit, but I'm much happier with the Windows Home Server I set up. Its much faster and more responsive. And I only put a Geode in the thing.
Windows Home Server might not be your thing, but the ReadyNas definitely is not the one to buy.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
... Infrant ReadyNAS! Expensive but oh so cool... :D
Storage and backup are mutually exclusive requirements. RAID is about providing high availability to a storage system or about providing high performance. It doesn't keep your data any safer, since corruption is replicated immediately anyway.
If you need storage, figure out how important speed is, and high availability. Hanging a USB drive off something like an Airport Extreme may be enough for you. If you need high availability, use mirrored drives unless speed REALLY isn't a factor (I've found that in virtually all NAS systems, RAID5 cuts throughput by 75% or more because virtually none of them do it in hardware!). If you need high speed, stripe them. If you need both, pony up and buy four drives and mirror them and stripe them (RAID 1+0)
However, none of that provides any backup capabilities. For that you need to have a copy of the data that is NOT updated immediately.
I solved that problem personally using an older NAS box that is far too slow even without using RAID for real-time use and it essentially rsyncs nightly from my "fast" server.
Just remember the mantra: RAID is not a backup solution.
I bought the Intel D201GLY2A Motherboard with preinstalled Processor, a 1GB stick of ram, two serial ATA hard drives, then re-used an old computer case.
Then I installed Ubuntu on it. I also installed BackupPC on it as well.
Get a d-link DNS323 and toss in 2x1TB drives, and you are set.
The firmware hasn't really matured until now, with FTP/iTunes/samba server, and the latest addition is a torrent client, for all your 24/7 downloading needs.
It's quite hackable, with an USB port for printer sharing, or storage with a bit of hacking.
I had horrible firmware problems the first ½ year i had it, but now it's smooth sailing
I recently purchased a western digital MyBookWorld. And I am happy with it. It may be a little below your requirements, but the price is really hard to beat.
Mine came with a 1tb drive and supports USB external drive additions. There are 2tb versions of the drive as well. The standard connectivity software is less than ideal. But it runs on linux and with a little hacking can do run just about anything that you can run with linux.
I've been using an old desktop with large HDs for years, always looking for that perfect, small NAS with minimal RAID that I could put in a corner. Unfortunately I was always frustrated since the majrotity of units were directed at business and ran over $1k (that's just too much to pay when a desktop is so cheap).
However, recently there has been a real surge in the market, with a number of more home directed products available. These often include streaming services, in some instances are OSS friendly or even hackable, and have small form factors with RAID1 or RAID5.
The best reviews I've found are at SmallNetBuilder.com... very thorough, always show the boards, etc. The best units I've found (or at least the ones that look the most interesting for my needs) are the following:
Synology DS207+
Looks like a great unit, with lots of control over the drives (RAID0, RAID1, and other drive configurations). However, it's a little pricey for a BYOD NAS ($350+). The support for NFS in external USB drives is nice, and the reviews are excellent. The fact that it doesn't have slimserver support (or not natively) is another weakness... I've been eyeing adding a squeezebox or other player to my stereo, and would like the option. One thing I can't figure out... is it worth going with the "+" unit, or is the old 207 adequate? It's a lot cheaper...
Netgear ReadyNAS Duo
This is obviously the most expensive option, and is about on par with the Synology unit from a performance perspective. I like the fact that it has Slimserver as a native option... seems very well rounded. Also has internal NFS support, which both the other units lacked. Negative seems to the weak photo sharing app (requiring a local install) and the lack of drive controls (RAIDX being the only option). The fact that the 1TB unit costs $600+ also sucks (that's with just 1 1tb drive)... I want a 1 terabyte x2 setup, and I can get a nice 1TB drive for a hell of a lot less than the $275+ (that's the difference between the 500gb and 1tb versions of this sucker). Basically means the 1 drive is a throw-away for me, which I have a hard time swallowing...
Hard choice to make... but I think I'm going to go with the Synology and two 1tb WD caviar drives I can get for $160. Total cost around $650... a little more than I wanted to spend, but this should be good for years to come.
-rt
Are there any cheaper yet reliable tape backup systems? Or is it still going to be in the $1-2K arena for the tape system?
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I would think that adding a SATA card and a bunch of drives to the machine, or possibly upgrading the motherboard with a SATA rich one would be cheaper than buying a NAS box and then populating it, no?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
To reply directly to your reqs (kind of lost track of the thread there) both manfacturers have other versions of those drives that are RAID5 (the NV+ line from Netgear, other Synology units).
As for services, both can be used as FTP servers, web servers, or anything else (I think both are LAMP, I know the Synology is). The Syn unit also supports bittorrent natively.
-rt
I bought a NSLU2 for fun last year -- ARM based, 266 mhz, 32 meg ram, 2 usb ports -- and promptly installed debian. Those specs are better than my desktop from 10 years ago, but I would prefer more ram and spu cycles. I've been looking at the QNAP 209/II (500mhz arm, 128/256 meg ram, 3 usb, 2 sata) and the the Thecus 2100 (600mhz arm, 128 meg ram (upgradable to 512), 3 usb, 2 sata). I'm not sure how well debian currently supports the qnap 209 though.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
http://www.bluearc.com/ - Hands down the best I have seen. We use it here at $GOVFUNDEDLAB, pound the living snot out of it, and it keeps on going without issue.
If you can cope with the limitation of having your drives in USB enclosures, the Linksys NSLU2 can make an excellent NAS appliance.
You can reflash it with assorted flavours of Linux, it's got very low power consumption, and the only noise it's going to make is when the disks spin up.
I went through this same search a little while back. There are a lot of good solutions out there, but I ended up going with a Thecus 5200. It's got tons of room, lots of RAID options, and the user interface doesn't suck. The only complaint I have is that it's very loud. But, it sits in a room I rarely go into, so that doesn't really bother me.
Netgear's ReadyNAS line of products (originally made by a small outfit called Infrant before Netgear bought them out) strikes the best mix of NAS characteristics outside of rolling your own.
The RND4000 retails for $900 diskless, although you can occasionally find it a bit cheaper. It has four SATA inputs and uses a "drive cage"-style design to eliminate wires and allow for hot-swap; it's 9" x 8" x 5". It has gigabit ethernet interface and 3 USB ports. You can set it up as a print server, interface to a UPS, set it up to auto-copy out to a USB HDD on a particular schedule, or set it to auto-copy in from USB flash card/drive to a particular partition.
All the interface is web-based, and in addition to the usual NAS features it supports FTP and HTTP sharing of files, Active directory integration (if that floats your boat), user quotas, and other fun little stuff. The system supports automatic power-on and -off at scheduled times, a journaled file system, and spin-down of drives when not in use. My model states that it uses 60W spun down and 130W at full tilt.
It supports RAID-5 and a RAID 5-based system that Netgear/Infrant call X-RAID. X-RAID allows for dynamic expansion of capacity, which is a very nice selling point in a NAS box. Got 4x250GB drives and want to upgrade to 4x750GB? Just pull one drive at a time, wait for rebuild, and repeat until all four have been replaced. Netgear/Infrant has never gone into the specifics of how it's done, but I'm guessing the drives are partitioned and the partitions are then RAIDed to ensure drive-level failure can't cause a problem. I know I've seen people do the same thing in software on x86 machines (in LVM, maybe?), so I'd guess that's what they're up to.
I have an older Infrant ReadyNAS (the X6 ver. 2 model), and have been very pleased with it. I have heard grumbling that after the Netgear buyout the support channels have gotten a little more irritating. I haven't personally had to deal with it, so I can't vouch either way, but I do notice that the latest system update (which had been in beta a few months ago when I checked) is now listed as a proper release on their downloads section, so they appear to be maintaining the normal release schedule.
You will hear some /.ers recommend rolling your own, and they'll definitely have good arguments. $900 diskless goes a long way in small, quiet, cool PC gear. If you want a NAS system, though, I've found this to be one of the best mixes of features (particularly the dynamic expansion) available short of a full-on PC.
I used to set up my own linux fileservers... then someone else asked me to do one for them, then someone else... and so on.
So I bought a couple of the Buffalo NAS TeraStations. Slightly pricier, but worth their weight in gold for 5 second configuration.
Adaptec/Overland Storage offers the SnapServer (www.snapserver.com), which range from 250 gigabytes to well over 88 terabytes of storage space.
There is also ASA Computers (www.asacomputers.com) which is dedicated to offering Linux-supported hardware and they have many storage and iSCSI/NAS solutions as well that reach into the 30 terabyte range.
See www.smallnetbuilder.com. They review NAS devices regularly. As well, they have a set of NAS charts with benchmarks.
I decided to get a Thecus (N5200B) over a Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ (also a diskless). The Thecus is the fastest while the ReadyNAS appears to have the easiest method of expansion. It's been about a month, so things most likely have changed a bit. Up until recently, http://smallnetbuilder.com/ has been the most informative source I've found.
You'll note that the 2 boxes are about $650 and $850, respectively, so you're easily in the range of a cheap computer. The reason I'm leaning towards these is power usage, size, and ease of use.
If you want cheaper, you can do it. If you don't mind power/heat and a larger size, its very easy to accomplish.
I am one of the hated Microsoft people that everyone rags on. But for a personal NSA, FreeNAS is hard to beat. I used it until 3 of the 4 hard drive fried due to external reasons. Very simple to setup and can communicate with a lot of various systems. It is based on a very light version of BSD.
www.freenas.org
An Intel SS4200-EHW. They're brand new - only out for a few months. They support 4 SATA hard drives up to 1 TB each, RAID 1+0 & 5. We've set up a couple and they pretty well rock.
They also have an "E" version that has a pre-installed OS.
Hate to sound like an advertisement, but this unit runs Linux and gets pretty darned good reviews.
If I get another NAS unit, this will be the one I buy.
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
While technically not an NAS (without the extra bit), I really like my new Drobo...
Eric
Eric Aitala
www.f1m.com
because I WANT those home server options, too. Run Squeezeserver, scan the NAS with AV software, have RAID 5 or 6 (implemented with hardware). I'm pinning a lot of hope on boards based on the upcoming VIA nano or intel atom with a PCI-e slot for the RAID card...
I'd love a NAS that supported TrueCrypt drives!
Anyone know of any? The problem I have is the small NAS stuff is portable, and I can leave it somewhere or, on occasion, has grown legs and walked.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
In most peoples' opinion, you can't do any better than this.
