Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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/
Quick and easy tip to increase storage space on a budget: buy the 3.5" model and punch a hole in the top corner. When the first side is full flip over the disk and use the other side. You will need to periodically flip the disk over and make note of what side contains the data you want.
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'.
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.
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.
I made a network link using SATA and a SAS HDD.
Two PCs, each with a single eSATA link to the SAS HDD.
Turn one link on and the other off, dump data on the drive, turn the first link off and the other on, read data from the HDD.
did it just for giggles. Actually was faster than my ethernet connections, but temperamental is inadequate to describe the setup.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
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.
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.
With parallel SCSI you don't even switch. Just access the HD from both hosts at the same time. :P
I did that between a PC and a MicroVAX once
thegodmovie.com - watch it
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 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.