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Entry-Level NAS Storage Servers Compared
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Desmond Fuller provides an in-depth comparison of five entry-level NAS storage servers, including cabinets from Iomega, Netgear, QNAP, Synology, and Thecus. 'With so many use cases and potential buyers, the vendors too often try to be everything to everyone. The result is a class of products that suffers from an identity crisis — so-called business storage solutions that are overloaded with consumer features and missing the ease and simplicity that business users require,' Fuller writes. 'Filled with 10TB or 12TB of raw storage, my test systems ranged in price from $1,699 to $3,799. Despite that gap, they all had a great deal in common, from core storage services to performance. However, I found the richest sets of business features — straightforward setup, easy remote access, plentiful backup options — at the higher end of the scale.'"
here
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Drobo wasn't compared? That's a fairly big deal in the SMB market.
I have a DS1010+ 5-bay model and absolutely love it. It's got 10TB in it right now but I may replace the drives with 3TB models eventually. With a dual-core 1.6GHz atom and 1GB DDR2 ram it easily reads and writes at 100+MB/s via a RAID5 array on my simple home gigabit network.
Also the new NAS' that are Intel-based can run most CLI linux servers and programs which is great. You may need to add more RAM if you run lots of heavy servers or have lots of concurrent users but most have spare ram slots.
The best thing I find about Synology is their every updating and cutting edge Web GUI. They are already using HTML-5 features to support things like dragging and dropping files right into your web-browser to upload files to the NAS remotely.
I got that, er, 2 bay NAS from those, uh, Netgears guys or something.
Got'er real cheap too.
Let's just keep this between us: you sure get what you pay for!
But really, its okay for personal uses. I'm sure some even turned them in to web servers with some of that hackery dackery doo magicks.
Nicely built, tough frame, strangely tough at that, were they aiming at the ARMY or something?
Trying to remember the name of it, pretty sure they seemed to have cancelled it now through some googling.
Man, this thing must have been *really* bad, even for them.
Maybe it wasn't Netgear now... can't be anyone else... do I even have a NAS? Who are you, what are you doing on my internet, go away, calling the cops.
The price of the two best ones, the Netgear and the QNAP, on Newegg, for the diskless versions, are about $230 apart - about a quarter of a difference. I think I'd go with the Netgear based on that.
The problem with these things is that Thunderbolt is almost here for everyone else (not just Macs), and with SSDs getting less expensive all the time, I think I'd rather wait for a Thunderbolt-connected version for the sake of future-proofing. Plus a version intended only for 2.5" drives would be sized better for those of us who want one of these for our desktop.
Still, if you want one now, these things have matured quite a bit.
The newer SMB2 protocol in post Vista version of windows is much more efficient in network usage. Samba 3.6 now has SMB2 support, but the article doesn't say which (if any) of these devices support the newer protocol.
Holy cow! $1,699 to $3,799" for "10TB or 12TB" of storage?
Case with 8 internal bays: $40
600 Watt Power supply: $35
MB with 8 SATA3 ports: $115
2.5gig dual core processor: $73
8 2TB drives: $800
1 Gig of RAM: $30
Total: $1093, for 16TB of storage. Yeah, yeah, you need one of them as a spare drive for redundancy, and you need an OS. You also need a few minutes to assemble and install. But for that price? Why pay twice as much? Hell yeah, roll my own, baby!
There is no mention of speed, performance, file copy replication, the ins and out of each solution, just a list of features they all share and how the author went about determining them at his whim. Without metrics this article is just a sales blurb for links. Other websites do it better: Storagereview for one, Smallnetbuilder is the other.
Another wretched sales brouchure disguised as a review by Infoworld.
Wheel of Time: Book by Book and Sumview (summary review) Bigdady92 style: http://bigdady92.blogspot.com/
They lead in this market a couple years ago.
Overland storage bought them but are they worth it anymore?
That PSU is to cheap at least get a $50+ one and don't just go for high watts.
get 2-4 GB ram mini should only be about $50-$60 for good 8 GB DDR 3 you want at least dual channel ram.
8 sata ports you may want to get a pci-e raid card / sata card. Maybe even SAS.
redundancy you may want raid 6 on a raid card and not on board fake raid and most south bridges only have 6 ports any ways.
Also some low end MB only have 10/100'.
This isn't about raw storage; it's about an appliance that *just works* (for a long time, in my case). I've had my ReadyNAS NV (pre-Netgear, Infrant version) up and running 24/7 since March of 2006. It never, ever crashes. Administration (when rarely required) is quick & brainless. It cost 700 bucks back then (no drives). Along with my IBM Thinkpad, that's the best computing money I've ever spent.
If I would have built a DIY version, it probably would have needed rebuilding (software-wise) 3 times by now, largely due to my own propensity to keep messing with it.