Along the lines for freenas, except that it has the current forerunner for the best filesystem available today, ZFS.
www.nexenta.org
direct link...
http://www.nexenta.com/corp/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogsection&id=4&Itemid=67
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
The first thing you need to know about RAID5 is that it's pretty unreliable; if you lose one device (and subsequently replace it) then the array has to read every sector from every other device in order to rebuild the data. Any unrecoverable sector error on any device will result in a corrupt sector in your rebuilt array.
RAID1 duplicates devices, although your storage requirement is now 2x the quantity of data being stored (as opposed to say 1.25x), the chance of error on rebuild is a lot smaller.
However, all inexpensive RAID solutions suffer from the problem that your devices are on a single server - they're a single point of failure, and if, for example, your server's power supply fails and fries the parts in the case, all copies of your data may be destroyed.
To mitigate that problem you could try a distributed filesystem. Your files would actually be distributed among multiple servers and the filesystem would ensure replication. MogileFS is one such, although it does not provide a POSIX filesystem view it is nevertheless pretty easy to use. There are various distributed filesystem projects around, including Ceph, Kosmos, and Venti.
Although these projects are at varying stages of completeness and you may need to be a bit brave to trust them with your important data, the promise of distributed filesystems is high availability and extensibility.
Raid 5 is a joke. It doesn't buy you anything other than a buzzword.
If you REALLY want data integrity, just use rsync to another set of disks. Crypto checksums are a LOT better than simple parity. And the problem with RAID 5 is that you can't determine which version went bad; only that something's not right.
If you want reliability, use mirroring. But one of the problems with RAID is that disks tend to be purchased from a single lot. That is, there's a very good chance that both disks will go bad together. Which blows your mirroring solution out of the water unless you act real fast.
So just skip RAID. It's more of a buzzword than a real solution. Except maybe for mirroring and striping.
If you need your solution to be cheap and customizable, you might think about picking up an NSLU2 and a few 1TB HDDs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSLU2 http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/
It's basically a usb-to-ethernet bridge which you can flash with customized firmware or a trimmed-down debian install. Plenty of people use it as a lightweight server for FTP, NTP, DAAP, etc.
Let me say this, as someone who runs a small network which has something like 10TB of total storage, don't use a NAS device if you want anything more complex than a samba server with (probably) no security. Use a server with either attached storage, internal storage, or SAN storage.
NAS devices suck. Either that administration is tedious and incomplete or nearly nonexistent.
Are you hoping that your NFS permissions work right? They won't, at least without massive configuration on your part. Are you relying on the data always being available? It won't be, because even the semi-expensive ones use junk hardware. Wanting high availability solutions? Don't even think about a NAS device. Most of them don't have hot-swappable power supplies, hard drives, or anything else.
They're essentially toys, overpriced, underpowered, hard to configure toys that break far too often.
Use a dedicated fileserver. Do yourself a favor. I've got 2 snap machines (one with expanded storage), an IOMega StorCenter, and they're all crap. The other one's I've investigated are crap. Use a real machine.
Check out my sysadmin blog!
I've gone through the exact same decision making process you are and made the same decision you did; build your own: 4U rackable box, 750W p/s, dual capable but single CPU Opteron MB w/4 GB RAM, 8 Ch SATA 2 (3 Gb/sec) LSI logic controller, 4x 1TB SATA II drives, 1 Intel Pro dual Gb NIC, OpenSuse 10.3, total $4,000. This box out performed commercially available solutions (closer to network/IO wire speed @ lower cost). This choice always surprises us with its performance and we have lots of options as far as growing the box over its life time.
I've been thinking about this for quite some time; the one thing that bothers me is having a system on 24/7, but if the wattage was low enough then I think it'd be OK. I'm getting ready to repurpose a desktop and was thinking about doing this, but the power consumption (and noise, even though it's not near anyone's room) bothers me.
Anybody use any online solutions? Any recommendations? I have web hosting with 150GB (way more than I need); I frankly haven't tried using Windows Explorer/Nautilus using FTP to access them. I know I don't get the convenience of SMB or NFS with this account.
Any thoughts? TIA.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
co-nas:~# uptime
/dev/ad8s1a 97M 54M 35M 61% / /dev
/dev/ar0p1 4.4T 630G 3.4T 15% /mnt/conas
8:08PM up 133 days, 1 min, 2 users, load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
co-nas:~# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
devfs 1.0K 1.0K 0B 100%
I heard a lot of good from friends of mine about the Synology Cube Station CS407, and that's the one I have on order now. I like the fact it's expandable, I'm e.g. planning to run a Squeezebox server on it. It has good support, and a large user community.
Others I heard about: Intel SS4200-E (Helena Island). It exists in two versions, one with an embedded OS on a flash and one without any soft. The one with software included has not that much possibilities and is not expandable, it's in the category "it just works." For the other version, I heard installing Linux or Windows Home Server on it is a PITA...
The ReadyNAS by Infrant (recently bought by Netgear) also gets good comments.
At one time I got myself a brand new $200 P4 (back when it was still the best chip) at a grand opening of an Office max, plugged in a whole pile of drives and set up a software raid 10.
Then I did the math. the power bills to run this thing 24/7 were going to be more than the cost of the computer. My disks would be pretty much spinning all the time even though for home usage i'd say I actually hit non-local disks maybe a few times a week at most.
So I sold it and went to external (firewire) disks and attatched them to computers I was already using. This makes so much more sense as a backup system. It actually cost less both in terms of chassis and power for a small system.
Even better is that I can detach the disks and take them offsite (my office desk at work) and rotate in new disks. my big fear is not losing my last week of stuff but losing say all my family photos or long term bussiness records, manuscripts etc. So really an always-on raid is not as big an issue to me as off-site storage. Because I rotate the disks I still have duplicates of everything.
The other nice thing is that since I have a wireless G network, when I want fast access to the disks I can move them from my desktop to my lap top.
Now some people say well, those external disks are more expensive because of their chasis and interfaces or that they are slower. But not really. with the dedicated server solution you have the computer and interface cards to buy. Probably a separate screen and keyboard as well. The power consumed is far more. And for low duty cycle usage you don't have to spin the disks all the time.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I tried working with the free NAS solutions, but the biggest issue I ran into was connecting to disk (SAN) that I already had, and integration with Active Directory.
Trying to find a nice solution that meet our heterogenous environment was the biggest challenge.
You might checkout the RELData 9240 gateway. It allows us to bind into AD, use Quotas/ACLs, and ties nicely into our iSCSI and Fibre SANs...
They also have complete NAS solutions, but I haven't used them.
RAID5 with hotspare(s) is acceptable for most applications, especially with disk speeds anymore.
In RAID5, if one disk fails, and then another fails while the array is being reconstructed, you are screwed. True, disk speeds have increased, but disk capacities have increased faster than speeds, making the two-drive failure much more likely. Details at Battle Against Any Raid Five.
Call me crazy but I use Windows Home Server and am extremely happy with it. I built my own box with a mobo that has 9 sata connectors for plenty of future upgrade room. I have had zero issues with it for the last 8 months. Flawless perfection. I have had zero issues with the data corruption bug that has people concerned. The box and drives cost me 1k.
Get the QNAP TS-409 Pro. All the options of the Netgear ReadyNAS NV+, significantly cheaper. When I was looking at these, I did get the sense that any of these ready to go solutions will lack in performance as compared to a full-blown server that you could build yourself. The benefit comes from the time savings (at least for me). I also saw a cost savings, since the QNAP system is pretty cheap. All told it was $1000 for the NAS, 3x 500 GB drives, and a UPS.
My Company - Red Cedar Technology
As a person who's suffered a RAID-5 failure and dealt with the poor performance I can say that RAID-10 is significantly
better performance and significantly better reliability that is well worth it.
RAID is just a reliability mechanism. It's not backups. Any NAS solution you look at should have a way to back up part of it, and many do.
RAID5 is acceptable IF you regularly scrub the array AND you don't have too many devices in the RAID set, because it is designed to tolerate one disk failure. RAID6 in a 4-5 drive configuration should be plenty safe in quantities most people would use for home NAS's.
RAID10 does offer much better performance, but the performance increase would be largely wasted in the home market. If you're watching video, anything over a couple megabytes a second just helps with seek performance (802.11N is just about perfect for most movie and TV "rips", for example- 802.11g is doable), and when you're uploading or downloading media, anything beyond the speed of local disk is also pointless.
Please help metamoderate.
I'm in need of more storage, and looking at DAS SATA enclosure, instead of being networked.
Can someone recommend a good/inexpensive ~12 bay SATA enclosure?
It'll be attached to a Dell PE2650.
You could use a Dell MD3000 attached directly to your existing file server. You can get it in SAS or SATA with their corresponding storage capacities. We use one of these at work and it works wonderfully. Plus, if you only fill 7 of the 15 slots, you have plenty of upgrade potential.
1.5TB is a lot of data so get a real raid card or a NAS box that is build for raid not a low end pc board some of them don't even have gig-e.
If build your own system good raid cards with raid 5, raid 5e, raid 6 and raid 6e. Run $300 to $600+ for cards with 4 to 12+ ports and ram on the card. Software raid systems some times freak out when a disk goes bad and with some of there the drivers only work in windows. Hardware raid cards have there own bios and work with many differnt os.
..but I can tell you what to avoid. My GF bought an Airlink-101 NAS, and it killed the drive put in it. Near as I can tell, heat build-up is what killed the drive. Furthermore, the firmware is not very flexible.
I've been researching this stuff for a while now, in the hopes of trying to get my electricity usage down at my home.
Chenbro ES34069
http://www.logicsupply.com/products/es34069
Then a mini-ITX motherboard
Go low power with a VIA, or get one that supports a Core 2 Duo.
Then add hard drives.
You get a full fledged x86 server for a similar price as vendor NAS solutions. And you don't have to mess with "hacking" anything.
As a person who's suffered a RAID-5 failure and dealt with the poor performance I can say that RAID-10 is significantly better performance and significantly better reliability that is well worth it.
My RAID controller goes up to 11.
Agreed. At BEST raid protects against some (most common) hardware failures, but it doesn't protect against ANY software or user failures.
And you are still vulnerable to fire, flood, lightning, or anything else that can take out the entire array at once.
Never let RAID replace backups. NEVER!
