Best Home Network NAS 802
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."
Drobo? (Score:5, Interesting)
FreeNAS? (Score:3, Interesting)
Insttall FreeNAS, http://www.freenas.org/ [freenas.org] .
Raid-1 (mirror) a pair of reliable disks (hitachi or seagates).
Set up CIFs shares.
Been said a lot already, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Build / buy a Windows Home Server (Score:4, Interesting)
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]
BackupPC will solve all your problems (Score:3, Interesting)
All you need is a cheap Linux box (Debian works well) with one or more large disks. The disks and disk controller don't need to be particularly fast either since backups happen during off hours. If you are worried about disk failure put in two drives, use software RAID, and forget about it.
Re:Airport and USB drives (Score:2, Interesting)
Leap Frog (Score:3, Interesting)
I build one drive until I "get it right", then I place anoth drive in the system as slave. Then I boot Knoppix 3.8 or DamnSmallLinux or something similar from the CD drive (I found some Live Linuxes make this process take much longer).
Then I issue the command
dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb bs=512M count=160
I have 1G of ram in the machine so I am assured of getting full 512M reads, then 512M writes, so the OS does not have to do extra buffering.
It takes almost exactly 1 hour and 8 minutes to totally mirror a drive. This copies the MBR, all partitons, even the blank, space byte-for-byte from one drive to another. It ignores files, folders, etc (so those long filename errors NEVER happen) it just copies RAW data.
I then take the second drive out of the system and place it on the shelf.
In the event of a failure (I am down to 4 working drives now.)
I take the good drive off of the shelf, make it
I then take
I take the failed (or failing) drive and make it
After the new drive is happy and in place for a few days, and I am sure I got everything I needed off of the failing drive, I re-clone the good drive and put it on the shelf.
So, far it has been the most hassle free disaster recovery plan I have ever used.
You can get 5 identical 80G hard drives for less than $200 with a very short search.
unRAID FTW (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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.
Re:OpenFiler (Score:5, Interesting)
BSD and Linux based NAS (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.freenas.org/ [freenas.org]
Re:OpenFiler (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:OpenFiler (Score:5, Interesting)
External Drives (Score:4, Interesting)
mdadm software raid 5 on cheap COTS hardware (Score:1, Interesting)
1) Second-hand hardware - I just got an AMD 3800+, SLI mobo, and 1GB of RAM for $125 on CL.
2) A _good_ PSU - I recommend the Antec EarthWatts 430 for its quiet running and 80%+ efficiency - $60
3) A dirt-cheap case - Frys has a dozen workable cases for $50 or less.
4) 3+ drives at the lowest $/GB price point you can find - 3 250GB drives at Frys for $180 a year ago
5) A simple, easy-to-use Linux distro like Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Mandriva, etc. - Free!
Total: $415 ($500 gets you a dedicated drive controller and a separate boot drive of 80-120GB as well)
You can go el cheapo on the mobo, CPU, and RAM because pure performance is not your main concern. The PSU has *got* to be good quality, however. If possible, use a separate fourth drive as the machine's boot and swap partition so that a failure of a RAID drive doesn't jeopardize the host machine's operation, and vice-versa.
I started my RAID server with a P3-900, 512MB of RAM, 3 250GB IDE drives and a two-port IDE drive controller to complement the mobo's, a 40GB IDE drive I got free from work as the / and swap drive, a $40 aluminum case, and the Antec PSU. All told I think my outlay was around $370 because while I got the CPU, Mobo, and RAM for free (in exchange for volunteering at interconnection.org, check them out) the PSU was more expensive then.
Setup is fairly straightforward, although not intuitive: you have to install Linux, prepare your RAID drives for mdadm, format them, create the RAID array, and then mount it. Finally you have to create your NFS or Samba shares and create users and set permissions for the raid. Actually, setting up Samba might be the single most annoying part of the whole process! Luckily tutorials for all of these steps exist on the 'Net.
The reason I emphasize the non-RAID boot drive is ease of maintenance: my little 40GB drive bit the dust a couple weeks ago and I was able to swap it out, install a new version of Kubuntu, and reassemble my RAID just a few minutes later. If I'd thought about it, I could have been backing up my original server configs *to* the RAID for just such an eventuality, which would have made restoring the system even more trivial. Essentially, if you separate the components of the server itself as much as possible from the
If you have the time and are willing to put in some effort, I believe this will yield a more flexible and cost-effective solution than most commercial SOHO NAS solutions: I was able to use this machine as a RAID server, a web server for an experimental flash video hosting site, a backup workstation for working from home and for school projects, and as a quiet bittorrent client. The only caveat is that the less powerful your CPU is, the longer automated RAID checks will take, but you can schedule those for early in the morning and usually never notice the CPU being used. Software RAIDS are usually as performant as hardware versions for non-enterprise needs, and being able to swap the drives into better hardware without needing a proprietary drive controller is a godsend.
Hope this helps!
Re:OpenFiler (Score:1, Interesting)
Not all of the blame goes to microsoft - though the default user account SHOULD NOT have admin rights - but the numerous software and hardware companies who have, traditionally, expected admin rights for the users of their software. This has changed a bit in Vista, I understand, but there are still too many programs that cause UAC to go mental (from what I have seen). Frankly, the whole software development culture on windows seems to be irreparably screwed.
I spend a lot of my time dealing with any Tom, Dick or Harry that gets a computer and then inevitably screws it up. I have a lot of sympathy for these people - safe, secure computing practises take a large amount of understanding and effort for someone who just wants to browse the web, download some mp3s and play some games. I have years of experience under my belt, they do not.
I am seriously contemplating developing a version of Linux for absolute beginners. The problem is that some of my ideas that would help people require radical alteration of the way things have been done (for ever) involving interaction with files, the filesystem, windows and window managers, etc, that programs would have to be severely modified to work with it.
As I said, I spend a lot of time with complete beginners and I take it seriously when they get confused about things like saving files (why do some programs use your default home and others ignore it?) or finding files, or why are there so many programs installed by default that do the same thing (ubuntu), why do installers on windows have so many options with such little information about what they mean, why don't most programs tell you immediately if they need a port opened on a hardware firewall, etc, etc. It's easy to see why people become overwhelmed by too much information, little of it helpful.
I'm a big fan of taking ui queues from games - most of which don't just dump you into the game and expect you to know everything, but find ways of teaching you the basics from the start. This can lead to abominations like 'clippy,' but I'm sure there's a way of doing it competently. Ultimately, I'm tired of watching people grapple with the illogical conventions of wimp-based, dumb systems - I know they only make sense to me because I've used them for so long. There has to be a better, user- and task-centric, rules-based way of doing things.
Why use NAS when what you need is a backup? (Score:3, Interesting)
Once in a while, yank the drive out of the enclosure and drop it in your safe deposit box and put a new drive in.
Advantages:
1) Easy approach to off-site storage
2) Protected from errors and viruses
3) Doesn't cost much
4) Doesn't waste power
5) Can restore on other systems
Disadvantages:
1) Not a very impressive geek toy
2) Not particularly fast
Re:Linux is actually cheaper here. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:OpenFiler (Score:3, Interesting)
RAID-Z [sun.com] is designed to prevent this.