Oh, I have got plug the ReadyNAS proprietary "X-RAID" feature, too: slap in an extra drive, and the array auto-expands to fill that drive. Zero-config, instant upgrades!
What you want is irrelevant; what you've chosen is at hand! - Spock, ST VI
Get an hp micro server ($300) and 5 3tb drives. Fits in a tight space (about the size of a 4 slice toaster and runs about 55 watts. I run VMware on mine and I also run free as in a vm. Works great and a whole lot cheaper than dedicated nas device.
It's definitely more work to set up than a pre-built appliance and I wouldn't use it in a production environment but it has some advantages and works well as my media server. I particularly like that multiple drives developing a few bad sectors won't render the entire array unrecoverable. That's a bit of a concern when combining multi-terabyte consumer level drives. I currently have 20tb of fault-tolerant storage with room for another 6tb before I run out of ports. With more ports and a larger case, I could go up to 40tb.
I built a 500$ Atom NAS over 2 years ago and it had better performance then that shown in the charts of that article. And these rigs are over 1000$ today? WTF?
The metrics were using different raid types from one solution to the next, some say RAID10, some RAID2, etc... The "Intel file copy" test was basically unexplained and it doesn't make sense that a file copy (sequential write/read operation) would have less throughput than random reads/writes (and wtf does he talk about 256k block size in teh legend instead of how big the read/writes are?) as the other test claims to be. Also, the author calls RAID-10 and RAID-6 as modes for someone with more technical knowledge that wants to "dig in." Ugh. Lame article on several levels. I couldn't read the whole thing because it was making me stupider.
Got one and mounted it in Windows. The volume stopped working one day. Logged into the firmware and it's stuck and can do nothing more than tell you the name of the device and the time. Any operation/reboot/or total firmware wipe (even if I tried to lose my data completely) fails "due to the state of the device" I called up IOmega support (paid $50 to talk to someone because it wasn't business hours yet) and they said my data is fine but their firmware is in a bad state so I have to send it back in order to get a new one. We couldn't get to the screen to view logs because "that operation failed due to the state of the device" I didn't bother, just left it in the rack as a decoration. Even if I had gotten a new one, the best that I could end up with would be another IOMega nas device with awful firmware and no robustness or debuggability.
Another bad thing about the IOMega devices. Many of them have their firmware/storage OS on the hard-drives themselves (so that's right, you can't take them out and replace them with your own disks.) I ended up with QNAP which is more expensive but at least ships with the firmware in the device so I can at least pick my drives. etc.
Just sharing my experience.
Something with some CPU power to take requests and get them out there plus a card that can do RAID6 and still saturate a gigabit network connection (with enough drives) doesn't really cost a lot more than some of those underpowered things.
And one NAS shall bind them all. http://www.drobo.com/ If I could have afforded it I would have bought a drobo. I ended up with a Thecus (strange name) instead. Don't get me wrong it's a nice little unit but the documentation is horrible and the KB is not much better. Shoehornjob
A Dell T710 is $900 and can take 16 2.5" drives or 8 3.5". If you're not a fan of linux software raid, toss in a PERC controller ($599) and bump the ram up to 4GB ($65) and 8 1.5TB disks at $520 and you're at $2084 for 12TB of storage, in any type of RAID you want.
That PSU is to cheap at least get a $50+ one and don't just go for high watts.
Uh, what? I can understanding criticizing a specific PSU brand as being too unreliable or low-quality, but come on! Just saying "any PSU less than $__ is crap, you need to spend at least $__" makes you sound like a classic Conspicuous Consumer.
get 2-4 GB ram mini should only be about $50-$60 for good 8 GB DDR 3 you want at least dual channel ram.
This is a NAS, not a server. Half a gig would be sufficient, honestly - I've run some with 256MB. One gig is plenty, unless you want to keep files on a RAMdisk.
8 sata ports you may want to get a pci-e raid card / sata card. Maybe even SAS.
When you're just building a home/small office NAS, you don't need a high-performance RAID card - software RAID is more than enough. Especially considering the price of those things.
redundancy you may want raid 6 on a raid card and not on board fake raid and most south bridges only have 6 ports any ways.
8 hard drives is not enough to justify RAID 6, unless they're EXTREMELY unreliable drives. Especially since that cuts down your storage capacity down to 12TB - not that good.
RAID 6 is only needed when it's possible for a drive to fail, and then for another to fail while the array is still recovering. There's no point in doing it with only 8 drives.
Also some low end MB only have 10/100'.
True. But then again, how many switches and computers are still only 10/100? Maybe you don't, but I still work daily with stuff that maxes out at Fast Ethernet.
Plus, a $115 mobo isn't "low-end", at least by my definition. It's a fair assumption that if it has 8 SATA ports, you're going to have 10/100/1000 Ethernet.
That PSU is to cheap at least get a $50+ one and don't just go for high watts.