We use RAID 10 extensively on our main server, but we need every bit of both write and read performance for the database. We have 12 smaller drives in order to get the most IO operations per second.
I purchased a Qnap NAS and I have very happy! Its the 409 pro and with 4 hot plug drive bays and just about everything you can think of pre installed its "almost" perfect. runs linux, media server, ftp server, http server, php, mysql, upnp server, etc etc etc.. gigabit ethernet, usb , raid. You see what I mean... whats nice is its a nice small form factor you wont run out of space as you just add more drives and go.... Hostingguy
RAID6 or RAID ADG (Advanced Data Guard or whatever you raid controller card's vendor is calling it) is SLOOOOOOW as crap. I tried it for about a month on a brand new HP Proliant that was fully loaded with a pair of quad-core XEON processors, a hardware Smart Array P800 controller card with 512MB of battery backed cache and every drive slot full of 15K rpm SAS drives configured as a RAID6 "ADG" array. My users complained so much about the slow performance of such a brand new machine that I had to dump the array off to tape, blow the machine away and reinstall making the array a RAID 0+1 instead and re-load my O/S and all the user's data. The machine is MUCH faster now, the difference is like day & night. Yes, we forfeited a bunch of storage capacity by going to RAID 0+1, but the tradeoff for performance was well worth it.
I tried both Intel's entry NAS and Synology's equivalent. Intel's croaked after 1 month.
I recommend Synology's CS-408 or whatever they have now. Meets your requirements and is low power + relatively quiet. Easy to port around, since they are the size of 5 drives, stacked (contains 4). Provides built-in mirroring (not as good as RAID 10, but not bad either). I've had 2 running for around a year without failure, one backing up the other. The new ones can have 4 1 TB drives.
These are definitely great backup devices.
RAID is just a reliability mechanism.
RAID 0 is for performance, not reliabilty.
I just upgraded from a Drobo to a ReadyNAS NV+. I have to say that I'm very impressed. Its very easy to use, quite fast (up to 15MB/sec), and a regular linux subsystem if you care to tinker. The GUI provides the ability to share music and other media to networked players. Also, I'm a big fan of the built in bittorrent client.
Can't go wrong with ReadyNAS.
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
QNAP TS-409 Pro - does RAID-6
I'm hesitating getting one myself at the moment and hoping the price might come down a little bit more.
I'm liking the feature set on the Drobo external drive, but the price with their NAS "dongle" is not very competitive.
I've got a ReadyNAS NV+. It was (is?) the best bang for buck when I bought it about 18 months ago.
There's a new 6-bay ReadyNAS coming out any day now I'm very tempted to get. I think they named it ReadyNAS Pro, if I'm not mistaken. No word on the street price on the diskless version as of yet. It'll be expensive though, me thinks.
Couple of things about ReadyNAS NV+. It performs poorly on file operations involving lots of files. It also has very poor network failure recovery. I've got mine on a wireless connection (can't use wired connection where it's at for now), and whenever the wireless connection to the router drops, it's a 50/50 whether the ReadyNAS goes into some horrible unrecoverable freeze up state. The file system will be fine, it's just that the unit doesn't know how to recover from the network drop. Sometimes it gets the connection back, but then the filesystem is unavailable. Or the whole box just doesn't answer to requests (even though the connection is fine). I've had to hard reboot that box so many times it's not funny.
These problems may or may not have been fixed with the latest firmware upgrades. I haven't upgraded mine yet.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
I think it's a no brainer to go with a Sun Fire X4500 Server.
Your specs are unspecified. >1.5TB doesn't really say anything since that can be provided by only two drives these days. As a result the X4500 might be overkill. But it's a great product.
I will never live for sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
...what she's selling, she's got a pretty face and very nice tits.
I got my hands on Linksys NSLU2 storage link device a few years ago and only recently installed Debian on it with two 500GB USB disks. It works amazingly well and is also more than just a storage link: it's a fully functional Linux server. I also use it as a print server and to run a couple of webcams as "security" cams. You can pick one up at Amazon for about 80 bucks. Worth looking into.
If you don't know what you're doing, you can't make mistakes.
http://lime-technology.com/ offers UnRAID which looks very interesting. There's even a free version to try. To me, it's not just that you need X amount of storage, it's also about growth. What seems like a lot now, won't be a lot in a couple of years.
My Tech Posts on Twitter
I have one of these:
http://computers.userfriendlyis.com/configure?product=104683
base price only has one drive, but you can add 3 more and they are hot-swappable.
Works very well.
I love my Thecus NASes. I run both a N5200 and the more recent N5200pro, both have 5 hotswap SATA bays. Spin-down on idle makes for a very silent and power efficient NAS (note, n5200pro only. although this feature is advertised for the n5200 too, I've never actually got it work). Full GPL'd firmware (Linux) availabe on site, extensible through modules. Active wiki, with loads of modules (note, the n5200 modules work on the N5200pro too).
Now if only I could get ZFS to work, I'd be in heaven :)
I like my Thecus N5200... 5 drives, raid5, looks sharp, mac/win/linux friendly, great price point, zero problems in over a year...
http://www.google.com/search?complete=1&hl=en&q=thecus+n5200&btnG=Google+Search&aq=f
Easy easy easy setup...
I've had very good luck so far with QNAP NAS devices, and I've messed with a Synology that I liked, but could have been better. The interface on the latter is better than the former, but the former has more features and an active user community.
I'd avoid Buffalo NAS unless you go high-end (Samba-only on the low end).
(Full disclosure: I'm a contractor for QNAP, but only because I liked their product and offered to improve it after I had already integrated it into my network.)
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
... Apple uses only the finest hardware components, dew picked and flown from Iraq, cleansed in finest quality spring water, lightly soldered, and then sealed in a smooth case designed by the most emo-like of emo designers.
If you can afford it then I can highly recommend one of the Thecus N5200 series (~$800-1000 for the chassis + extra for the HDD's). Small, scaleable, self-contained with very good performance and features.
Five drive bays, USB, FTP, Samba, iSCSI
RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, RAID 6, RAID 10 & multiple combinations of both.
Best of all it runs Linux with available GPL source code. There are plenty of homegrown addons so you can add support for ssh, rsync and even torrent directly to the server.
A large portion of these posts are debates about RAID levels. That's not what the poster asked about.
I've heard really good things about both ReadyNAS and Thecus NAS solutions for home use. Both are supposedly incredibly stable, have a large following and forums behind them that build new features and assist with problems. But in my research (18 months ago), these were the best of the best and there were still problems with throughput. It seems that the chipsets that the manufacturers use in the home storage NAS solutions don't allow full 100Mb throughput much less a large portion of Gig throughput. If you're editing video, streaming to multiple machines on your network at the same time, or intend to transfer large multi-gig files to it routinely, you should probably do what I did and roll your own.
In my case, I couldn't find anything that supported Raid6 which is what I decided I wanted. So I bought a Promise controller for a few hundred bucks and rolled my own. Then I ran into problems with finding an operating system that supported a single logical partition of greater then 3TB on a 64bit AMD chip. I tried XP, a couple bootable ISO 64 bit versions of Linux, and finally ended up having to use Vista 64bit. I'm sure I was doing something wrong with the Linux versions, or maybe in the bootable ISO's something wasn't set right for large arrays, but I decided not to bother figuring it out. So since it's a real desktop, the drives can spin down when they're not in use, I get the full throughput that any standard (non-NAS) device would get on my network, and I can install any service I feel like for getting access to my data.
But, if you're sick of rolling your own and don't want to replace your 4u with another 4u server, and don't expect to need a lot of speed, check out Readynas and Thecus. If you roll your own make absolutely sure it's a true hardware raid card and not a raid card that does some computations in software. If it's over $150 you're probably safe.
RAID0's also not RAID. It fails on the "redundant" part.
Just use Amazon's S3 service. Your data is completely safe, energy is not being consumed at your side and it's so cheap!!
I picked the raid card. A software solution for NAS did not make any sense to me as hardware solves this so much more reliably and runs much faster. Even if the raid card fails, I can just buy another card and the disks come back up. And comparatively it was cheap. For 2.2T RAID5, I took an old underpowered box, put Debian on it, and have rebooted it once in a year.
http://synology.com/enu/index.php
I use the 207+ right now love all of the features, fairly frequent firmware updates and have never had any problems with any of the models I have used.
I ended up building my own as it seemed more flexible than anything on the market. I used Chenbro SV ES34069 case with VIA EPIA SN18000G Mini-ITX MOBO (there is also fanless version of EPIA running at 1GHz).
Right now I have 2x 1TB SATA hard drives running Linux RAID 1, so no need to worry about proprietary RAID controller failures. Works great (I use it mostly for streaming multimedia files) and the power consumption is pretty low.
I like QNAP - have had good experience with their TS-109. On first blush, they look expensive, but when I factored in electric power costs, they started getting cost competitive (with a generic linux PC) within a year of continuous use.
I also like the (lack of) noise factor. They make a TS-409 that will do RAID5.
I have a QNAP TS-209. I bought after getting tired of running Dell PowerEdge Servers (Linux/RedHat-based) for ~ten years. It's great to go from a giant, honking, noisy Dell RAID server to something that (when idle) uses less power than most light bulbs. You're not going to get that with an old PC, either. Oh, and hot-swappable drive enclosure is great. That alone is worth the extra $$ you pay for this unit. I hooked up an external USB drive, though, for backups. Can't be too careful. Manually added a cron job to rsync to the USB drive. To get the most out of this unit, it helps to know your way around Unix shell. Root/admin shell is possible, but you have to enable it. Manufacturer seems to encourage hacking, which is a plus. I migrated existing files from a RedHat server, and getting the permissions 'just so' (i.e., working with Samba) was a bit of a pain. The good news, though, is that it's doable. If you're migrating from an existing Windows/Samba server, you won't have these issues. Note the following set of reviews: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822107008&nm_mc=OTC-Froogle&cm_mmc=OTC-Froogle-_-Network+-+Storage-_-QNAP-_-22107008 Despite the above reviews, this unit has been fabulous for me, especially with the new 2.x firmware. This is a good unit. Richard
---- Richard L. Goerwitz III
Anyone know of one of these units that supports automated backup via rsync+ssh (or equivalent)? The LinkStations (and TeraStations) seem to be able to do automated backup to another LinkStation on the LAN, and based on the port number seem to use rsync, but I haven't seen anything about securing the connection or even backing up to a regular rsync server.
