Best Home Network NAS

jammerjam writes "My WD 120GB drive got its MBR scrambled so it no longer mounts in my W*ndoze box (I can recover the data so I know that's intact). But now that's made me realize I need to implement my data backup plan. Scouring the Internet I can't find a reliable resource for home NAS solutions. For every positive review I can find a negative that refutes it. My first choice from what I found starts at $1200...I've got $500. Anyone have a suggestion? I'm not looking for enterprise-level storage here — but I do want reliability."

OpenFiler

[morgan_greywolf (835522)]

Buy a couple of 500 GB SATA HDDs. You can build a box with a SATA RAID controller for probably ~$200 or so and throw OpenFiler [openfiler.com] on it. You still won't do this under $500, though. Probably under $750, though, for sure, if you're careful.

As for the botched MBR, boot an MS-DOS or even a FreeDOS boot disk and do a fdisk /mbr. That should fix it.

Re:

[jmahler (192217)]

If it's vista, follow the directions here to recover your MBR. [microsoft.com]

Re:OpenFiler

[imipak (254310)]

Why not use £50 NSLU2? Dinky little ARM box with a Cisco logo on the front - it comes with a cheap as chips web UI, supports SMB and various other ways to push/pull data. And of course you can nuke the default firmware and blat it with a proper full-blown Linux installation [openslug.org] and install software galore (Asterisk, even!) I've got my root fs on a flash stick, which makes booting pretty fast - the other USB slot has a single 500Gb drive, but you could easily make drives 2.

You have to buy the drives as well of course, but I paid less than 70 quid for my 500Gb EISA drive. In my specific setup, the main drive could of course go bang, but I'm using it for network attached backup rather than primary storage. No reason you couldn't do it though.

Re:OpenFiler

[bendodge (998616)]

You're making this too hard:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&SubCategory=124&N=2000150124 [newegg.com]
Right there at the top is a 5/5 rated Lacie 320GB Ethernet Disk for $153.

If you want something a little more secure and flexible get this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822102007 [newegg.com]
And add some of these: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148261 [newegg.com]
If you use two of those drives in a RAID 1 array, you have 250GB of redundant storage for a total around $370.

Re:OpenFiler

[mortonda (5175)]

I just recently made a backup server from parts off newegg:

• inexpensive AMD64, mobo with built in Gb nic and 4 SATA controllers
• 1GB RAM
• 4 x 500GB WD Caviars
• case and misc parts

All for just under $700. If you really want to rock and roll, get some of the new 1TB drives!

I don't use the raid chip on the mobo, just Linux Software Raid all the way. For a home backup system, it's the way to go - I can always stick the drives in a new system and have it recognize and reconstruct the array. OTOH, I have had a hardware raid card go bad, and man, that's a world of hurt unless you have an exact duplicate card on hand. Not good for a file server! The performance of a software raid is more than adequate, given that the CPU has nothing else to do - it's a file server! The cost/risk/usefulness balance is very heavy in favor of software raid.

I divided the drives into 4 partitions each: a small one mirrored across all drives for the /boot info; a swap mirrored across all four... the third partion had two drives mirrored for the root partition and another two for the /var system. I also made sure to pair those across separate ide controllers - sda3/sdc3 and sdb2/sdd2 so if a ide chip goes out, it may still have some limited functionality. Of course, it won't help with the raid5 below.

The remaining partition on all four drives is used for the (raid 5) actual file storage, I put it on /storage, though you may have a better preference. This yields a useable storage space of nearly 1.4 TB. If you really want redundancy, you could do a raid1+0 on it, at the cost of a third more of the storage space.

For software, I see some turnkey systems that people are pushing around here, but I just went with a basic Ubuntu server 64 bit. That way I can install any number of packages from Ubuntu's massive package repository.

For backup solutions, I went with backupPC, though I am also experimenting with Bacula. Samba and Webmin round out the file services and maintenance.

The best part of the whole thing? Since I implemented this, I have had 2 complete system losses ... but I didn't lose any files. Just fix the hardware, reload the OS, and restore all the files. Sweeeeeeeet.

Re:OpenFiler

[Rogerborg (306625)]

If your maiden aunt asked you what a good cheap commuter car would be, you'd recommend a Porche, wouldn't you?