Uh, what? I can understanding criticizing a specific PSU brand as being too unreliable or low-quality, but come on! Just saying "any PSU less than $__ is crap, you need to spend at least $__" makes you sound like a classic Conspicuous Consumer.
ok but don't cheap out.
get 2-4 GB ram mini should only be about $50-$60 for good 8 GB DDR 3 you want at least dual channel ram.
This is a NAS, not a server. Half a gig would be sufficient, honestly - I've run some with 256MB. One gig is plenty, unless you want to keep files on a RAMdisk.
ok but for $30 you can get 2gb ram
8 sata ports you may want to get a pci-e raid card / sata card. Maybe even SAS.
When you're just building a home/small office NAS, you don't need a high-performance RAID card - software RAID is more than enough. Especially considering the price of those things.
maybe but not all boards have 8 ports and some that's 6 chipset and the other from a add on sata chip also the build in software / fake raid likely will not work across 2 different chips like that. And even with 8 ports you still need 1 for the OS disk or you can mix the OS with the data drives.
redundancy you may want raid 6 on a raid card and not on board fake raid and most south bridges only have 6 ports any ways.
8 hard drives is not enough to justify RAID 6, unless they're EXTREMELY unreliable drives. Especially since that cuts down your storage capacity down to 12TB - not that good.
RAID 6 is only needed when it's possible for a drive to fail, and then for another to fail while the array is still recovering. There's no point in doing it with only 8 drives.
8 drives in raid 0 is a major risk. Raid 5 uses less space.
Also some low end MB only have 10/100'.
True. But then again, how many switches and computers are still only 10/100? Maybe you don't, but I still work daily with stuff that maxes out at Fast Ethernet.
Plus, a $115 mobo isn't "low-end", at least by my definition. It's a fair assumption that if it has 8 SATA ports, you're going to have 10/100/1000 Ethernet.
The case needs to have room for 8 HDD's + a os disk and good cooling.
RAID 6 is only needed when it's possible for a drive to fail, and then for another to fail while the array is still recovering. There's no point in doing it with only 8 drives.
It's also extremely useful if you run into an unrecoverable read error while trying to rebuild the array.
A lot of standard mechanical drives have an unrecoverable read error rate of about 1-in-10^14 bits (or 1-in-~12TB), meaning you're getting into some pretty nasty chances of hitting an URE on at least one of your disks when you're trying to rebuild the array after a disk failure with a decently-large array. This issue is alleviated when you have storage with an URE rate of 1-in-10^15 or higher (such as some SSDs), but this won't come cheap for a comparable amount of storage.
Of course, RAID isn't a backup solution. But I'd personally rather lose a little more storage than have to restore from a backup (which, while you should have, doesn't have to be convenient) on short notice.
That's why you have cron do a raidcheck once a week. You'll know if you have a drive starting to go TU before it completely fails.
ok but for $30 you can get 2gb ram
Yeah? For $30 I can also add a nice SD/MicroSD card reader. And it would be just as beneficial to the system. Just because RAM is cheap, doesn't mean you need to cram absolutely everything full of it.
maybe but not all boards have 8 ports and some that's 6 chipset and the other from a add on sata chip also the build in software / fake raid likely will not work across 2 different chips like that. And even with 8 ports you still need 1 for the OS disk or you can mix the OS with the data drives.
Once X79 comes out, you'll have 10 ports, naturally. In any case, software RAID, at least under Linux, can handle disks on any widely incompatible set of chipsets. As well as separating the OS onto a disk partition on just one drive.
8 drives in raid 0 is a major risk. Raid 5 uses less space.
That would be relevant, if we were talking about RAID 0. RAID 5 and 6 are identical save for the number of disks used for parity, which in turn affects number of simultaneous failures it can recover from and the efficiency of space utilization.
The case needs to have room for 8 HDD's + a os disk and good cooling.
Again - how is that relevant to the section you were responding to?
You can find large cases easily. I found one in under a minute with 8 internal bays for $40.
I got a Fractal Design Array R2 Mini-ITX NAS Case which is gorgeous, takes 6 HDD in a small case. MB is Sapphire Pure Fusion Mini E350 AMD Dual Core E350 which is very low power, 5 x SATA III + 1 eSATA II, USB 3, GbEthernet.
FreeNAS 8 supports the hardware, and ZFS filing system is reliable.
Not enterprise level, but excellent for home use.
Use GlusterFS http://www.gluster.org/ for redundancy spanned across one or more JBOD machines for a much easier hardware and data upgrade path. Use oVirt for easy set up http://www.gluster.com/community/documentation/index.php/GlusterFS_oVirt_Setup_Guide. Mount GlusterFS directly to your clients or export via iSCSI target, fibrechannel target, FCoE, NBD, or traditional NFS for a more advanced shared storage solution. And you can still run more of a NAS type setup with CIFS, WebDAV, or the like.
