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What NAS To Buy?
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Mon Jun 30, 2008 10:31 AM
from the to-busy-to-build-your-own dept.
from the to-busy-to-build-your-own dept.
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."
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Firehose:What NAS to buy? by Anonymous Coward
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FreeNAS (Score:5, Informative)
Re:FreeNAS (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:FreeNAS (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:FreeNAS (Score:4, Interesting)
Using iSCSI, I maxed out a 100 megabit connection using an IDE drive. I feel confident that I could build on that pretty easily if I were thwacking a bunch of drives in there.
My plan is a FreeNAS box exporting drives over iSCSI to a Solaris server using ZFS. Easier to expand.
One of these [icydock.com] and One of these [icydock.com] in One of these [dvhardware.net].
Coolermaster makes some other cases with 8 (!!) 5.25" slots, which is enough for altogether too many drives. That said, the likelihood is that even four drive slots would give you enough room to move around. 4x1TB now, then in a year when it fills up, add 3x2TB. Down the road, replace the 4x1TB with 4x4TB, and so on.
Actually, running Solaris on it directly might be more efficient. Hmm..
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Re:FreeNAS (Score:5, Informative)
FYI: Channel #samba isn't visited by the Samba developers. #samba-technical is where we hang out. We don't use words like "wintendo" there. But then again we don't offer a lot of end-user help (mainly discussions on the code) so it might not be the right place for you.
Jeremy.
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Re:FreeNAS (Score:5, Informative)
OpenFiler is also a good choice. Get that with a low power AMD cpu and you will have a nice inexpensive NAS.
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Re:FreeNAS (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:FreeNAS (Score:5, Interesting)
Problem with Openfiler is it doesn't do any authentication itself. Or it didn't the last time I messed with it. You had to have another machine set up to do LDAP or Samba (or whatever) authentication. It was a huge pain in the ass and I gave up on it as a home-based solution. Very powerful, but huge overkill.
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personal storage servers (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:personal storage servers (Score:5, Informative)
Interesting, but it's not a good solution for a household with multiple computers running at odd times. What if you're at work and your wife wants to access those mp3s? She has to turn your computer on? She has to take the firewire/USB drive from your computer, including the power cables and stuff?
I have a USB drive, with four people in my household, and five computers total, it's not a viable solution for sharing all the family photos and music. You may not need a dedicated server, but at least one box has to pretty much always be on.
If you skip down, you might see my other thread:
Online storage [slashdot.org]
I guess it depends how much you have to store, but the solution I was given sounds great...
The only downside is speed, but I don't see why people really need that much speed for most things. I mean, I don't normally, for example, rotate out ALL of my mp3s on my player, just maybe a few dozen at a time; low-res photos are on my website, so I don't normally need to access the high-res versions very often... plus I'd generally work locally and then save remotely.
So I haven't tried this out yet, but I intend to... for my 30GB worth of stuff that I have right now (that's worth backing up and sharing amongst the computers), it's like $4.50/month. Sadly, I wish I could use my GoDaddy account (where I have over 100GB free), but I can only use that with FTP. Fine for me, but no one else in my family.
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RAID5 is stupid, RAID 10 or no RAID (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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++.
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Re:RAID5 is stupid, RAID 10 or no RAID (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:RAID5 is stupid, RAID 10 or no RAID (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Use the 21st century RAID notation for clarity (Score:5, Informative)
RAID10, is a mirror of RAID5 arrays.
RAID0+1, is a RAID5 of mirrors.
No. The old nomenclature (such as "RAID10") was never defined properly so different people used different definitions. One vendor's RAID10 can be the same as another vendor's RAID0/1 so be careful.
Since 1990 or thereabouts people have taken to using the plus symbol, so
RAID0+1 is a RAID1 of RAID0s (a single mirror)
RAID1+0 is a RAID0 of RAID1s (a bunch of mirrors)
RAID5+0 adds (or stripes) a bunch of RAID5 arrays together.
You notate the RAID levels in the order they were applied; if I take 96 disks and make 12 stripe sets (RAID0) and then make six mirror pairs (RAID1) and then make a RAID5 array from them, it would be a RAID0+1+5 array. The notation is infinitely extensible and simple to learn and remember.
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Re:RAID5 is stupid, RAID 10 or no RAID (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:RAID5 is stupid, RAID 10 or no RAID (Score:5, Informative)
I would still recommend RAID5, as it's worked quite well and been very economical for me, but performance-happy it is not.
I'd recommend RAID6, personally. Not because two simultaneous disk failures are likely -- they're not -- but because the process of rebuilding a degraded array is very intensive and there's a good chance that if you've got a second drive that's getting close to failing, the rebuild process will trigger it.
This happened to me. Twice. I had a six-disk set, five active disks in a RAID 5 plus a hot spare. One drive dropped out and put the array in degraded mode, so the hot spare was brought in and the rebuild process started. Halfway through the rebuild, another drive failed, and obviously the whole array went with it.
The second failure was transient, so after rebooting I had five functioning disks, but the array was hosed. Thanks to the e-mails mdadm had sent me during the failure and rebuild, I knew the EXACT order that the disks were in prior to the start of the rebuild. I forcibly reconstructed the array from scratch, telling MD to treat the array as being in a valid degraded state no matter what the superblock said.
The transient failure happened again during the second rebuild attempt.