Re:OpenFiler

[magarity (164372)]

I just know how to spend wisely; $150 - $200 on a proper raid card, $40 ea for 3 or 4 80GB drives (more than enough to back up the 120GB in question) leaves $200 for a PC from a second hand shop with a 90 day or so warranty. Plenty. Unless he needs a new dual core system that's going to sit idle practically all the time except for backups? The project is for online backup storage which puts the emphasis on the disk subsystem. Good raid card in second hand system fits that bill better than a new mb/cpu just to run software raid. It's also more power efficient.

Re:OpenFiler

[jarich (733129)]

Serious question then (not flamebait)

When your RAID card does die (2 years? 4 years?), what will you do? If that card isn't being made anymore, are you out of luck? Or can a different card read the disks? I don't think they can. I know a few people that ran into this.

With a software RAID, you do lose some performance, but any Linux distro will be able to read the disks. If the OS bugs out (an infrequent occurrence), you might lose a little data, but not a ton... I'm actually not convinced you'll have a good linux distro w/frequent kernel panics anyway. If you lose your card, will you lose it all?

Re:OpenFiler

[kryptkpr (180196)]

Why add the additional point of failure? Or was I supposed to buy 2 identical RAID cards for when one failed and it turned out the array it built isn't compatible with anything except the exact same device with the exact same firmware revision?

With software (Linux) RAID the actual RAID set is just partitions on the physical drive, not the whole entire drive. My /boot and root partition is mirrored on all of my drives, so even if the array completely disappeared I can still boot up. To gain access to the rest of my data (RAID5), any recent kernel with RAID support will do..

Hardware RAID controllers may have made sense 10 years ago when commodity hardware was much slower (and so a dedicated CPU for RAID was a must), but unless I'm missing something they no longer make sense today.

I prefer them for an office environment.

[khasim (1285)]

But then I also prefer SCSI disks.

That is because I can get them hot-swappable and with lots of nice lights.

I have a new SATA server that has fakeRAID, and the drive lights are not supported and they aren't hot-swappable.

For a home environment where YOU know what you have and how it is configured, I'd say go with whatever you're comfortable with. Just make sure you document what is what and where ... just in case it works too well and you don't think about it for the next 6 years.

Re:OpenFiler

[Chelloveck (14643)]

Why add the additional point of failure? Or was I supposed to buy 2 identical RAID cards for when one failed and it turned out the array it built isn't compatible with anything except the exact same device with the exact same firmware revision?

In fact, I just had a RAID controller die. Fortunately it would still let me mount the disks read-only and recover the data. That pretty much convinced me that RAID is not what I want for home.

To replace the RAID (and because I needed more storage anyway) I went out and bought two 500GB drives. I have them mounted as two plain ol' ext3 drives -- not RAID, not even software RAID. Just two drives. I have a cron job that rsync's one to the other every night. I took a cue from this page [mikerubel.org] and keep a week's worth of backups as hard links. This gives me seven days to recover anything I accidentally deleted before it's gone for good, but doesn't take up much more backup space than just a single copy. My data is mostly unchanging files like CDROM ISOs and MP3s, so after the initial 5-hour mass copy was done the nightlies only take a few minutes.

Now if either drive craps out I can mount the other in any Linux box and recover the data. If anything in that box craps out, including the controller, I can take the drives and recover the data. Yeah, it's possible that the controller could fubar both drives if something dire happens. A RAID controller could do the same. If I had 500GB of storage off-site I'd rsync to there instead.

Re:OpenFiler

[Machtyn (759119)]

How could people be missing an opportunity to promote the wonderfulness that is the Ultimate Boot CD 4 Windows [ubcd4win.com]. You can even put the Ultimate Boot CD [ultimatebootcd.com] image on there. I have a disc that can boot into either. If you are opposed to the MS Windows version, or don't have an extra XP license laying around, the Ultimate Boot CD has the wonderful utility called Test Disk [cgsecurity.org] by Christophe Grenier. It can recover MBRs and potentially rebuild tables and/or indexes for crashed drives.