No, RAID6 is the only useful level of RAID for any 7200 RPM drive over ~1TB other than RAID10. The bit error rate and time to rebuild are too high for anyone who cares about their data to use anything else.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
HP N36L - 4 bay, non hot swap + space for 5th hdd in CD Drive bay space. If you want to use 2.5" drives, can swap that out for a 4 in 1 unit for 8 drives.
This server + low profile PCIe SATA expansion card running NetxentaStore Community (ZFS + DeDupe) accross 5 drives (3TB, ~15TB with ~12TB usable) + 2.5" boot drive + SSD gives me ~97MBytes read / write when exporting via iSCSI to VMware, NFS / Samba shares.
X79 is the high end chip set that needs a i7 cpu that likely $280-$300 + a $200-$250 MB also the cpu has quad channel ram so you may want to have at least 2 ram sticks maybe even 4 also may need a low end pci-e video card as x79 has no build in video so the system may or may not boot up with out one. VS say a lower cost CPU and MB + a hardware raid card at about $300 is about the same (You do not need a i7 for that and with the lower end board on board video is ok) and hardware raid makes so you don't need a high end cpu or MB.
and for like the cost of 320GB or Smaller HDD you can have the OS on it's own and not have to have be part of the data disks.
Around pg 4, he shows some performance graphs. Meh.
My $130 external array connected to a weenie desktop running Linux Software RAID gets 200+ MB/s reads (206.58 MB/sec) with a tiny bit of /sbin/blockdev tuning. Obviously, HDDs not included in that price.
(4) 4 yr old Seagate 7200rpm SATA HDDs - nothing special, using the internal SATA ports on the motherboard. The downside is this array only supports 4 HDDs.
Had a Promise RAID card, not fakeRAID, it was slow. Only supported a 2 yr old kernel.
Writes to a single 7200 Black drive are between 65-73MB/s doing nothing special using SMB. I see this daily over a GigE network at the house.
These devices appear to be a major rip off if you care about performance. If you do, check out AoE and spend your money where it matters.
A few yrs ago, you could get a rebranded Dell 8 drive iSCSI device for $5K. Similar devices seem to be $15K these days.
I'm thinking I"m in the wrong business. Building an 8 drive OpenFiler or FreeNAS device with a few GigE ports, software RAID, and iSCSI, NFS, SAMBA, CIFS, FTP, .... seems like $2500 would be 50% cheaper than the competition and it would cost me about .... $250 + (8 x 100) = $1000. The $1500 would be my time to create branding icons. Could probably put the OS on a RO-flash card so the HDDs are all available for storage. There must be things I'm missing or everyone would do this.
addonics.com has parts.
I stopped reading the slide show when they not only spelled out a definition for ISCSI, but got it wrong. Horrible article. Zero details, all fluff.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
At least for entry level. I recently bought a LianLi EX-50 enclosure, it allocates up to five disks and supports all the common RAID modes. And is cheaper than these NAS servers.
The difference is that it connects to the eSata port (newer version supports USB3), as I have a little server (just an old desktop pc) I simply had set up the nfs service.
BAH! Sure,that's not bad to do, but if one drive does go tits up, then you (home user) order a replacement, wait, get new drive, try to rebuild, what's the chances just one in 7 of those remaining 2tb drives has just one read error? If so, raid array rebuild fails.
We're approaching the per-disk capacity and failure rate where raid 5 isn't enough (there's an EXCELLENT article on this somewhere - looked it up... I think this was it: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/why-raid-5-stops-working-in-2009/162)
For comments about backups... my only real plan on using some consumer level external raid array would be for backup purposes. I should have a backup for my backup, but then it's turtles all the way down.
The only real advantage "real raid" has over "fake raid" is the battery backed cache, so if it doesn't have that, you're probably better off with "fake raid". Your system CPU is faster than the CPU on board (plenty fast for parity calculations) and with "real raid", you have yet another OS (the board's firmware) to keep updated and hope doesn't crash and take our your file system.
I'd rather have the OS handle the disks so there's no mystery disk format and I have complete control from the OS level. ZFS and BTRFS are the future and make more sense than using separate MD and FS layers. Still, a battery backed write cache is a nice thing to have and it would be cool to have those built into the disks.
you may want raid 6 on a raid card
You just added hundreds or thousands of dollars to a $1000 NAS and locked yourself to a specific piece of esoteric hardware in one swoop. BIOS-based RAID is a little too pedestrian for serious storage, yes, but there's nothing to be ashamed of in a true software RAID setup (ie, mdadm), even if it means adding SATA ports through a card.