Ultimately, what I want is a NAS appliance that can do scheduled backups over a secure tunnel to some place like rsync.net, and I want to do it with stock firmware. I know I could easily do this from the shell, but for the application I'm considering, that sort of work is unacceptable.
The JackRabbit
They make units that start at 5TB raw all the way up to this 48 TB beast.
I stuck a Buffalo Pro something or other 500GB gigabit ethernet device on my network, no redundancy at all. It's around half the speed of copying directly between two PC's on a gigabit switch. My method is to manually keep two copies of any data. I'm not going balls-out for performance, just the best bytes-per-quid. I've since added two USB 500GB drives to it. Not the best performance but it has simple SAMBA shares, uses my domain controller's list of users and is quietly emailing me status reports daily. I stream audio and video to devices around the house (2 XBMC's, 3 or more PC's).
Pro Coffee Drinker
www.rebyte.com
I had some old hardware, disks of various sizes. I liked what I saw with Drobo, (Use drives of different sizes, redundant), but they're pricey for just a chassis with no drives. I found unraid by http://lime-technology.com/ I can use different drives with different speeds, interfaces, etc. Boots from USB, configures Samba, FTP, etc. Not as fast with writes as raid5, but reads are pretty fast over the LAN. With some tweaking, I was able to put it on a full distro and retain the easy configuration, UI, etc. Worth checking out their free edition.
...which NAS to buy?
Advice: on VPS providers
I haven't tried it yet, but Nexenta's OpenSolaris-based NAS systems are now available. It offers everything you need and much more. http://www.nexenta.com/corp/
The currently iteration of the Intel Atom-based motherboard is quite limited in features, but is quite extraordinary in power consumption for the processing power you get. If you can wait a little, see what the next wave of Atom-based boards/devices can offer.
I myself is looking into a similar solution as well, possibly with FreeNAS or stock FreeBSD/Linux distros.
I looked at all the NAS I could. In the end, about 4 weeks ago, I ended up purchasing a Thecus N5200Pro and then 5 Samsung 1Tb drives. I run in raid 5 so I have 4Tb user space. All the services were very easy to setup. The initial formatting was painfully slow, but once its setup I get great access speed within my network (behind a cheap gigabit switch). If you have machines running Vista, be sure to get the service pack 1 to resolve some file transfer speed issues.
http://www.coraid.com/
I've used several in my line of work (Linux Sysadmin), and have been very impressed with how easy they are to work with and how reliable they've been. Very Linux friendly; newer kernels support AoE natively. Might be out of your price range, but they'll do RAID 5 or 10. You buy the enclosure, and the drives separately.
I've been using Lacie network drives for years and never had a problem with them. This is our current home NAS solution:
http://www.lacie.com/us/products/product.htm?pid=10953
($379 - 1TB)
If you don't need the RAID, you can always just go with this instead:
http://www.lacie.com/us/products/product.htm?pid=10882
($319 - 1TB)
And just for fun, backup to Amazon S3. You can't beat that for reliability (and cheap cost for 1 TB).
I've bought a Promise Smartstor ns4300
http://www.promise.com/product/product_detail_eng.asp?product_id=177
Very nice design. Great feature set. Simple to deploy. Supports up to 4 1TB SATA drives. Hot swappable too.
Not the cheapest, but my data is worth a lot more than what this unit & drives cost me.
...and I'll probably buy this in a few days. What does the /. community think of it? Also, what's the best way to tie my shoes? I fear I'm being inefficient.
Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.-rms
www.drobostore.com
The Thecus N5200 will act as an iSCSI target. Fill it up with 5 large drives running raid6 and partition an iSCSI drive for each machine.
Anything more sophisticated than that and it might as well be an actual server machine.
I put together a 4u file server last year. 4 500 GB, WD AAKS'es. I ended up using a stripped down Slackware build with iscsi enterprise target. Since it had 2 gigs of RAM, and the OS took like 35 MB from a cold boot, I turned down the vfs_cache_pressure and let it cache inodes all day long. When I setup iscsi Enterprise Target, I gave honkin' big buffers to the app, and set huge buffers for the RAID stripes. Each disk is sliced in to 9 partitions, the last partition for archive since the slowest 15% of a disk is all but unusable.
You can mount the iscsi target from any initiator (Microsoft provides one for free from their site, and all RPM distros have the iscsi initiator as part of the extras disk/repo) and it acts just like raw disk.
My box is somewhat extravagant, but if you're feeling froggy, jump. I stripe three gigE connections to two cascaded switches, (two on one, one on the other) and do the same for my server which is mounting the exported disks. Then I have two connections to my LAN which my Windows and Linux desktops mount directly.
This also allows me to utilize buffering in the Linux kernel at the file system level by mounting a dd'ed raw image. Since it's on a loopback mount, everything passes the inodes (when shared as a file instead of a blockdev) cache, and instead is buffered. That means I've got a bunch of 20 Gig raw image files lying around that I just mount on a loopback and export over iscsi with a ~1.5 gig buffer dedicated to it.
Granted, it took weeks and a lot of heads down time to get setup (not to mention kernel compiles!), but it's stable as a rock and faster than greased lightning!
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
RAID is just a reliability mechanism
No, it is not.
Repeat after me: RAID is for high availability, not high reliability.
If you want your data to always be available, you want backups, incremental backups, distributed chronologically and geographically.
If you want your data to be constantly be instantly available, then RAID is what you want. You still need backups to assure the data will always be available.
Check out some of the QNAP solutions. I've been running a QNAP TS-209 Pro for over a year roughly and I really love this device!
yes... those are hundreths of a penny, so take it for what its worth - also that I deal with storage arrays daily.
So unless you are going to go with the magic number of disks (this varies but you'll need quite a few for a raid-5... around 8 or so) your performance is going to be less than stellar. Jump up to an 11 disk raid-5 (or preferrably 6) and you'll be screaming - depending on if you use SAS or SATA drives and your controller card of course.
If you are just wanting a tiny raid to stick in your tower, I would run a 3 drive raid-0, with each drive being around 300 gigs. Then, I would additionally have a 1 TB drive to back up that raid-0. That way, you have extremely fast disk speed via three drives and the redundancy on one drive.
If you want to talk about spending big bucks, Dell has a product called the MD1000 that can't be beat for price. You can stick SATA or SAS in there, you can daisy chain three together, and six if you use both channels (you have to use their PERC5 or PERC6e to be supported but other cards work if you play nice but I wouldn't). And each enclosure holds 15 drives. They will also have an offering for a 24 disk array that is only 2u as well that holds 2.5inch drives... sas only of course...
I did a ton of research on consumer NAS devices about six months ago, and eventually settled on the ReadyNAS NV+. The Qnap TS-409 and other similar devices were very tempting due to their extra features and lower cost, but their user communities seemed much smaller than Infrant's, and also seemed to report more problems with their devices. I didn't want to mess with "public beta" storage hardware, so I got a Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ RND4250 from eAegis.com for $975, before shipping. eAegis.com had a promotion going on where they included a third 500 GB drive for free. All drives were new Seagate Barracuda ES drives, which are excellent drives. One arrived bad, (it was painfully slow, and I saw lots of SMART read/write errors in the ReadyNAS drive health report), and their great customer support helped me find the Netgear number I needed to call to get it replaced quickly.
At the time I purchased it, Netgear was also running a promotion for a free Sony DV camcorder in return for the original UPC, which I redeemed, selling the camcorder on Craigslist for $150. In all, with the camcorder sale, it cost me a bit under $900 for my 1.5 TB ReadyNAS NV+. I've been extremely pleased with it for the past six months, I set it up with a RAID-1 array that performs scheduled incremental backups to the third disk each day, and monthly full backups. I chose RAID-1 so that if my ReadyNAS hardware fails, I can still mount the drives in my PC and get my data off them.
"This is Slashdot!!!"
Build a box in an enclosure with lots of hot-swap drive bays, fill it up with SAS drives, put a couple of NICs in it, plug it into your network, put a tape drive in it, install Linux on it using software RAID, and you have your NAS.
Since you're already familiar with PC-based NAS, I'd suggest staying away from turn-key products. I personally find them all overpriced, feature-stripped and they can even be fussy about the brand and model of drives you use.
What I would suggest is building a cheap, quiet, low-power PC in a smaller chassis. You could use something like an Atom CPU and board, or an Intel E1200 with either a 945GC board or an NForce 610. I've built some potent desktops using the 610, consuming 40-45w idle, 60w peak. If you underclock the CPU, you can probably drop even lower. The low heat output also means you can get away with a tiny chassis.
RAID5 is going to kill your performance, no matter what kind of CPU you have. Don't expect much above 20-30mb/sec unless you spend a zillion dollars on a hardware-accelerated RAID controller. With the low cost of hard drives, I've switched over to RAID1+0 setups, which deliver high speed at the cost of 50% overhead. With today's prices, that means each TB of RAID1 costs roughly $320. One thing I've been meaning to try is RAIF, filesystem-level RAID-like striping/parity. RAIF allows certain files (or directories) to be mirrored for safety, while less important files can be singly stored to maximize capacity.
If you choose carefully, you could end up with a near-silent, face-melting NAS. Myself, I run it as a combined firewall/NAT, NAS, print server and MP3 jukebox. Not bad for a $150 PC (excluding disks).
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I got the Thecus N5200, supports samba, ftp, nfs, iscsi, usb...
Its got its downsides (iscsi, usb, are all seperate fs's from samba/nfs, so its not one huge volume), but I got 5x 1TB drives and did RAID5, its a good, fairly small & low power storage box.
Not the fastest thing in the world, but then, I'm looking for bulk storage for video's, not necessarily speed.
Well mine isn't that advanced but I ordered a NAS kit from Newegg.com where you can put in your own HD (IDE in my case) and it has a web interface for the setting it up. The NAS runs ftp, smb, http, torrent downloader, and it runs on embedded UCLInux.
I'm looking for a cheap simple NAS. performance not particularly important, RAID unimportant.
what I would really like is something very much like my Linksys print server, which is a 3" x3" x .75 box that connects to my router and has a USB port on the back, but geared towards storage.
cheap matters.
simple matters.
multiple drives would be nice (connecting a usb hub to a single port is fine with me)
performance? it's only serving a max of 3 computers on a wireless-g network, no video, mainly just a photo repository and critical docs backup.
