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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."
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.
The price difference may disappear quickly with the difference in power usage.
According to my Kill-A-Watt, my old NAS box (old P4 desktop with two 750 gig SATA drives) costs me almost $20 a month in electricity more than those two drives in a USB enclosure hanging off my Airport Extreme.
When I was using a rack-mount HP server, it was costing me twice that!
I'm having hiccup problems with my Buffalo Pro II Rackmount... VMWare doesn't like accessing VMDK's off of the NAS because it apparently hiccups every 1 to 5 hours, which dumps VMWare to the floor. That and the speed degrades over the course of several weeks and I have to bounce the box. And thirdly, Apache on another box won't even start if a path to a share on the buffalo is referenced in the .conf file... and the apache box has full rights to the share and the NAS... I triple checked and had 3 buddies do the same.
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!
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.
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.
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.
We use these at work for secondary backup systems and as file servers for small offices. They are fast as they are one of the few that has hardware raid controllers rather than doing it with the OS. No complaints other than they cost a bit more but you are getting what you pay for.
After using others that do the raid in software I would never go back to that.
I was looking to buy a NAS device earlier this year, to replace an aging machine running Ubuntu acting as a file server only.
Every device I read reviews for had the same problem. The drives are never spun down, so they consume way, way too much power and die a premature death.
I want a device that can go into low-power standby after 30 minutes of non-use and wake on any LAN event. I just can't find anything out there capable of this.
Device needs to support Samba or another cross-platform utility. It needs to be able to interact with OSX / XP / Ubuntu desktops.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
DO NOT get a SATA card, unless you're putting it on a very fast (high speed) bus. A regular PCI bus is too slow.
I've found that MOBO's with SATA Raid on board are better performing and cheaper than separate MOBO and PCIe SATA Raid, but there are features on the PCIe SATA RAID controllers that many people might want.
ASUS makes a couple of MOBOs with SATA RAID, that I've found very good. I really like the NVIDIA SATA RAID setup on this board. Though you may be able to find a similar board cheaper somewhere else.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Using iSCSI, I maxed out a 100 megabit connection using an IDE drive. I feel confident that I could build on that pretty easily if I were thwacking a bunch of drives in there.
My plan is a FreeNAS box exporting drives over iSCSI to a Solaris server using ZFS. Easier to expand.
One of these and One of these in One of these.
Coolermaster makes some other cases with 8 (!!) 5.25" slots, which is enough for altogether too many drives. That said, the likelihood is that even four drive slots would give you enough room to move around. 4x1TB now, then in a year when it fills up, add 3x2TB. Down the road, replace the 4x1TB with 4x4TB, and so on.
Actually, running Solaris on it directly might be more efficient. Hmm..
Problem with Openfiler is it doesn't do any authentication itself. Or it didn't the last time I messed with it. You had to have another machine set up to do LDAP or Samba (or whatever) authentication. It was a huge pain in the ass and I gave up on it as a home-based solution. Very powerful, but huge overkill.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
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.