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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
.. 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.
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.
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'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
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
Good idea, but skip the D201GLY2A and get a D945GCLF instead - afact its the same board approach, but its the atom version so only ~2.5W and a proper intel mobo chipset instead of the via chipset on hte D201GLY2A for the same sort of money. Not that the D201 is bad ( I have one at home and its great ), but it seems the D945 should be a better choice.
"Success is based on knowing how far to go in going too far"
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.
In most peoples' opinion, you can't do any better than this.
The fact that the USB port that the share uses throttles your data access to a crawl... I'd call that "crappy".
The current drobo is not a purchasable unit for network service, period. If you like the Drobo wait for the 2nd gen, which will undoubtedly have native gigabit ethernet support.
-rt
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.
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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.
She's a hardware pimp. Try getting references from someone who isn't being paid to pimp their products.
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.
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.
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.
RAID is just a reliability mechanism.
RAID 0 is for performance, not reliabilty.
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.
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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).
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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.
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.
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).
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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.
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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.
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.
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
I agree and disagree. If you want high performance NAS like you'd get in a data center, then drobo definitely isn't the way to go, but if you are just looking for a simple home unit for backups and maybe storing media on, then it's not all that bad.
Think of it like an apple product, simple, elegant, streamlined, but still missing some of the advanced features you could get if you built your own.
Yes, the slow speed sucks, no, it doesn't affect streaming video / music to something like mythtv or itunes. The biggest PITA for me is that when it sleeps it takes a few seconds to wake up and spin up the disks.
I've had one for about a month and have no problem with it streaming video (divx) to my mythtv or having my mp3 collection on it for itunes, or storing all my pictures on it and accessing it from lightroom. I chose it because I had gone the "build your own" before using linux + lvm + evms + raid and decided I wanted something I didn't have to maintain or worry about. YMMV of course, depending on what you're looking for :)
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.
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.
No, Samba doesn't have a 2GB file limit. Samba is fully 64-bit clean.
Jeremy.
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.
----
I could spend much time espousing unRAID but here it is in a nutshell....
Bunch of drives of whatever size, all but the parity drive are formatted ReiserFS. One drive, the parity drive, must be as big or bigger than all others. This drive stores parity for all other drives. Files are not spanned across drives nor is parity like normal RAID. This is good in that not all drives must spin to read or write a file. this is bad in that for reading you do not have the aggregate speed of multiple drives together. For normal use at home, in my case a media server and backup solution, performance is acceptable - especially for streaming to my HTPC (XBMC on Linux).
If a single drive fails I have access to ALL data and need to replace it with a drive as big or bigger than what failed. If TWO drives fail I lose data but instead of losing the entire data set I lose just the data on those two drives. To keep from losing all data with most RAID you need spares - yucky for home use. Since the drives are standard ReiserFS I can also pull a drive and read off it's data should I need to - most RAID I'm aware of cannot do this. There are companies specializing in data restoration from various types of RAID for a reason...
So, cheap hardware, low power usage (Celeron and drives spun down), pretty safe storage of data, and it's actually not very loud - I use 5in3 SATA cages in the new box, 4in3 CM cages in the IDE. I've not had issues with mine crashing either and if you wanted an FTP server could probably be setup.
Oh 2 be fair there are some downsides. Write speed is slow, security a little weak but there is some, disk space not always used 100% efficiently, and the hardware supported while good isn't HUGE. I think you're limited to "only" 14 drives too :-P
Fire away here or on their support board if you have questions...
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Not trolling, as this is a serious question:
What data do you have that is so important as to require TrueCrypt, and yet is something that would be carried around off-site?
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