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."

FreeNAS

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

Re:FreeNAS

Actually, I much prefer Illmatic [wikipedia.org]. Don't know what the rest of you are on about...

Re:FreeNAS

What are your experiences with the speed of FreeNAS? The couple of times I've dabbled with it, it was unusably slow by my standards (ie, 100Kb/s over a gigabit connection); no fault of the hardware, which currently serves at speeds of 20+MB/s using the disgusting but functional standard Windows file sharing.

Re:FreeNAS

OpenFiler is also a good choice. Get that with a low power AMD cpu and you will have a nice inexpensive NAS.

Re:FreeNAS

Also in the home brew camp would be OpenFiler [openfiler.com] which I have a few I've built. Tyan has a nice 1U case with 4 hot swap bays that is reasonable, then their S2925 motherboard will support the Phenom (overkill on a NAS) but a nice X2 4000 is super cheap, and the board supports cheap RAM, add in a 3Ware 9650 for sata raid, or I've really started liking the Adaptec 3405 for SATA/SAS.

I personally don't use Samba for anything, like your cleaning lady, I don't do Windows, but I've at least tested it and seems to work fine. LDAP is supported as well as NT4 and Active Directory for authentication. I have 4 boxes setup using LDAP and backup 300 servers between them and I simply never have to do anything except define new shares when I need one.

personal storage servers

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.

RAID5 is stupid, RAID 10 or no RAID

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.

Re:RAID5 is stupid, RAID 10 or no RAID

I don't know why AC got modded troll... it's good advice. I built my file server as raid5 and am regretting it. It's the most economical, and you do get some redundancy.. but if I had to do it all over again, I'd totally go raid10.

With Raid5 .. two drives fail and your done. Unless you buy every drive at a different time from a different manufacturer, chances are under the same wear conditions, two will fail around the same time. With a raid10 .. you put all one brand on one side, all of another brand on the other side... possibly on a separate controller. Raid10 can withstand a much larger failure... and you also get some serious performance++.

Re:RAID5 is stupid, RAID 10 or no RAID

With Raid5 .. two drives fail and your done

Then go with RAID 6. Takes 3 failures (out of 4!) to lose data. By the way, is there any sort of setup out there with more than 2 parity drives?

Also, if you've got 4 drives in your RAID 10 setup only two drives need to fail for you to be screwed, plus you only get (theoretically) twice the performance of a single drive, as with a RAID 5 setup for the same amount of drives you get 3 times the performance.

Re:RAID5 is stupid, RAID 10 or no RAID

Um, no, try again. RAID-6 is n+2 redundancy, not n+3. RAID-10 is n+2 on a good day but you are really only guaranteed n+1, since if both mirrored disks fail then you are screwed.

Re:RAID5 is stupid, RAID 10 or no RAID

Using RAID 1+0, you get almost 4 times the performance for reads, and 2 times for writes.

Using RAID5, you get maybe 3 times the performance for reads (if you're lucky), and writes can be slower than a single drive due to parity calculations.

Clearly, 1+0 is the preferred choice for performance (and yes, I have used both, for years)

I would still recommend RAID5, as it's worked quite well and been very economical for me, but performance-happy it is not.

Re:RAID5 is stupid, RAID 10 or no RAID

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 stupid, for not appropriately using RAID5

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.

Obligatory Spinal Tap Reference

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.

NAS: Western Digital MyBook World Edition II

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.

Re:NAS: Western Digital MyBook World Edition II

I've got it set up in RAID 1 mode (mode 5 needs a lot more drives).

Sure, if by "a lot" you mean 1

Build Your Own

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/ [breden.org.uk]

ReadyNAS NV+

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.

Re:ReadyNAS NV+

Is there any practical reason why the hardware is limited to 4 x 1 TB?

This used to be true. The new code version (free upgrade) supports volumes up to 64 TB. See here [readynas.com]. From that page,

With RAIDiator 3, you were limited to a data volume of 2 terabytes. With four 750 GB drives, accounting for RAID and other overhead, you're roughly at 2 TB. However, with the latest 1 TB drives, usable space with 4 drives are around 2.8 TB, so you'll need RAIDiator 4 to take advantage of that extra space. RAIDiator 4 supports up to 64 TB, so you will be happy to know that your investment will be good for quite a number of years, especially with the way the ReadyNAS capacity is able to grow with X-RAID.

If those are your requirements..

... 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.

Re:If those are your requirements..

And it should be noted there are still plenty of IDE drives out there in the larger sizes. If you really want to go with SATA, then get an adapter card.

Lack of performance? Not an issue, since I've yet to see a NAS that- at the lower end pricewise- was competitive in this regard, anyway.

Or, keep the server, and drop in a new $100 mobo/chip combo that allows for better power management. Regardless, I've found things are much better with a home server than they ever were with a NAS, and my DNS, DHCP, Samba all work better, plus I now can run squeezebox.

Having just seen terabyte drives at $169ish this past weekend, the flexibility of adding storage also makes it a better solution, too.

DNS323

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

ReadyNAS

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.

Synology CS-407

I heard a lot of good from friends of mine about the Synology Cube Station CS407 [synology.com], 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 [oinkzwurgl.org] on it. It has good support, and a large user community.

Others I heard about: Intel SS4200-E [intel.com] (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 [netgear.com] by Infrant (recently bought by Netgear) also gets good comments.

Re:I understand why you`d want to go pre-built

The price difference may disappear quickly with the difference in power usage.

According to my Kill-A-Watt, my old NAS box (old P4 desktop with two 750 gig SATA drives) costs me almost $20 a month in electricity more than those two drives in a USB enclosure hanging off my Airport Extreme.

When I was using a rack-mount HP server, it was costing me twice that!