I am literally 3000 tokens away from the chaotic crossbow --Stephen
Dear Slashdoters. I know that you can build a better, faster, cheaper NAS that will perform fellatio over SSH and wipe your ass for you. But, I don't care... at all. According to you, I overpaid for my two NAS devices, a Drobo FS (serving media) and a Synology DS211+ (photo backups (profoto)). But I'm exceedingly happy with them. Transfer speed is sufficient on the Drobo to serve 1080p content to 2 tv's and an iPad simultaneously, and the Synology keeps up with my image editing software just fine. I've upgraded the drives in the drobo once so far, and just like their videos claim, everything just worked. The Drobo survived a drive failure last year, in the middle of 'movie night,' and video playback from the drobo was unaffected. - I'm glad that these NAS devices were reviewed, but I can't imagine why so many have come to this thread to post their server builds. The people, like myself, buying these NAS devices are buying them so we don't have to build our own servers.
In nature, there are neither rewards or punishments, there are only consequences.
get a cheap HP ML110 server with a few GB of RAM, load it up with disks. Get a bigger housing if the case is too small. Benefits: remote management (very basic ILO), server grade chipset/CPU if you get the Xeon specced model. I got one of these in a special offer and it runs my linux server very well. 1.6TB RAID 1 (mdraid), off the shelf disks, bought half a year apart so I don't get bitten by some bug that's in one firmware and not the other. Enough CPU/RAM/disk overhead to run the occasional test VMs. I absolutely love it. The power consumption is also quite modest at around 75W when idle. I know the NAS solutions eat half of that at most but they aren't as flexible and the Atoms in them get absolutely blown away by the performance of my quad Xeon.
The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.
RAID 6 is only needed when it's possible for a drive to fail, and then for another to fail while the array is still recovering.
Yes, exactly. That's the point. I've had this happen to me on two occasions with single-redundant layouts, resulting in data loss. It's one reason why I favor 3-wa mirrors.
There's no point in doing it with only 8 drives.
*headspin* Wha? That's a total non-sequitor.
1- I don't know of any good-quality power supply below about $60. Good quality means Japanese capacitor, low ripple, good resistance to micro cuts, no lead, good current on the 12V rail, at least bronze-level efficiency, silence, and so on. Cheap no-name PS eventually fail, sometime taking the whole PC with them. Most people dismiss the PS, but it is an essential investment in a piece of equipment that runs all the time.
Read this for instance.
2- On a homebrew NAS you want to run ZFS, you really do. In fact this is the number one reason to build a homebrew NAS because the commercial ones never support it. This requires approximately 1GB of RAM per terabyte of data for good performance. ZFS essentially eliminates the possibility that your RAID becomes invalid and unrecoverable due to too many bad silent blocks. Read this.
3- For ZFS, the recommended setup is the equivalent of RAID6 as soon as you hit 4 disks of data, and to split arrays beyond 6 disks of data.
That is precisely the problem. Your array may have already failed without you knowing it. If there is a single unreadable bad block anywhere on the "good" disks while your array is being rebuilt, the reconstruction is impossible with most hardware and software RAID solutions. You have already lost your array completely.
RAID is far from the panacea it is sold to be, in fact it is now an obsolete solution to a real problem.
I just set up a server with Nexenta Community Edition. Free for 18tb of storage. My system is: Dual Xeon 2.8Ghz 16Gig Ram 1.5TB HD x 8 Dual GigE Adaptec Raid 5805 Controller, used as Sata controller only, NO RAID, each drive shows as separate volume for Nexenta to manage. I went with the Nexenta for two reasons: 1. Inline Deduplication 2. ZFS setup with Raidz-2 for dual drive failure without loosing data. I am demoting my Drobo from primary storage to backup storage, as it only has single disk failure without loosing data. With DeDupe on I am getting write speed in the 40-60MB a sec range. Not quite as good as with the Adaptec in Raid 6 mode, but the dedup is very much worth it. My USB drobo was giving me the occasional transfer error, and corrupting my data. I did a verified copy onto the Nexenta and with ZFS end to end checking of CRC's and monthly error check and correction I HOPE to stop bit rot. With a 8TB data store, across 80gig drives to 2tb drives of various ages, it was time to consolidate, error check and correct. Just my 2 cents as I outgrew my drobo.
My own AFP experience with QNAP was terrible, due to the dodgy FOSS stack - I forget which one - that was included. There was no useful way to authenticate (no OpenDirectory, no Kerberos, no way to automate user import). I ended up with iSCSI between the QNAP and the Mac OS Server (ATTO iSCSI) and serving AFP from there, with a 5x speed improvement.
Was I doing something wrong? It doesn't seem to match the AFP figures in the article. Anyone else have similar awful real-world AFP performance?
...for my needs anyway, so hopefully I can add something to the discussion. I'm one of those traitors who traded a homemade linux NAS for an off-the-shelf model and went through quite a few models before I found one I was happy with.