I'm not interested in building something from scratch, I might be willing to re-purpose an existing device (a-la tomato on wrt54g) if it were easy enough.
any ideas?
The difference between Theory and Practice is greater in Practice than in Theory.
It all comes down to what performance level you want and what budget you have.
Generally using a good RAID card in a modern PC, with an external enclosure will give by far the best performance.
This also has the benefit of allowing you to choose what software you are running.
It also means you are not tied to a manufacturer of a standalone NAS solution for updates and bug fixes.
Also beware, as a number of NAS manufacturers have used GPL software and have obviously violated GPL.
Maurice W. Hilarius Voice: (778) 347-9907
The cache size on any array is what is going to give you the performance that you are seeking. The backend protection scheme, while very relevant to protect data, is insignificant compared to how much cache you have in an array.
As you all know, it is much faster to read/write at the speed of cache then it is at the speed of disk.
The answer to your all your questions is no.
the drives I attach to the desktop are also exported so anyone can reach them. And since when one is sharing a disk some computer either has to be on all the time or easily woken from sleep.
As long as I have to have a computer on, i'll make it the desktop not the server in the garage. And in most households one can even let the computer sleep since walking over to the den to wake it so it can begin sharing to another computer is not that big a deal.
My problem with online storage is that I have more than 30GB of photos and MP3s and e-mail. And I prefer to operate in a mode where I back everything since it's faster to recover if I have a disk image.
Also with on-line storage the outbound time may be incremental but when you actually want to use it the bandwidth is non-trivial. Even keeping a disk mounted webdav or ftp for long enough to move 30GB is moving to the dicey regime. PLus there may be a bandwidth cap.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
and found that if you want USB you are looking at getting a external disk drive with a network connection. I couldn't find a NAS that allowed you to connect via USB for initial population of the drives. Mind you this was about 6 months ago so things may be different now
RAID10, is a mirror of RAID5 arrays.
RAID0+1, is a RAID5 of mirrors.
No. The old nomenclature (such as "RAID10") was never defined properly so different people used different definitions. One vendor's RAID10 can be the same as another vendor's RAID0/1 so be careful.
Since 1990 or thereabouts people have taken to using the plus symbol, so
RAID0+1 is a RAID1 of RAID0s (a single mirror)
RAID1+0 is a RAID0 of RAID1s (a bunch of mirrors)
RAID5+0 adds (or stripes) a bunch of RAID5 arrays together.
You notate the RAID levels in the order they were applied; if I take 96 disks and make 12 stripe sets (RAID0) and then make six mirror pairs (RAID1) and then make a RAID5 array from them, it would be a RAID0+1+5 array. The notation is infinitely extensible and simple to learn and remember.
consumer grade nas appliance out there. Appliances just don't have the power/resources to deal with gigabit network speeds and transfers.
The problem is the term "NAS" has been thieved by cheap, crappy devices. Anything affordable that calls itself a "NAS" is really a disk drive(s) with some crappy software bolted on. Much better to put said drive in a real computer.
NASes become worth it when you are ready to spend real money and get a real NAS. If you've got $20,000 to blow, get a NetApp FAS. It is amazingly good in every respect. However, after using one, don't assume that spending $200 gets you the same sort of thing at home, just less of it. Real powerful NASes have a very high entry cost. They are worth it, if you need that kind of power, but if not a computer with drives is the way to do it.
No one has mentioned this one yet. I own several of QNAP's NAS boxes. I've been very pleased with them all.
Have a look at the specs at the mfr page:
http://www.qnap.com/pro_detail_feature.asp?p_id=85
I have had 2 freenas boxes working faultlessly with windoze boxes, but just couldn't get my 'testing-the-water' umbongo(8.04) box to play nice with them. I could browse the shares(CIFS), even write to them, but not read files back from them(except with FTP). Much swearing and cursing and setting switches and things on the freenas and umbongo until i updated to the latest freenas image (by using cd as i had been on 0.66 or 0.67 or something) and hey press-stud, everything is working perfectly.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
With any of these RAID methods make sure you pay attention to your disk controllers as well. If you have a controller go out and all the disks on that controller go with it, what happens to your array? Things to keep in mind...
You're right. And having two or more controllers does not always help - unless you intelligently distribute your RAID elements across more than one bus. And don't forget to put your power supplies on separate circuit breakers, too.
Although I use FreeNAS because I always have spare parts around. After alot of looking around and playing, QNAP is a great ready built solution. (qnap.com)
-- Eekrano
One aspect of the Synology product line that separates it from the competition is their software strategy.
The only differences between any two Synology products is the hardware. The firmware is the same for all products. You get the same platform, the same services, and applications, but they just handle more data or run faster, depending on the hardware choice. I really like that I just pay for scale. There are no "kiddie" versions of the software.
The OS is Linux (busybox), so it's very familiar. Busybox cannot be extended as endlessly as a traditional distro, but the company includes a pretty complete set of utilities, a full LAMP stack, and an impressive collection of applications. Documentation is good, including a nice integration guide for integrating your own apps with the device (http://www.synology.com/enu/support/3rd-party_application_integration.php )
All in all, it was their vision of a NAS device as a no-excuses, true server platform for my content that won me over.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Sounds like you want a NAS unit with capabilities for a Small Office, Home Office (SOHO). Strangely, I find no mention of the Thecus line of NAS units. http://www.thecus.com/ These would be worth investigating. I personally run the thecus N5200, and two of my clients run the N5200 PRO's. The N5200 series are the only SOHO NAS units with 5 available slots and raid 5.
One of my clients has a ReadyNAS, so I've had the opportunity to compare all 3 units directly. Note that this unit wasn't a ReadyNAS+, but from what I've read, there's been no increase in speed. The largest difference is speed of file serving, although the web-based configuration is a factor as well. The Thecus blows the ReadyNAS out of the water. ReadyNAS gets about 10MB/s on a good day, and the Thecus N5200Pro units approach 30 MB/s. My older N5200 unit does about 20MB/s over gige.
Today's prices are even more convincing- The N5200PRO is available for about $750 at http://www.eaegis.com/, http://www.newegg.com/ has the ReadyNAS+ for about $900.
The N5200's have other advantages- 5 bays for instance. They also run linux, with the source for each model available at Thecus. They also have modules for special types of file serving, and you can even ssh to the box while it's running.
Here's the thing. I fell into NAS because I needed more storage space at home, to hold all my business data. And system backups. And stuff. I started with a home-built linux server running samba, but quickly realized that stock linux raid fails in the areas of raid expansion (adding more drives) and raid migration (let's run raid 5, now that I have enough cash to actually buy 3 drives). You can migrate, but you have to put the data somewhere else while you're doing it. I wanted a simple box that would do those things for me. On my N5200 unit, I have personally migrated from raid 1 to raid 5, and expanded the raid from 250GB to 320 GB drives. I now have 5 drives, will be expanding the raid with 750's soon. That would be have rather painful on a simple linux based server. I don't know about Freenas, but the hardware it supports is rather limited. Same thing for a zfs solution, not to mention that I'd have run Solaris -yuch.
If you're going to fully populate the unit from the start with the biggest drives available, raid migration and expansion won't mean much. The Thecus N5200PRO still wins as it's the only unit with 5 bays, so you get the full 4 TB's possible. That being said, the linux/freenas/zfs server options can be nice, because you'll have more control over your server, and can possibly be cheaper.
The big point here is that raid is not backup. raid is high availability, and you'll need some way to back it up. What do I do? Well, since the raid is HA, all I need is simple windows box with raid 0 or spanning and a few drives. That's if I'm doing CIFS. It'd be a linux box and nfs if that were what all my home/office boxes were. As long as the Thecus or the backup is up, I'm good.
Good luck on your search
The Internet has no garbage collection
Keep the 4U and get a low-power mobo/CPU/chipset. I think you'll find that the 4U, while bulky, ensures that you will always have a very flexible setup.
At work, we go with SuperMicro 3U chassis and build out from there. Parts are very easy to come by, since, with the exception of the chassis itself, all parts are commodity items and very easy to replace.
Another alternative is Soekris + USB external drive. Very low power, although quite a bit more limited than the rackmount setup mentioned above.
I basically would never buy a pre-built integrated solution; I like having full control over the hardware.
Boy oh boy, are you in luck.
I happen to have an American Megatrends nStore SCSI Raid enclosure. It has 4 18GB drives in it, currently configured as RAID 5.
You can HAVE it. I'll throw in the PCI LSI SCSI controller card.
Seriously, I've been trying to give this thing away. No one wants it. It works.
I just can't understand why.
Just email me your shipping address and it's yours.
If you do what you always did, you get what you always got.
I bought a QNAP TS109 6 month ago and is very pleased with it. Although it's not a RAID, QNAP has a bigger model with RAID in it as well.
The biggest advantage is the low power it's using. According to www.qnap.com it's only using 15W and has everything that I needed: Samba, FTP, a full LAMP setup, bittorrent client, etc, and it's very silent.
Before I bought the QNAP, I used a computer running 24/7 as well, using about 200W, and I calculated that I would earn the price of the QNAP in about year of usage compared to having the computer running. (this is with swedish electricity prices)
I was going to start in on this conversation, but I realized my experience is with NetApp, BlueArc and a few others. Amazingly, I think these are outside of the normal price-range most /. people are looking for on this specific topic. =/
--
This post brought to you by the captcha 'Venture'.
you know what i'm like... ya play it in your system every night
------ no thanks... I've quit
My disks would be pretty much spinning all the time even though for home usage i'd say I actually hit non-local disks maybe a few times a week at most
man hdparm
Its a fairly standard util included with most Linux distros. Specifically check the -Sx option (where x is an integer > 0), which sets idle-spindown time. Note, there is a warning regarding hdparm use with software/bios raid, and I havent tried using it myself on drives involved in RAID, so YMMV. Changing spindown time shouldnt adversely effect the RAID though, as it would just block IO until the drives spin up. I think the warning is more in regards to setting the DMA, 32 bit IO and other more IO/low level oriented options.
Since you only hit the drives occasionally, this would keep them turned "off" most of the time, so long as you dont keep swap or some active partition on the drives as well.
tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
Try a DROBO
Get RAID-1337. Mirror a RAID 3 of a RAID 3 of a non-standard RAID 7.
Owned (data reliability)!
And your power supply too!