RAID is NOT just for availability

[StandardCell (589682)]

RAID is most definitely about reliability and recoverability as well as availability. It all depends on the level you choose. Your argument that multiple disks increases your likelihood of failure is trumped by one simple fact: how do you know that the single drive you buy for the job will be more reliable than the one next to it?

You can't, and that's why using at least something like RAID1 is a smart way to go. When one drive fails, your data doesn't all go with that one drive. I've seen drives from batches fail literally within a couple of days of each other. If you're smart and rebuild offline as soon as a failure occurs, your chances of losing all your data are very small. Reliability engineering is all about probabilities, and the mirroring and parity concepts of RAID facilitate this reliability. The only place where your argument holds sway is on RAID0, and that's a pretty specialized application to be sure.

If you want to swap drives without disassembling the machine, get case with enough 5.25" bays for the drives you need and buy some removable trays for $10 a piece. When one drive fails, you turn a key, pull the tray, swap the drive and back in it goes for a rebuild.

Re:OpenFiler

[Elledan (582730)]

You might want to reconsider putting such a cheap PSU in that system. From everything I've seen in PSU benchmarks such as those posted at hardocp.com (including such budget PSUs), PSUs for less than $90 are quite likely to be a hazard to the rest of the system. Together with the mainboard, the PSU is one thing you really don't want to go cheap on. Don't forget to read benchmarks, though. Some manufacturers like to put some really horrible junk up for sale at really inflated prices.

Buy responsible, buy informed ;)

cheapo walmart linux box

[freedom_surfer (203272)]

I'd get one of those cheapo walmart linux boxes...stick it in a closet....then just use rsync or rdiffbackup....with a real box you'd have the luxury of being able to add additional storage easy...you can even setup a software raid for extra protection...

Re:cheapo walmart linux box

[nolife (233813)]

But some 300-500GB USB external hard drives. They are like $70-$100 now. Plug it into your Linux/Windows machine and share it out. Not as sexy but it will work. You can use rsync or the windows equivalent ntbackup or robocopy to back it up to another drive somewhere on your network. Hell, $100 for a 500GB external, buy two and plug one in periodically and copy one to the other with your scheduler.

There is no raid controllers and setup to worry about, no elaborate "recovery process" to follow if there is a failure, never a need to open up the computer, nothing special needed for installation (plug them in and share them out), and the external drives can be plugged into any USB port on any computer and mounted. Total cost for 500GB of "network" storage backed up to another 500GB drive on your desired schedule will be about $200 +tax.

As with any NAS or backup solution for the home... Speed, Reliability, Cheap. Pick any two.

RAID 0

[spyrochaete (707033)]

For $500 you could buy a whole PC with a pair of 7200RPM 500GB SATA2 drives. You could configure a mirrored RAID 0 array and back your stuff up over the network. For many dollars fewer you could upgrade your power supply and stick those drives in your current PC, assuming your motherboard supports software RAID.

Re:RAID 0 != Mirrored!

[Chas (5144)]

RAID0 = Striping
RAID1 = Mirroring
RAID5 = Striping with parity
RAID0+1 = Mirrored Striping
RAID10 = Striped mirroring

Re:RAID 0 != Mirrored!

[jcoy42 (412359)]

The easy way to remember this is:

How many drives can you afford to lose?

RAID0: you can lose 0
RAID1: you can lose 1
RAID5: if you don't remember this one, you're hopelessly lost anyway, so sure... you can lose 5.
RAID6: RAID5 with an extra pairity drive.
RAID0+1: you've added RAID1 to RAID0.
RAID10: you've added RAID0 to RAID1.

Re:

[vally_manea (911530)]

he said mirrored - so probably he meant RAID 1 :-)

Re:RAID 0

[spyrochaete (707033)]

pshh, 1, 0, computers barely know the difference.

I've got the DNS-323

[ThatDamnMurphyGuy (109869)]

Last year I ditched the file server at home for the DNS-323. With the current firmware, it's been rock solid for me. At the time, it was $300 for the unit and two 250GB drives. It's iTunes server works well enough for me as well.

As a bonus, it's debian based, so you can hack the OS as well to server up things light lighttpd, upgrade samba, or run subversion.