My initial file server was built into a cheap 4U rackmount and a couple of 3ware cards and provided sterling service. However, it was exceptionally loud and very heavy, and sucked up a fair amount of power. When you've moved house as often as I have, you start to think about whether you really need a 40kg server just to put 8 hard drives in (and another server to back up to).
So cue me looking for a smaller case that I could cram a mATX or mITX mobo into, and rely on linux softraid; there aren't really any that aren't rackmount. A couple of nice ones have come out recently like the Lian Li V354 (six bays and available in a very fetching red as well as black and silver) and the Chenbro ES34169 (four bays w/ hot-swap caddies) but I needed eight bays... so I started to look at the NAS market.
http://www.kustompcs.co.uk/acatalog/info_1591.html
http://www.xcase.co.uk/Chenbro-ES34169-Compact-size-chassis-w-4-Hotswap-p/case-chenbro-es34169.htm
Once I could afford it (don't get me wrong - NAS units are colossally overpriced for what they are) I got myself a NAS chassis. I'd bought a Synology DS410 for a client before and it was reasonably nice kit (PPC processor and four non-hot-swap bays) and the synology OS was OK... but adding third-party apps to it was a bitch (you needed to hack the bootloader) and the shell was gimped. I returned the DS410 I bought for myself as a test (was planning to donate it so my sister as an engagement present once I'd evaluated the OS) and bought a QNAP TS-419P - also four bays but run on a 1GHz ARM processor.
The ARM processor was, sadly, anaemic. The QNAP OS didn't allow RAID10 at the time (you could set it up on the command line using conventional mdadm commands but then couldn't manage the volume from the web GUI) since QNAP were under the delusion that "RAID6 is just as fast and more reliable!" - wrong. Thankfully they've now seen the error of their ways. Hence volume creation and write speed was limited by the processor (it was on the Synology too, but less so since the PPC was more powerful). I think I could get writes over CIFS at about 20MB/s on a good day, considerably less if I used SSH or rsync (which I use all the time). So, not good enough. Which is a shame since as a British geek who grew up on a school Acorn Archimedes (and had a former colleague of Sophie [Roger] Wilson's as a flatmate before he drank himself to death) I'm naturally a fan of ARM processors. The only other real difference between the DS410 and the TS-419P was that the QNAP was noticeably quieter than the Synology, despite the fact the spec sheet led me to beleive the opposite would be true. I think the latest model in the 419 line has a 2GHz ARM processor so should be considerably faster.
So I looked at the x86 range. As much as I hate the Atom, for a NAS they're adequate. I sent the TS-419P up to my sister and bought a TS-859 Pro+ which uses a 1.6GHz dual-core + SMT Atom D525 and a 1GB SODIMM (which I later upgraded to 2GB) and the experience was instantly better. Across a six-disc RAID5 I got CIFS writes of about 100MB/s, and now that it's got eight drives in RAID10 (i.e. much less CPU overhead for RAID) I can get that up to 150MB/s with the two bonded gigabit ethernet ports; the bottleneck here appears to be smbd itself since with multiple transfers I can max out both interfaces at about 220MB/s. I figure there's something single-threaded in samba (or at least QNAP's version of it) that'll bottleneck the speed of a single transfer, but 150MB/s is easily fast enough for me at home. Amongst other things I use it as an iSCSI baby SAN for my ESX testbed. Noise-wise, the 859 i
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
I did have a DIY linux fileserver a while ago, but I got rid of it in favour of a turnkey NAS.
DIY linux fileserver = built with standard PC spare parts.
NAS = built with specific hardware tailored for the job (for example mine has a sparc CPU).
My linux fileserver iddle power comsumption was 68W
My NAS iddle power comsumption is 27W
Here, the DIY linux server use 150% more power.
(and makes much more noise)
They use JFS on debian.. You can easily add the filesever software of your choice (Samba, Netatalk, NFS, etc.)
On the hardware side they use a Intel mainboard with a Intel Core 2 CPU, a PCIe SATA 2 Controller and 45 SATA 2 discs (each 1.5 TB). They put it in a custom enclosure, the 3D model is available here (25 MB ZIP archive). This all costs less than 8000€ for 67 TB (discs included!).
There is also an update, where they get 135 TB for less than $8000. In this model they still use Debian, but as a filesystem they run ext4 on LVM with RAID 6.
QNAP comes out as best in nearly all tests, yet they still recommend one of the brands that performed way worse? (disclaimer: I run a QNAPclub community forum)
I'm no expert. We've got a NetApp where I work now, and had a Netgear ReadyNAS at my previous job. But I will say that some ability to upgrade is going to be key.
We got the ReadyNAS up and running with just a couple TB of storage because we really didn't think we'd need more than that. Within a year we were full and looking for some way to expand it.
The NetApp here was installed with a good pile of storage... But we've grown our environment so much that we've exceeded the capabilities of the chassis, and are looking at upgrading to a faster model.