NexentaStor is a virtual NAS that uses zfs to provide almost unlimited storage capacity. Check it out- it provides a good alternative to proprietary hardware/NAS systems.
Namaste
and really like it. Small. It can take up to 4 disks. I have 2 750GB drives in a mirror raid, and back up to a 3rd 750GB drive weekly.
It's got DDR2 memory, pretty fast network access, and only takes ~30watts.
I can ssh in with putty and play around with it.
So far, I've installed an svn server on it and have all of my code in svn now.
Two thumbs up here.
Don't steal. The government hates competition.
I really like my TagmaStore Universal Storage Platform by Hitachi. It is a little more expensive then some of the other solutions I have seen people posting, but it seems to work really well.
I actually setup 2 in my basement and do a software raid 1 array across them from my hosts, and I get great performance.
I would deffinately recommend one of these baby's for storing all your mp3s or video.
This same thing was asked roughly 9 months ago which got me thinking about my own solution. At first I was going to set up something like FreeNAS in a VM (easy backup, save states, etc.) but soon realized I needed more.
What I have now is a dedicated machine with four 500 gig HDDs in RAID 0+1 (I wanted 1+0 but I couldn't find the option and it's too late now).
In addition to a place on the network to store all my excessive files I can also use it for things like downloading media with Miro and sharing the media with TVersity, which allows me to stream media to my 360 etc.
In addition I added an RSYNC relationship (with deltacopy) between it and my primary PC for backing up and it is running JungleDisk (attached to Amazon's S3) for auto backup offsite.
It also is there if I want to rip and re-encode a DVD to DivX but still use my main machine for something else.
This is probably more than you were asking for but it is working pretty well for me.
If you wanted a low-power solution you could set all the above up with one of those mini-itx VIA boards (just buy a bulky enough PSU). The only devices I have are the five HDDs and a rarely used DVD-ROM. It doesn't actually take a lot of watts even with a normal board.
VIA mini-itx resource:
http://www.mini-itx.com/
DeltaCopy:
http://www.aboutmyip.com/AboutMyXApp/DeltaCopy.jsp
Miro:
http://www.getmiro.com/
TVersity:
http://tversity.com/
JungleDisk:
http://www.jungledisk.com/
Amazon S3:
http://aws.amazon.com/s3
"UNIX is very simple, it just needs a genius to understand its simplicity." -Dennis Ritchie
SuperMicro has a lot of fun chassis options; and OpenFiler does a fantastic job with iSCSI, NFS, Samba.
Not a true geek solution but keep your existing setup or something similar for your network shared storage and back that up to a cheap external USB/1394 portable drive(s) mounted with Truecrypt on a schedule.
This is extremely flexible, reliable, secure and is extremely low cost and non proprietary and your backups will not be sitting on the same box and "online" with the rest of your shared mounted file systems.
I'm sure that old 4U machine is not very efficient either and/or it is probably extremely loud and if it is more modern, it is far more than you would ever need to serve up 5-15 concurrent connections.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
The first thing I would do is narrow down your choices to a couple of companies and then look at the reviews on smallnetbuilder.com. The guys at smallnetbuilder put a lot of time into writing good reviews, so you won't find a regurgitation of the marketing materials like you do on other review sites. Another good feature of their site are the NAS charts (http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/component/option,com_nas/Itemid,190/). You can look at a number of different variables on all of the NAS boxes they have reviewed. For example, you can compare NAS read and write performance over 100Mbps Raid 5, 4k jumbo frames, 1000 Mbps Raid 10, etc.
You may come to another decision after doing your own research, but when I faced a similar situation for my home network, I went with QNAP. The thing that I really like about them is that their developers are very active on the official forum (http://forum.qnap.com/). They release firmware updates regularly and always seem to be looking for ways to make their users happy. YMMV, but I am pretty happy with their product.
I don't want to nitpick too much, but RAID 5 is faster for most garden variety storage needs, and for any sort of read access. Obviously you would never want to use it for a database or a swap file if you can avoid it - it is much slower any time you are writing out data in sizes that are smaller than the block size (and some controllers just suck, too).
I prefer RAID 10 though, but not for performance. And of course you must remember that RAID helps with failover, not backups.
If you like or know Apple you might already know "time capsule".
I am recently considering it for home use. Has no raid, but you can use it for various other tasks.
It has gigabit ports, so as a network storage it can be quite fast. Also you can add an external disk, so you might be able to raid them (well, mirroring mode), use it as an access point or wireless disk besides a print server.
Well, then again, I like it because I need a cheap gigabit solution, and having a large disk as backup comes handy besides the new long-range WIFI.
Just my 2c, for the price it is a nice option.
An other could be a NSLU with linux and several usb disks, but for me anything other than firewire is not a favoured solution. Please do not bother about specs and read reviews before telling how much USB is faster than firewire. It is NOT most of the time....
Been using unRAID for years now. One system is all IDE, the other all SATA. The IDE is a mix of drives all no bigger than 500gigs - 12 of them. The SATA is 9 drives with 4 of them as big as 1TB and the others at 750 or so. The software is well supported, constantly improved, the source for the GPL parts is available, and the author doesn't mind people trying to expand what it can do. It's write speed is indeed slow but they have a caching scheme now to help fix that - I've not tried it. Read speeds are as fast as I get from a Windows server and the thing is fast enough to stream multiple copies of HD video across a network. You can mount each disk as a share or setup spanned shares for data access. It doesn't support FTP out of the box and it's NOT "RAID5" but I find it superior in that I can have mixed drive sizes and spin down drives not being used.
Worth a look IMO.
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
It depends entirely on the OS that's most commonly used throughout the network. If you're using a lot of Windows PCs, one of the solutions from one of the major manufacturers (Buffalo, Freecom etc) should serve you well. If you're using a lot of Macintoshes running OS X and/or a lot of Unix boxes, then Apple's Time Machine will appeal to you (although its on-board storage space is comparatively small, so you may want to add another hard drive to it by USB). If using Linux, you might want to consider FreeNAS.
Each of these solutions has its own merits and pitfalls. If you're feeling adventurous, you could stick a RAID5 array into a small form-factor case like a pizza box, and stick FreeNAS on that.
Those using pirated Tinysoft signatures(TM) are a real threat to society and should all be thrown in jail.
Instead of a NAS, I use two Antec 900 cases with low-end pc. Each case can hold up to 9 HD (if you don't need an internal DVD), and the disks are located in 3-disk containers with a dedicated 120mm fan (yep, one fan for every 3 disks!). There is also a huge 200mm fan on top of the case and a 120mm on back. With all those fans the disks stay cool no matter how badly you ride them, and the fans can be set at the minimum speed; there is not much noise. Also there is 2xUSB and 1xfirewire ports on top of the case, which I use for the O/S.
So in a single case (which is also quite the looker) you can get 9x500GB or even 9x1TB. Of course you need to find a mobo with enough SATA (or IDE if you prefer) connectors, but 2x SATA RAID 1 cards are cheap and reliable. And you also need a good PSU (I live and die by Antec!).
I don't know where you live, but here in Canada this whole setup is quite cheap:
-mobo+cpu+2GB DDR2: 225$
-psu: 100$
-SATA RAID cards (2): 50$
-Antec 900: 125$
-9x500GB HDs: 800$
-USB stick (for the O/S): 20$
So for less than 1500$ you get a 2.2TB fully redundant storage, on which you can connect using Samba, NFS or whatever protocol your Linux O/S supports. As for myself, I use iSCSI and LVM in my client PC to connect to my 2 Antec servers so my system is completely redundant.
The only tricky part is to access the RAID cards from Linux, but even with no-name brands you can make it work with stock drivers and a good search engine...
lucm, indeed.
Drobo is the Tivo of NAS. If you can afford it, it is worth it (if that doesn't make sense to you, you can't afford it).
Don't buy one of these. The drives are non removable (voids warranty) and when it fails like mine did after 9 months they expect you to send it in for repair without take the drives out. As I have all my financial information on it there is no chance so now I have a very expensive door stop.
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A Sun Enterprise x4500 running ZFS on Solaris ?
My mod points ran out or I'd flag your post. I'm barely linux literate, and it was a snap to set up and a snap to run. Serves my media machines. Case, MB, and cooling are key, but relatively simple with a browse of the forums.
There have been some minor speed concerns because the parity is calculated by the CPU, so the Limeware team added a cache drive to allow faster writing, and offline transfer to the array. For consumer media it's not an issue (few writes, reads are faster than my poorly tuned gigabit network), but the team is planning on making the cache drive a hot spare. So if you lost one drive, the hot spare would step in (auto/manual isn't certain at this point). The added bonus is that a failure of 2 drives means the loss of only one drive worth of data. With 6-8 drives, that's a nice bonus.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Check http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/component/option,com_nas/Itemid,190
Cheap and dead good setup: ProLiant DL180 + 1TB disks w/ compatible trays + Linux + Zumastor
The HP ProLiant DL180 server is a 2U rack server with 12 SATA 3.5 slots starting at US $1299. You may also use the older DL320s but its processor is less powerful, it only admits 8GB RAM and the machine is more expensive.
Buy the server, then buy 12 empty trays at US $25. I've always bought them at SCSITray (you are looking for part number 373211-001
Now, but 2x80GB SATA disks for system in RAID-1 and 10x1TB SATA disks for data in RAID-5 (if you want RAID-6, you need a P400 controller with BBWC or a P800 controller with BBWC, the P600 won't work with > 2TB volumes).
For the software part, install Linux and Zumastor, which provides ZFS-like features on top of any Linux filesystem (I'm using it on top of ext3, some people prefer XFS). In case you want to have several replicated fileservers, Zumastor does replication automagically for you.
I run a NetApp appliance and works very well with 23 Tb on it. NFS/CIFS is a snap to setup, supports snapshots, dynamic resizing, and can have a fully duplexed config (failover - mirrored file servers). We are using its "Dual Parity" feature where you can lose up to two disks in a RAID pack and it will be fine.