Re:I've got the DNS-323

[giminy (94188)]

As a bonus, it's debian based, so you can hack the OS as well to server up things light lighttpd, upgrade samba, or run subversion.

I also own a DNS-323, and I can't recommend it so much. The 323 is *not* debian-based, it runs busybox. You can install debian on your hard disks, chroot a shell to the debian install directory, and start services like a separate http server, ssh server, etc under debian. It isn't quite the same thing, however...

The kernel that comes with the 323 is a huge problem, and the chroot debian can't fix that. There is a hack to load a new linux kernel image on top of an already-running kernel (akin to the way that you used to use LoadLin to boot linux from DOS, if anybody was doing that way back when). This method of replacing the kernel is highly experimental though. As it stands, nobody knows how to create a custom firmware for the 323 and load it without hardware hacking -- the firmware update interface checks new firmwares for a digital signature from D-Link.

I should also point out that even the latest version of the 323 firmware, 1.03, disappears files. It has also been reported that it will not rebuild RAID-1 arrays correctly. To demonstrate the former bug you try to transfer a file bigger than about 20GB to the NAS. It will report to your operating system's SMB layer that it took the file fine, but the file just won't be on the filesystem. I have tried this using Windows XP, Mac OS X tiger and leopard, and my stock Feisty Fawn boxen, using two different switches. The 323 exhibits the same behavior to all of them. The earlier firmwares are also really notorious for dropping files if you transfer large numbers of small files in batches (like, say, backing up your filesystem).

Also, the 323 only supports ext2 as its underlying filesystem. This probably explains some of the problems that it has when working with terrabyte-sized arrays? Also, the 323 does not provide a safe way of running fsck (you can do it via the command-line if you set up ssh/telnet, but only if you are willing to fsck a mounted filesystem [eep!]). In any case, it has been over a year, and D-Link has not got the kernel right on the 323 (and all they have to do is compile a kernel > 2.6.6 and ship it in a firmware), so I would suggest avoiding it...

Airport and USB drives

[dhartshorn (456906)]

$179 for an Airport base station, $321 for three 500GB USB drives and a USB 2.0 hub. Should be enough for a serious porn collection, and you get wireless N for free.

Drobo?

[Old Man Kensey (5209)]

Without knowing what you've looked at, it's hard to give you an intelligent reply, but a friend of mine just bought a Drobo [drobo.com] and loves it.

Re:Drobo?

[jbarr (2233)]

I've read a LOT Drobo looks like an EXCELLENT choice, but there are two things to consider:

1. It isn't cheap at $499--without drives.

2. It is not a NAS as such. Drobo is a USB-attached external drive system. Yes, its volume(s) can be shared over a network, but it is not a standalone, network-connected device.

Now, if Drobo had a gigabit Ethernet connection, I would seriously consider saving up for one....

Re:Drobo?

[jbarr (2233)]

Understand that for the $500, it will hold NOTHING, because out of the box, it comes with no drives. Your limitation on space is in how many drives you install (up to 4) and what capacity drives you install. Using their Drobolator [drobo.com] page, you can see how capacity is affected by the number of drives and capacities. For example, installing 4 1TB drives gives you 3TB of protected storage.

Freenas

[by Anonymous Coward]

Try the freenas server. It works great.
I use a old beat up computer with 3 500 gig external usb harddrives in a raid 5 which gives me a terabyte of storage :)

www.freenas.org

FreeNAS?

[hlt32 (1177391)]

Get an old box, age doesnt really matter.

Insttall FreeNAS, http://www.freenas.org/ [freenas.org] .

Raid-1 (mirror) a pair of reliable disks (hitachi or seagates).

Set up CIFs shares.

For the record...

[Applekid (993327)]

... you'll always need backups. Even the most reliable systems will eventually fail. Routine backing up is essential.

You don't need enterprise storage solutions: great. That means that you probably don't need to do nightly backups.

The lesson in you losing your data is not that you needed NAS, but you needed to make better backups.

Define "reliable"

[jimicus (737525)]

Try and work out exactly what you're protecting against before you worry about solutions.

Do you want data to survive a hard disk failure? RAID. (Though I make no guarantee that any of these things have implemented RAID terribly well, particularly if a disk fails 2 years later and the replacement you plug in has totally different geometry).