It's very easy, when you're shopping around, to simply look at prices and your current needs and come to the conclusion that you really don't need that much storage... It's also very easy, once you've got a network storage device, to throw everything on there - simply because it is so convenient. And then, before you know it, you're running out of room.
Make sure you get something that can easily be expanded and/or upgraded - because it will happen. Probably much sooner than you expect.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
unRAID. Boot from USB, uses a standard albeit not common FS (ReiserFS), only loses one disk to parity, and losing multiple disks doesn't kill the entire storage array. Can host a max of something like 16 disks although I've never gone past 11 on either of my systems. No OS maintenance although if you add on lots of stuff you can get into murky territory. Needs no more than maybe a gig of memory and a SLOW CPU. CPU will NOT be your bottleneck and Celeron or single core whatevers work just fine. A case that can hold 8 disks or more isn't hard to find BTW especially if you use 5n3 racks which will then also allow for easier wiring of power, better cooling, and easier accessibility to swap drives. Racks liek that cost all of about $99 each and my cases have room for 3 of them plus more room inside the case for additional drives. What's really nice is I can upgrade drives piecemeal or add drives any time I want when I need space. Been using this system for 5++ years with no issues - it's an appliance to me.
Seriously, buying anything consumer oriented or SOHO that's "prebuilt" is just asking for a kick in the nuts IMO. I have had multiple friends convert to unRAID after their buy of the week Drobo killed a port, overheated, or just plain bricked.
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Software RAID does NOT require anything resembling a high end CPU. The LOWEST end Intel CPU undervolted and underclocked could do it. Boot the OS from a USB stick into a RAM disk. You will NOT need more than a gig of RAM if you do it right. Do NOT use hardware RAID, when it pukes and you try to replace the hardware you'll have all sorts of "fun".
You have actually DONE this right not just reading about it and postulating?
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Celeron or single core + boot from USB + software raid is not a good idea. At least boot from a sata HDD or maybe firewire
Look at unRAID. One drive supports the parity and the FS is standard ReiserFS. Lose a disk and a rebuild is no problem. Lose TWO disks, and be completely unable to recover with standard tools, and you lose.... two disks of data NOT the entire damned thing. In 5++ years of using this system and having gone through multiple drive failures I've never once lost data. Never once had two disks die at once either and my systems run 24X7X365. I had one machine up to over 11 disks once but with larger disks have brought it's spindle count down. One of my machines now has 10 disks, no issues. Some of the drives in it are smaller so as they fill I swap in larger drives - seamlessly. When I moved from IDE drives to SATA I swapped the hardware without issues. I don't have some of the advantages of ZFS I know but I also do NOT have the headaches and can swap drives easily - video isn't likely to have much duplication anyway. I may not have quite the speed of some of the crazy RAID schemes but when you're streaming HD video you don't have to have balls to the wall speed, it's simply not required. Hell one of my systems only wants to synch at 100meg instead of GigE and it streams 1080P BD quality video with no issues so speed is certainly not an issue for me. Build something complex with tons of RAM, weird parity spanning, and all the rest - I'll stick with something simple that spins down my idle drives to save power and doesn't eat me alive trying to support ubber redundant and unnecessary parity schemes...
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
For real NAS comparisons, go to http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/nas/nas-charts/bar/1-filecopy-write The NAS charts are the most complete I've seen anywhere.
And WHY pray tell is that? Been doing it for well over 5 years and have gone through more than one USB stick without issue - my current stick is 2 years old. Boot takes about 2 minutes and only ever occurs when I upgrade software or a drive. The USB stick isn't written to during that time and only stores the OS to boot to RAM disk and a single config file. The image on the stick is standard from my vendor and the only thing unique I need backup anywhere is the config file - it's maybe 10K or I can print out one config page to reenter as needed. USB memory sticks are perfect for this, last a good long time, and are CHEAP.
Seriously, booting from a drive of spinning media of any sort would be silly. The ONLY thing booting from a larger drive would allow me to do is some of the hacks that guys have done to install a full OS in order to expand the NAS into a full Linux server with desktop - I'm not interested in that. And what does the Celeron\single core have to do with my boot device exactly?
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
How many (if any) of these off-the-shelf devices use ECC RAM? How many (if any) of them use the ZFS file system? NAS isn't even worth considering unless both are present. Otherwise, data integrity cannot be guaranteed.
Yeah I figured that out a long time ago. I figure the only people that buy that crap are people that are lazy, want a really simple solution, or do not have the expertise to do it themselves. That is to say you take one of these pre-assembled NAS, plug it in network, do a wizard, done. For a small biz with no tech support, maybe an option. Also most of the bigger NAS support hot swappable drives, which is nice... thought if you spent about 120$ rather than 40$ on your case you can get hot swappable drives anyway.