It amazes me how everyone is wrapped up in the hardware debate when really the bigger concern is when is the file system going to blow up. People it's not a matter of hardware it a matter of getting the data you thought you put somewhere when your grandchild wants to see pictures of grandma. So pick what ever box you want but give yourself a fighting chance and get a filesystem with end to end integrity. I've seen too many file systems eat themselves and there is not a RAID configuration out there that is going to save you. Now on the subject of hardware RAID, you better have a good reason to use the low to medium power processors in the ones currently available. If you are not doing heavy duty movie production, save the recovery nightmare, there are places where the cache and the CPU offload make sense, but not at home. If you have a spare change talking tens of thousands here, look at what SUN did with the X4500, 48 screaming disks of raw heart stumping data flow, then again 6 disk controllers, 16 Gigabytes of memory, and 4 opteron cores directly hooked to said memory make for a nice day. By the way don't forget the 10 Gigabit Network pipe to get that raging data flowing.
HATE 'em. Now. Just kidding. Actually, I got a Linksys EFG80. I wonder if can get FreeNAS to work on it.
All this talk about RAID and no zfs link yet?
http://flux.org.uk/howto/solaris/zfs_tutorial_01
I was reading about the Asus Eee box released in 2 weeks time and I'm thinking of using it for my NAS. It's not likely to support RAID tho (maybe through software hack?). It has enough USB port for plugging in my old external hard-drives and maybe replace the hard-drive it comes with if I need more storage.
The real interesting thing is that its' only $269 each and consume only 14.5W of power at idle (http://www.anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=3321&p=5)
Grab 4 disks, take the last 15%-20% (read: slowest tracks) of each disk and make them a four disk raid 5. Use that for your 'archive' since it's slow anyways, and you'll not want the seek performance of reaching to the inside track during regular use. Since we all know you're rolling off to DVD/CD/tape/whatever, losing this four disk RAID 5 won't matter much to you.
Then do either raid 6 over the four disks through the next 50% of the drives, and make the first 25% a blazing fast (albeit expensive in cost/MB) RAID 10.
Line up all the stripes to 256KB chunks on the RAID 5's, 128KB on the RAID 6's and 64KB on the RAID 10's (32KB where databases are) and make sure your file system/logical volume manager align to this chunk size, as well. Keeps everything fast and peppy, even while transferring to the 'archive' tracks at the end of the disk.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
Value your data? Don't use RAID-5 !!
http://www.baarf.com/
Build a dedicated machine - I built a NAS machine for the small office I have. I tried openfiler and FreeNAS - both of which are fine for a small network but didn't support LDAP authentication easily (I wanted direct connection to the NAS but still having it secure). I also tried nexentastor which is incredibly powerful but in the end was too complex for what I needed and caused me headaches trying to setup the raid configuration I wanted (also 1tb limit without paying thousands).
In the end I built a debian server running software raid 10 with as an NFS server. Permissions wise this was perfect as we used LDAP to authenticate each user and to supply the Nas machine with its users and groups. Each user had their home drive on that machine and it allowed us easy hot desk capability.
I'm also not one for running ridiculously over spec hardware - the only requirement was no data loss so the machine is an amd x2 5000 with 4 x 500gb samsung sata drives. Whole thing cost less than $1k.
This is with 20 concurrent users all with their home dirs mnted to this machine
top - 08:24:31 up 34 days, 15:00, 1 user, load average: 0.02, 0.02, 0.00
Tasks: 91 total, 2 running, 89 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 0.0% us, 0.2% sy, 0.0% ni, 99.7% id, 0.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.2% si
Mem: 4048608k total, 4020036k used, 28572k free, 365008k buffers
Swap: 2040244k total, 76k used, 2040168k free, 3093528k cached
I have since copied this setup for a home server - the only difference is I also run a samba server so it can act as a central point for multiple media centers
Take a look at Drobo with the drobo share attachment.
Just putting this out there but I'm on my third drive in 6 months. Their firmware controlled hardware is crap. The hd itself has been solid but then again. I've never used it over 3 months.
http://www.scalableinformatics.com/summary/products
http://jackrabbit.scalableinformatics.com/
Regards.
http://www.onebackup.com/ [onebackup.com]
$12.95 / month unlimited storage.
But no linux lol.
Use Solaris with ZFS, gives you a system with a storage system that can keep growing.
I wonder how many comments are going to be left here, all over the map from "cheap P3 at ebay with 12 TB of SATA drives crammed in there" to "If you haven't spent at least $25,000, you aren't serious" before anybody realizes that TFA is about some guy's personal backups. Queue at least 10 comments
This is some guy dinking around in the cellar at his mom's house, for all we know.
And there's nothing here that wouldn't be easily found Googling for "cheap nas" or something like that. Howtos for this are a dime a dozen. Really, it's kind of annoying to have such a troll article as this dropped on all of us. Guess you gotta get the cheap hits for ad dollars though.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
This has already been covered. http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/21/141244 My opinion is that most of the set-top boxes you can buy are quite crappy, and FreeNAS is somewhat unreliable. I prefer a proper linux distro with disks in RAID-1 (or 5) running Samba.
Depending on your budget, the ReadyNAS is a good buy. We just deployed a 20TB NAS using the Open-E DSS. Not cheap, but it works, and we like it. http://www.open-e.com/
Theres alot of arguments in the replies about things unrelated (like the symantics of raid levels.
My personal option at home was (for some time) a very cheap amd mb with a gig connection and 6 sata disks 3 medium sized fast canavores striped and 3 larger (slower) disks (used as raw volumes for backup with bacula. Some of this storage was on shares, others were used as iscsi volumes and after trying a few of the bits of software out there (freenas/openfiler) i finally decided just putting fedora (any linux based os will do, ubuntu, suse, whatever floats your boat) and webwin was perfectly satisfactory (later it all got replaced with a very speedy xeon machine work gave me and so now i have no real nas as such.
There are a number of devices that i have used (the linksys nslu2 for example) which are perfectly good (only 100mb ethernet though). And i've heard good things about the d-link dns-323, both exceptionally low power devices.
But also the other day i saw these:
http://www.intel.com/products/motherboard/d945gclf/ and http://www.intel.com/products/motherboard/dg45fc/ which both look like fantastic little products to build off. Ultimately, there are quite a number of good products out there that do it "out of the box" like the thecus things, but I personally prefer something a little more flexible then they prefer.
I haven't seen any of the posts above mention the Thecus NB5200. I also quite like the Netgear Readynas NV+ it is a slicker device -- however, the Thecus has a bit more raw power and also an extra drive bay.
The thecus supports a 5 disk RAID array (inc. RAID 6) has 1ghz or 1.5ghz (I can't remember) celeron CPU. ISCSI, various UPNP media servers, itunes shareing, BT clients, VPN etc...
The web interface is a bit rough around the edges, but it is really quite a capable device.
These devices be plagued by them! I wrote a report about Synology a while back that documented dozens of amateur, remotely exploitable bugs in their entire NAS line. I later audited their web application and found similar issues. Here's my report: http://cryptocity.net/archive/synology_report.pdf If anyone wants me to do a brief evaluation of any other NAS products, feel free to contact me.
I have not used the product but Data Robotics makes a device called Drobo for $450. It is a smart external USB drive which can upgrade to 16TB of data using SATA and SATA II drives. The propaganda states that you can replace smaller/failed drive on the fly. The system automatically reconfigures the storage to minimize data loss (i.e. data redundancy, but seriously if you pour battery acid on it the life expectancy will be reduced). For only $200 you can also get a network adapter to convert your USB drive to a non-enterprise level NAS device to share your terabytes of home videos. It appears to be using RAID+5. When you get tired of the NAS crap you can unplug the drive from the NAS box and use the USB mode (called a "drive on a rope" or tethered drive?). It can handle EXT3, HFS+, NTFS, FAT32, SMB/CIFS. As for power? In USB mode it uses between 12W (drive spin down mode) to 40W (four drives ready to squirrel away your data). Add a light dimming, nuclear power plant taxing 6W when you add the NAS module.
Down side is the website seems almost too good to be true. So...before you buy find an unbiased reviewer (preferably one who is NOT on the books).
A/C
- "Another loud mouth who is too lazy to register."
After a lot of research, I chose the Thecus N5200 Pro for my NAS. As one of the very few enclosures that takes five disks, it gives you a lot more storage capacity. Here are the thigns that I like about it: - takes five disks, therefore up to almost 4TB in RAID 5 with 1TB disks (this is how I'm running it) - uses a Celeron CPU rather than XScale or other underpowered CPUs that most other NAS's use. This enables it to get significantly better performance than XScale models - 512MB cache memory - dual GigE ports offering load balancing or failover. As previously stated about the Netgear NV+, it just works. But this has the benefit of not being short of CPU power (especially when calcuating parity over 5 disks) and having 5 disks to give you the additional storage and performance of additional spindles.
I'm very happy with my QNAP TS-209 Pro (2-drive model). I currently have it configured in a RAID-1 with 2x500GB SATA disks. Lot's of nice features and very low power usage in sleep mode.
I recommend Snap servers. They've worked pretty well for me so far... It even uses a Linux kernel... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snap_Server http://www.snapappliance.com/
I'm like a superhero, but with no powers or motivation.
Some people who do HPC tell me all the HP controllers are slow, in any mode, if you hook enough disks to them.
Nothing to see here; Move along.
The Buffalo nowadays has hot-swap drives. The older ones do not and you need to take out 27 screws to get to the drives. That's okay if you have the afternoon spare, however, it is a real pain when another drive fails the following week. That happened to me and I was not pleased. :-)
Backing up the Buffalo over the network took a whole weekend and it would not be able to do this to a local drive, i.e. plugged into the USB port. It even had problems with a Buffalo drive plugged in. The only way to do it was with a Linux machine - the M$ powertoy for syncing drives would not do it (and I blame those Apple resource files...).
Eventually we moved to a homebrew solution that re-used an old server. We stuck in a SATA card and four 750Gb drives, added SAMBA shares and used the Linux to do the RAID. A complete backup was needed so we setup a different machine with 'spare' drives in it and used 'rsync' to do the honours when nobody was in the office. This meant that we could also get back recently deleted files
The Buffalo is a tempting offer due to the bang per buck, however, the homebrew was a better deal. We also got to re-use hardware, a good thing to do if you want to at least pretend to be 'green'.
I use a Drobo with DroboShare. The Drobo is USB connected and can be used with a single PC. DroboShare is an add-on that the Drobo plugs into to allow it to be connected over a 10/100/1000 Ethernet connection. Since it's USB based, the speed isn't spectacular, but it's fast enough on a Gigabit network to play two DVD images over the network simultaneously.