Do you want data to survive your own mistakes? Then use the NAS as a backup for your own PC(s).

Do you want data to survive poor implementation in the firmware? For best results, you'll probably need two totally different devices and some means of keeping them synchronised. (Though a number of Buffallo's Linkstation products can support a separate external USB disk for backup of the NAS itself).

Do you want data to survive a house fire? If you've got immense quantities of data, you'll need a unit you can take offsite. If not, perhaps a subscription-based internet backup provider is the way to go.

How many computers?

[Nimey (114278)]

If you've got data on only one computer, don't bother with a NAS and get a USB (or Firewire, which would be better since FW doesn't hog the CPU) hard drive. SyncBack isn't a bad free backup program for Windows, but the free version can't copy open files.

Even if you've got two or three computers, a good external HD will be cheaper and probably more reliable than a NAS box, simply because there are fewer parts to break on a USB drive than a NAS, which is typically a power supply, network card, some RAM, an OS in ROM, drive controller, and one or more hard drives. The only thing you won't get from an external HD is RAID, but you can fake that with software if you get more than one per computer, and RAID only means that the data's still accessible if one drive dies (assuming you're not stupid enough to use RAID 0), so it's probably not important for you.

If your data is valuable, burn the most important stuff to DVD periodically and stick it in a bank's safe-deposit box.

Inexpensive backup

[Caltheos (573406)]

Go to office Depot or Staples or whatever the local office supply store is, buy out their entire stock of paper and number 2 pencils. Proceed to copy down bit for bit the content from your hard drive. If you write really small, you might be able to fit it in under $500 worth of supplies. For even greater redundancy, you can use clay and chisels, but thats just too time consuming for the average user.

Re:Inexpensive backup

[rubycodez (864176)]

now that's just stupid, by writing hexadecimal instead of bits you can only use 1/16 the paper.

Been said a lot already, but...

[Penguinisto (415985)]

I have an old Celeron box with four 500GB hard drives in it running Fedora Core 7. It has RAID 5 (software RAID), two network cards (I get one NIC, and my wife gets the other one), Samba, and NFS (for my Mac and Linux machines - much faster than Windows sharing). The whole wad was made from spare parts, and the biggest cost was the drives (but w/ ~1.5 TB of storage space, no problemo).

I run Bacula [bacula.org] (it's not just for the enterprise, folks) and back up all the important data to the disk array.

I think I peek in there once a month or so, mostly to check disk space and see to patching. The box has zero Internet connectivity, so no probs there.

/P

Linksys NSLU2

[powelly (70306)]

I'm using a Linksys NSLU2 [wikipedia.org] as a NAS. I've wiped it of the original Linksys firmware and installed the officially supported ARM version of Debian Linux on it. Debian is installed on a 2GB USB Memory Stick, and I have a 500GB External USB HD attached via a tiny USB hub. I also have an HP F380 Printer/Scanner attached.

I'm using the box as a Samba server for file sharing, SANE server for remote scanning, CUPS server for remote printing and a Twonky Media server for steaming audio and photos to my XBox 360. It all works really well.

Not a bad NAS (or really a complete Debian Linux box) for about $250 for the NSLU2 and the Harddisk.

Buffalo is the way to go

[squarefish (561836)]

The DriveStation Quattro [buffalotech.com] is in your price range and provides you with 750GB of storage using RAID 5 and it's in your price range.

I just got a 2TB buffalo terastation pro II [buffalotech.com] for 1K and it's awesome. Here's [trustedreviews.com] a review of the 1TB model. They offer other options, but this seemed like the best one for me based on price, capacity, and reputation. True reliability means you probably want RAID 5 and that means 3 or more drives. If you don't want to fight with raid cards and configuring it from scratch, then this is a great option.

personal experience: ximeta

[psbrogna (611644)]

I've had good luck with the two Ximeta NAS devices I've bought in the last couple of years. They have a proprietary architecture that allows you to put a standard low cost, high capacity drive onto your home network for file sharing via either Cat5 or USB (through a PC). The network connection provides superior performance. I've used these drives in Windows & Linux environments succesfully. I believe you can pick up the external enclosure (that only needs a drive; already contains power supply and interface hardware) at Radio Shack for ~$60 and then put whatever compatible drive you want in it. Read more at: http://ximeta.com/ [ximeta.com]

What is "NAS"?