Also, considering you don't really need a whole lot of RAM or CPU to run the thing, the easiest and cheapest way to make one, is to simply use an old system. They aren't worth anything to sell, but you can still get a lot of use. So buy yourself a new shiny sleek system, and just re-purpose your old, into a NAS, or web server, or dev machine, or whatever as the cost then (not including the upgrade you probably needed anyway) is 0$ dollars.
For the $2000 or so a 10TB NAS would cost, I can build an inexpensive whitebox ESXi server with 6 2TB drives that will be much more useful, and have enough money left over to feed my greed.
Most of these NAS boxes are just linux-based Mini or NanoITX machines with software RAID - no different than I could spin up in a VM in 5 minutes on ESXi.
I'm entirely, completely in love with Drobo as a NAS device.
The ability to pop out a smaller drive and replace it with a larger drive is amazing - that is simply how technology is supposed to work. I have the Drobo FS at home and the DroboPro FS at work. Having used them for about a year and having tried to make them fail before I moved them into production, I'm very happy with their reliability and performance. (More on performance in a second.)
At the high end, I have used EMC and IBM solutions. At the low end, I've used every home-built and crappy RAID NAS solution you can name. Having used three of the five products reviewed by InfoWorld, I can say the Drobo is easily better than most of the units reviewed.
Performance on both the Drobo units I own isn't mind-blowing compared to some of the solutions that cost four or five times more. Ease of management, reliability, price point, expandability and overall functionality far offset the less than awesome performance. Still, as Lifix noted, there is more than enough performance to meet the needs of a home or small office. The only time I really notice the DroboPro FS slowing down is when we're running multiple rsync backups to it.
I have not been this excited and evangelical about a piece of technology since I got my TiVo.
Cheers,
Matt
(I'm not in any way compensated by Drobo but would be willing to entertain offers. Drobo? Are you listening? Send me free stuff.)
I did a lot of research about NAS tech in the past year and a half and I've arrived at the following conclusions:
All non-enterprise grade NAS products are crap. All of them. They rely on bad technologies with hardware and processors that are both inappropriate and inadquate for the task.
1. Embeded ARM and PPC cpus are barely fast enough to saturate a 100 megabit ethernet connection, let alone gigabit. Intel Atom CPUs are better, but not quite ideal.
2. All but enterprise grade hard disks throw too many errors to be used in a traditional raid array and be considered "stable" you raid array WILL loose consistency every couple of months.
3. None of the tools shipped with any commercial NAS product are adequate to ensure the safety of your data. Basically they're all hacked together crap that comes up short under all but a few common test cases.
4. Traditional RAID is crap. At 1TB+ drive capacity traditional RAID systems are unable to keep your array consistent because their protection and error correction mechanisms are too simple and not robust enough.
The only technology that wont' disappoint you is ZFS. ZFS is based on the premise that your hardware is unreliable, which it is. With 1+TB hardrives you WILL have unrecoverable errors. Traditional RAID systems fail with any unrecoverable error. ZFS doesn't rely on custom hardware or proprietary controllers. It harnesses the cheap and powerful availability of modern CPUs and cheap memory. ZFS will take and aggressively use multiple CPU cores and 4+GB of memory and will deliver high performance and high reliability. This sounds shocking, because it is. It's a filesystem that actually safegaurds your data. It takes extreme lengths to checksum data and ensure disk redundancy. Errors don't kill your array. They're simply corrected because the filesystem assumes that they will happen.
It also adds modern features like compression, snapshotting, encryption. Reliably.
For general NAS use ZFS has been ported to freeBSD. Freenas is a FreeBSD based NAS platform that offers ZFS volumes and quite solid. It's not the latest version of ZFS and doesn't have all the features that solaris offers, but I'm not aware of any easy to use Solaris based NAS solutions.
My NAS runs NX, so I can pull up a published firefox, or do bit torrent. Anything I surf in my published firefox leaves no trace on the PC or the DNS servers of the site I am at. They only see an encrypted tunnel to my home PC. A full desktop gives me alot of flexibility at little cost.
Cheap storage VM.
I'll bet that thing is loud, most server equipment is.
Cheap storage VM.
Yeah... Not really keen on running desktop apps on my main storage device. Having that environment crash and damage data I care about is just too risky. That said, it's doable with unRaid and some guys even use them as VM servers....
Most cases with 8+ bays aren't exactly built for quietness. Unless you live in a cool area, these cases need cooling, which is usually through fans. They can be very loud. I use my NAS mainly to store movies, and I live in an apartment, so having something that sounds like a jet engine is out of the question. The cost of quiet-proofing a PC is non-trivial and parts are not inexpensive to come by. I own both a Qnap and Synology and they're absolutely silent. Something to consider.
PS - I took a Dell server home once to do some work on a weekend, and the thing was so loud we couldn't hear the TV at all, and this was 3 rooms away.
Um, make that a 4U server, not 1U...
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