Drobo holds up to 4 SATA drives and has redundancy, but it's technically not RAID5. Rather than limiting the array size to a multiple of the smallest drive, you get an aggregate of the storage of all the drives minus the size of the largest disk for redundancy. For example, with RAID5, 2x250 GB drives + 2x500 GB drives gives you 750 GB of usable space (4x250 - 1x250 parity) with the 500 GB drives being pretty much wasted since you only get 250 GB out of each. With the Drobo you'd get 1 TB (2x250 + 2x500 - 1x500 parity). You can hot-swap dead drives or add higher capacity drives and it will automatically expand the available space while retaining existing files (unlike RAID5 implementations I've used).
I'm using a Drobo + DroboShare with 4x500 GB Western Digital GreenPower drives, which run absolutely silently and cool. I am completely happy with it. It looks very slick and has a capacity indicator and drive status lights.
Check it out at http://www.drobo.com/ Their Drobolator virtual Drobo shows how much space you'll get from any combination of drives (up to 2.7 TB). Please note I am in no way affiliated with Drobo other than being a very satisfied customer.
best of both worlds...
http://www.fitpc.com/ -- bog standard via based i386 compatible server, install any distro you want on it using an external optical drive. fanless, high tolerance to temperature variations, consumes 4 watts. Has 2 USB ports.
http://www.drobo.com/ -- usb box that isn't RAID. Just throw in a random collection of drives and it will give you the most capacity you can reasonably ask for with no configuration. dead simple.
Unless you don't care about speed.
I've been unimpressed with NAS speed claims -- only recently, I found one with a 1G ethernet connection -- but it didn't need it -- with a 2x750G, 7200RPM SATA RAID-0, read was 12MB/s, and writes were about 9-10MB/s. It used ext3 as a file system, but don't know what the OS was (would guess linux, but dunno where else ext3 might be).
It went back to Fry's and I haven't tried it since. That's about the speed I got on a laptop drive ... about 7 years back... Not too impressive.
But what I'd like to know -- is finding one that does auto-versioning of the files you copy to it -- so if you want to restore, you can choose which version to go back to.
Any file-systems/programs that allow that other than Windows Server?
L.
No matter what hardware you go with, make sure you have a UPS if you use RAID5 or 6; 2 sequential outages can cause loss of ALL of your data, if there was a write during the first outage.
The problem is the RAID will start rebuilding when the power comes back, and a second outage at that point is often fatal.
Nothing to see here; Move along.
I've found Raid0 to be faster.
Nightly backups, provide security for catastrophic failures. Yeah, for as often as it happens, a few extra hours to restore from backup is worth it. I think that's once in the past 15 years.
But I also don't wait for drives to fail -- I upgrade them every few years like you're supposed to.
But I have room for 4 drives -- so to "move up", a RAID0+1 system would do nothing -- so RAID5 seems like a
logical step up.
Nothing beats nightly incremental backups, especially if you are on a budget. As for RAID10 -- that won't protect against a software catastrophe (virus; rm -fr / tmp/* ) -- versioned nightly backups are alot more flexible.
The backup disks can be big/slow S/ATA, and the working disks can be 15K-SAS. Depends on where you want to
put your money -- me, I put the speed into the SAS-based disks (and they still aren't as fast as I'd like).
But SAS drives -- to waist 50%? Not cheap.
However, if a client is paying...then, 0+1 or 5+spare might be reasonable...but I'd still prefer an automated
backup -- Windows Server has file versioning -- don't know of any freeware product that does the same.
Guess one might have to go with Microsoft if one wants that type of reliability. (*cough*, ducking)
L.
yes ... floppies!
maintainable, but a bit of work as floppies go bad every once in a while.
easy to build, the drives are relatively inexpensive. you can pick them up cheap.
you may need a bit of room, especially with a raid setup. it requires a bit of space for 500 gb or larger.
the cacophony of my 500 gb drive definitely lets me know my investment is working for me. the grinding drives settle into the background sooner than you think!
its the ultimate back up solution for my workstation!
"They say travel broadens the mind, so I went over the falls in a barrel." -Thomas Dolby
You didn't state if it's for home or your company.
If it's not for home use ring up Dell, HP or EMC and look at a SAN-backed EMC Celerra or Windows Storage Server.
I really like the look of NexentaStor, which is OpenSolaris + ZFS (http://www.nexenta.com) It's got a few downsides for a roll-your-own solution (limited to 1TB for the free version, no turnkey hardware config)
I'd really like to see a productized low-power x86 system with battery backup and pluggable SATA trays in a small footprint running NexentaStor. I think it could be produced very cheaply and blow anything currently out there away from a usability perspective.
Here is the direct URL for the ZFS articles: http://breden.org.uk/2008/03/02/a-home-fileserver-using-zfs/
My principle problem with NAS is that they're all easy to install, but few of them document recovery of a dead drive. I want a simple mirror or RAID5 for home, but I've put it off until I find out how recovery works, and I find that often not very well documented.
But I'll have to bite the bullet at some point :-)
Insert
I realize that you can build your own, but sometimes it is nice not to have to engineer and administer every little piece of your network. I put my Terastation on line in a few minutes. It has a gigabit ethernet with jumbo packets. It has smb afp and ftp access. It has worked well for two years now. It is small and quiet, and gives me a good feeling about my data being safe. I am paying less money using this appliance than I would running a PC chassis and drives. YMMV
First, always remember that RAID is no replacement for a backup system. You need both.
Second, avoid anything that involves LaCie products. In my experience, they suck camels throw straws.
If 60 -CENTS- a day is killing your budget, get a job that pays more than whatever it is you're doing. You socialists must like living the life of a poor monk. Come on. $20 a MONTH for backups is chicken feed.
Sorry, but a Thumper is way to expensive to keep a personal collection of pirated MP3s and out of focus photographs ....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
If your data is mostly read only, or if you have little metadata (i.e. big files) RAID5 is perfectly adequate.
After reading this thread it feels like RAID5 is the Sun of mirroring schemes here in /. (hated without a solid reason).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
From the page:
Quote
Get It
From $23,995.00 (US)
Unquote
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
If you are looking for something REALLY scalable google for Scale out File Services :-)
Well, that's OK, I will laugh with you!
Ha ha ha ha ha!
These Internets sure are fun.
"Nightly backups, provide security for catastrophic failures."
Yeah, you brought a point I didn't even went into but you are absolutly right: RAID is NOT a means to make your data safer, only more avaliable and that's people usually forget. It is not a question about "would I go with RAID or with backups?" since they are quite different beasts. RAID (higher than 0, I mean) is for your data to be accesable 24x7, not to cover your ass in case things wreak havoc. That's what backups are for.
versioning, lots of options depending on what you mean:
-- straight linux OS level snapshots...
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/snapshots_backup.html
-- source code management systems ... can be applied to entire file systems: git, subversion, tla, bzr, etc...
-- maintaining parallel copies: http://www.linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/2008063000526OSHL
surely lots of others too...
RAID10 does offer much better performance
Depends what you mean by better. Raid 10 will have better write performance than raid 5, but raid 5 has better read performance.
You also want to consider read/write performance after a disk dies and the array rebuilds with a hot-spare.
Volume snapshots looks to be closest, but it sure doesn't look even close to the functionality and ease-of-use as the Vista version.
In Vista Business, Enterprise or Ultimate, there is an extra tab under file properties called
"Previous Versions". There's a picture at http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/06/30/vista-previous-versions-shadow-copy-vs-recycle-bin/.
Not sure how it is implemented, but it is contingent on having "free" disk space to allow old copies to be 'kept'.
I'm not sure any of the Linux file systems would easily support this.
Sometimes it's not about what you "can do", but how easily you can do it. I wanted something I could hand to my folks who know nothing about OS's, or file systems, and it would "just work" -- but I certainly wouldn't want to curse them with Vista if avoidable.
It looks real slick, but I don't know how it is implemented in practice. It would not be acceptable to store a full copy of the file every 3 hours -- preferably not even on every change -- but on some 'delta' mechanism going back from the current version, only storing new copies if more than "N%" had changed.
I could see having a 1MB file, with 1 change every 1024 bytes in each of 1024 versions -- and ideally it would
only take 2MB, + book-keeping. Dunno if that is how the Vista version works, but its an ease-of-use issue. I'm still surprised Linux doesn't have a generic 'compress' tag to allow compression on top of any filesystem (at least as much as one can add an encryption layer over most filesystems).
??
L.
I got an infrant readynas NV+, now sold as the netgear readynas. It's pricy (I got mine for around $550 without any drives) but it's dead simple to use and maintain. I popped in 4 500GB drives from their approved list, let it grind away formatting, and instantly had about 1.5ish TB of storage ready.
http://www.netgear.com/Products/Storage.aspx
Features I like - the OS allows for plugins, however the included servers more than meet my needs. It came with various media servers and compatibility with every reasonably popular operating system. It's flexible and very configurable for both security and features. You can also upgrade the ram on the system mobo, which can add up to 10% or so of real-world performance for the cost of whatever it takes to pull that used sodimm from your spare parts bin.
Feature that is ok - I used "X-Raid", which is essentially raid 5 but with the ability to swap in drives of different sizes. The array automatically sizes itself to use 4x the capacity of the smallest drive, but if you upgrade one at a time with larger drives it will automatically resize to the larger capacity when all 4 drives are the new larger size. Downside - it's proprietary and not true raid5. On the gripping hand, I don't care. It works and automatically manages itself.
Feature I don't like - it's not very fast. Even over gigabit ethernet, it's no faster than a single USB drive. You can speed up writes by turning off journaling and trying different features, but it's still not very fast.
It's possible that netgear has increased the overall speed of the device since speculation in the user forum is that any changes to the unit's motherboard due to previous design obsolescence would invariably speed up the whole device in every way, but I have no direct knowledge about this. It seems that the unit is either cpu or drive controller limited, not limited by drive or network adaptor speed once you pop in a larger sodimm.
Bottom line - for me it was pricy peace of mind. It sits quietly in the corner of my office hooked up to my gigabit switch, and it's available 7/24 for backups. When I go on vacation, I can poke a hole in my router and get relatively secure web, ftp, nfs, etc. access to the unit. I can put my music or video library on it and stream to any computer on my LAN with the included media servers. Pricy, but useful and I haven't had to fiddle with it beyond the initial setup and minor tweaking of services the first week I owned it.
Check this out http://www.netgear.com/Products/Storage/ReadyNASNVPlus.aspx - Asit