[KWTm (808824)]

The title and summary do not explain what NAS is. Nor have the comments so far.

Of course, any geek worth his/her salt must know what NAS is. Since it must be a very common term for people to use it without explanation, I looked it up on Wikipedia. Now I no longer need to turn in my geek card, because I know that NAS is a 34-year-old American rap musician [wikipedia.org]. It would surely be awesome to invite him home to perform over the network, thus solving problems of scrambled hard disks with the Best Home Network Nas.

Of course, NAS might stand for any number of other things [wikipedia.org] including Network-Attached Storage, Network Access Server, Non-Access Stratum, Network Audio System, or of course that shining epitome of disk failure prevention, the New American Standard bible.

Anyway, I'm glad I'm done scratching my head over this, because I'm developing a bald spot.

unRAID FTW

[BLKMGK (34057)]

First, I'd not heard of Openfiler and will be reading up on it but for now I'm using unRAID from Lime-Technology.com and it's working well. Here's why I like it and why I think it's better than standard RAID:

1) It doesn't stripe and it easy expands to as many as 16 disks.
2) Because it doesn't stripe disks that aren't being used can goto sleep, much less power usage, noise, and heat trust me.
3) One disk is used for Parity and must be as big as or larger than all others but all other disks can be any size you want - they need *not* be identical. JBOD indeed!
4) If you lose a disk you still have access to the data, if you lose TWO disks you will lose data - two disks worth and NOT the whole array! Yes I know RAID can protect against multiple disk failure but only with hot spares or schemes that mean you get to use even LESS of your disks for data. I get to use ALL of my disk space save just one disk. I'm actually running sans a Parity disk right now since I had a hardware failure, I have access to ALL of my data and am hoping a second doesn't die on me while NewEgg ships. :-O
5) It boots from FLASH memory on cheap hardware, you do not lose storage space to an OS.
6) The trial version supports two data disks and a parity disk, perfect for testing. The full version isn't super expensive. The product has decent support.
7) The disks use standard ResiserFS as their F/S. Want to pull one and take it someplace to mount to a Linux box? Sure, go for it. Need to do a data recovery for some odd reason? It's ResierFS so whatever works for that works for this.

Doing this for just $500 won't be easy without some spare hardware around. The Asus P5B V0 M/B runs about $106 at NewEgg and has 8 SATA ports (one is eSATA) and GigE. That and two 4port Promise cards (SATA or IDE) will get you up to 16 drives but obviously I'd start with just the M/B. Buy some cheap memory, no more than a gig. I spent $25 on the RAM I bought and $60 for a 2.4Gig Celeron D and that's WAY more than enough. Slap all that into a case you have laying around with a decent P/S and you're good to go on the cheap sans drives. Spend the rest on drives, I find Seagates work well and their 5yr warranty rocks! Oh you will need a FLASH stick too, 512meg is WAY more than enough so figure $25 here too.

Some things you might NOT like about unRAID:

1) You aren't going to turn this into a NAS\WEB server\Mail server. It's storage stupid, use it for that. To do all of those things you'd need a swap space and out of the box this doesn't have swap - nor is it needed. It can be added but....
2) Each drive is it's own share. I address them using UNC naming and there are ways to access files across multiple drives as a single share but it's not like RAID with one big fat volume. IMO the advantages outweigh this downside, more details can be found on the unRAID site.
3) It ain't super fast. Yes, it will max out a 100meg NIC pretty good but not the GigE. You're getting the throughput of a single drive with some overhead so there's no aggregation of disks to improve speed. It IS fast enough to stream HD and multiple SD streams are no biggie either. I *do* back my machines up to this without issue using Acronis. Do use a GigE NIC however, it bursts above the 100Meg mark and testing has shown advantages to having it, it just cannot max it out continuously.
4) unRAID doesn't YET support NFS, Tom is working on it. SMB is what I use.
5) The driver is open source but the controlling software is closed source and yup Tom makes some money on it. Source is available for the GPL'd driver software he's modded so you could go around this but frankly I think his pricing is reasonable, zealots might not think so.

Check it out, if nothing the ASUS board is a good base for damned near anything else you might want to build for a NAS and is supported under Linux, it has onboard video on it too. More details about the M/B, HD deals, or other hardware like SATA cages can be found on the unRAID support forums and in the Wiki.

My thoughts...

[Muad'Dave (255648)]

I've been doing research on this very issue. Here's an excellent site [smallnetbuilder.com] that has performance statistics and ratings.

• The Thecus 4100+ is rumored to be extremely slow.
• The Infrant/Netgear ReadyNas NV+ is the one I'm looking at. It has an iTunes server, a DLNA server, and a USB connection for TimeMachine.
• The Qnap TS-401T seems to have a USB port, but it is not for computer access to the filesystem - it's for backing up files to external drives!

My 'dream NAS' would support 3.0 Gb/s SATA transfers, support RAID 0-6 + JBOD, use a Linux-mountable filesystem on the drives (ReadyNas uses EXT3), have iTunes and DLNA media streaming support, firewire 800/USB 2.0 connections for the currently-direct-connect-only OS X Time Machine, support and use 1 GB transfer speeds.

The Thecus 5200B is sinfully fast, but doesn't have the iTunes or DLNA servers (it is a SMB box, not a home server, after all).

Opinions?

External Drives

[CopaceticOpus (965603)]

A fairly thorough and cheap solution is to use external USB drives. This plan protects you against pretty much every conceivable failure, including theft, fire, accidental deletions, and double hard drive failures. It would take extraordinarily bad luck to lose data. The weakness is that it requires regular human intervention, but the required work is very easy once it is set up.

1. For every drive in your computer, buy two external drives of the same capacity.
2. Label one set of external drives "A" and the other "B".
3. Give the drives from A and B the same names so that when they are plugged in, they will mount to the same location. (Assuming you have automounting turned on, like Ubuntu does by default.)
4. Write a script to backup your internal drives to one set of external drives.
5. Run the script with set A plugged in, then with set B.
6. Move set B to a convenient remote location, perhaps your office if your employer allows.
7. Every week or so, backup your files to the external drives currently at home. Then take those drives to your remote location, swap the sets, and bring the other set back home.

NAS != backup!!!

[swordgeek (112599)]

I can't believe I have to mention this AGAIN, but every time there's a discussion of home-RAID systems, 90% of /. jumps to the wrong conclusion.

Let me state something VERY VERY CLEARLY here:

RAID is not backup.
NAS is not backup.
SAN is not backup.
Snapshotting is not backup.
Backup is backup.

A "backup" means A COMPLETE COPIES OF FILES STORED OFFLINE.

RAID is a way of providing data availability and reliability. It doesn't provide backups. SAN and NAS are various frameworks for presenting the data in a storage system (generally RAID, but not necessarily) to an environment. It doesn't provide backups either. Backups consist of making COMPLETE COPIES (and yes that includes incrementals--ultimately, with a base copy plus incrementals, you have a complete copy) of files, STORED OFFLINE. Snapshots provide copies of files (and the smart snapshot systems do provide complete copies), but they're still online copies of the data. They will let you recover files to a point-in-time, but if your storage array goes T.U. for some horrible reason, you're still screwed.

RAID is fantastic for keeping your online data from being destroyed or taken offline due to hardware failures. SAN/NAS is great for making data available to a networked environment. However, if you want backups of your files, then back up your files--don't use RAID (and SAN/NAS on top of it) as a backup scheme, because it ain't.

Re:On the cheap

[Skinkie (815924)]

If you do it with OpenSolaris and ZFS, you make it very simple for yourself. The amount of administration needed using Linux and *iSCSI is huge. While OpenSolaris provides iSCSI/NFS on the fly. Including snapshots of snapshots. So you can have 'raw' volumes, and managed data. I'm using OpenSolaris now to boot my Xen Linux Nodes now from OpenSolaris NFS. Yes I know xVM exists, but it is not as mature as the Linux version. Use the best tool for a problem.

Re:Build / buy a Windows Home Server

[didde (685567)]

You must be new around here, right?

Re:

[Richthofen80 (412488)]

Either that or I was a beta-tester for Windows Home Server, during which it saved my bacon when I accidentally blew away my Quicken data files.

Re:Build / buy a Windows Home Server

[Richthofen80 (412488)]

HP makes a Windows home server for $600. Half a Gig, with hot-swappable trays for SATA, etc. just plug into your network and voila.

http://www.amazon.com/EX470-MediaSmart-Server-Sempron-Processor/dp/B000UY1WSK/ref=pd_bbs_sr_3_s9_rk?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&s9r=8a585b431588ae070115f9650cd90da1&itemPosition=3&qid=1195658849&sr=8-3 [amazon.com]

Re:Build / buy a Windows Home Server

[Toreo asesino (951231)]

"I can't imagine this taking more than half an hour to get working."

Jesus. The number of times I've said that and regretted it.

Windows Home Server Review

[justechn (821584)]

I second that suggestion.

I just completed a very extensive review of both the hardware [nyud.net] and software [nyud.net] for Windows Home Server. It is a fantastic backup solution and you can build a machine for very little cost. Not only do you get a great backup solution, but you also get a lot more. Windows Home server has a built in web server that will host all your files online for free. From the website you can also Remote desktop into any of your Windows boxes that support remote desktop. You can also stream all your media content from the Home server to any machine on your network. There are some problems with the Media Streaming, hopefully those will be fixed. Last but not least you have the ability to use add-ins which can add tons of extra functionality.

The biggest limitation of Windows Home Server is that it will not backup anything but Windows machines, but that does not mean someone won't write an add-in that allows other operating systems to be backed up.

Re:Linux is actually cheaper here.

[Penguinisto (415985)]

Dunno about all of them, but most of them are very easily addressed:

Ubuntu does not come with client software for windows machines to automatically back up the windows box nightly onto the Ubuntu server. WHS does.

Task Scheduler to copy files from client to a network share? Can't be all that complex to set up a basic data backup routine...

Ubuntu requires you to install Samba. WHS uses windows shares / web server interface.

Samba has a pretty easy GUI setup, even in Ubuntu. It's also already installed, I believe.

Ubuntu requires raid hardware or software.

Software RAID is already built-in. If you use Fedora instead of Ubuntu, you can use LVM's GUI tools to do all of the dynamic partition sizing goodness.

Ubuntu would not give you Remote Desktop access to your windows machines without configuring Wine, I think.

Use the Package manager to install rdesktop, which allows remote desktop access to any Windows box. Done.

Ubuntu requires you to install CVS to get versioning of files, which requires you to actively commit files. WHS automatically saves changes between versions and allows you to step back, all through the nightly automatic backup.

Ah, now there's one that you've gotten perfectly correct (IIRC), and why I use Bacula [bacula.org] on my home network (which is admittedly not something for the casual user).

You'd have to write your own web service to access the machines from outside the network. You'd also have to configure the router yourself. WHS automatically configures routers (if supported) and has an IIS app that lets you access all machines and WHS content from the internet.

I'm not so sure I'd want any un-hardened machine to be accessible from the Internet; esp. a Windows one that both streams media and holds all of my personal data in one easy-to-reach location. That's just begging for a first-class arse-pounding from the first script kiddie to see that you've done that.

This is just a handful. I thought this through, I run a small business (20 hours a week of development) and did my homework before making the decision to buy WHS.

I'm sure you probably have... but I don't think you had all the facts at hand when you did. Now know that I'm not knocking your choice at all - if you use something as a beta and like it, and it works for you, cool... but I think that you haven't really looked all too deeply into the alternatives, you know?

Personally, I find that spending $169 for just the OS (when I can get at least an extra hard disk with change left over at that price) to be a bit much. There is also the headaches specific to Windows - the high probability of being targeted, the EULA that says I do it MSFT's way or no way at all, the 'phoning home', the DRM, the extra overhead (I stick with runlevel 3 on my home servers), and the fact that there really isn't much I can tweak on it (at least by comparison)... But then, I do the sysadmin thang for a living - so my needs, skillset, and priorities are a lot different from that of the average home user.

And so it goes... :)

/P