Since I didn't have backups of some of the data on the array, I crossed my fingers and tried again. This time it worked. I immediately dropped in a new drive, forced a failure on the one that had failed twice and breathed a profound sigh of relief when the rebuild completed successfully and my data all appeared to be intact.
I decided then that RAID6 is a hugely superior solution over RAID5+hot spare, because a RAID6 array will survive a second failure while rebuilding the array onto a fresh drive.
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Re:RAID5 is stupid, RAID 10 or no RAID (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:RAID5 is stupid, RAID 10 or no RAID (Score:4, Informative)
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++.
My advice is that if you can't explain how raid5 will help you, then you most likely don't need it and should use raid10.
Those that really need raid5 can explain how it is more cost effective over a given time span for them than raid10.
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Re:RAID5 is stupid, RAID 10 or no RAID (Score:4, Informative)
Linux MD RAID 10 driver page. [unsw.edu.au]
This RAID mode does not require an even number of discs. My understanding is that writes are much faster with RAID 10 than RAID 5 because parity checks are not necessary. However, this RAID10 mode gives you only half of your total RAID size, and RAID 5 gives you your total RAID size minus one drive in capacity.
Some useful, more detailed (and likely more accurate) information [wikipedia.org]
Some performance comparison results [blogspot.com] to RAID 5. It would appear that the read performance is close to RAID 0, and the write performance is close to RAID 0 divided by two -- because every write has to be done twice. Furthermore, RAID10 can be more robust for drive failure.
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You're stupid, for not appropriately using RAID5 (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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RAID != RELIABLE (Score:4, Informative)
RAID is just a reliability mechanism
No, it is not.
Repeat after me: RAID is for high availability, not high reliability.
If you want your data to always be available, you want backups, incremental backups, distributed chronologically and geographically.
If you want your data to be constantly be instantly available, then RAID is what you want. You still need backups to assure the data will always be available.
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Obligatory Spinal Tap Reference (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Re:RAID5 is stupid, RAID 10 or no RAID (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:RAID5 is stupid, RAID 10 or no RAID (Score:5, Informative)
Not to be pedantic, but RAID10 will only guarantee data security with one drive failure. With RAID 10, there's an approximately 1/3 chance that the second drive to fail will cause you to lose all your data.
Of course, with RAID6, any two drives can fail while ensuring the safety of your data. Hot spares are a good idea and will minimize the chances of having a three drive failure.
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Re:RAID5 is stupid, RAID 10 or no RAID (Score:5, Informative)
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NAS: Western Digital MyBook World Edition II (Score:5, Informative)
Re:NAS: Western Digital MyBook World Edition II (Score:5, Funny)
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
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Re:NAS: Western Digital MyBook World Edition II (Score:4, Informative)
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Build Your Own (Score:5, Informative)
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+ (Score:5, Informative)
Re:ReadyNAS NV+ (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:ReadyNAS NV+ (Score:4, Informative)
Using 32-bit unsigned integers gives a maximum of 4GB of addressable space. It had been 2GB until their recent firmware update. Also, there are no disks larger than 1TB currently on the market, so 4TB is also a practical limit.
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If those are your requirements.. (Score:5, Insightful)
... 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.. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:If those are your requirements.. (Score:5, Interesting)
DO NOT get a SATA card, unless you're putting it on a very fast (high speed) bus. A regular PCI bus is too slow.
I've found that MOBO's with SATA Raid on board are better performing and cheaper than separate MOBO and PCIe SATA Raid, but there are features on the PCIe SATA RAID controllers that many people might want.
ASUS makes a couple of MOBOs with SATA RAID, that I've found very good. I really like the NVIDIA SATA RAID setup on this board [tigerdirect.com]. Though you may be able to find a similar board cheaper somewhere else.
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I understand why you`d want to go pre-built (Score:4, Insightful)
.. but unfortunately all the pre-built NAS cubes I`ve seen are way over priced. They usually end up costing about as much as a home built file server _without_ the drives.
The way I look at it, by building your own, at least you can also use it for other things (if it's just a personal file server). I have a 3 TB file server that I also host virtual machines on. Even in software raid, with many drives, there is not much resource usage. If you buy a NAS cube, you are paying the same price or higher, and _just_ getting a file server.
Re:I understand why you`d want to go pre-built (Score:5, Interesting)
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!
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Re:I understand why you`d want to go pre-built (Score:4, Interesting)
I was looking to buy a NAS device earlier this year, to replace an aging machine running Ubuntu acting as a file server only.
Every device I read reviews for had the same problem. The drives are never spun down, so they consume way, way too much power and die a premature death.
I want a device that can go into low-power standby after 30 minutes of non-use and wake on any LAN event. I just can't find anything out there capable of this.
Device needs to support Samba or another cross-platform utility. It needs to be able to interact with OSX / XP / Ubuntu desktops.
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Drool over Drobo (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Drool over Drobo (Score:4, Informative)
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DNS323 (Score:5, Informative)
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
Re:DNS323 (Score:4, Informative)
I've said it before, I'll say it again: the DNS-323 sucks. I have one.
- It uses ext2 filesystem, which isn't great
- Its ability to rebuild a raid-1 array is questionable (lots of people have reported the device 'Doing the Wrong Thing' when they slap in a new drive)
- Its ability to deal with unicode characters on the filesystem sucks, even with the latest 1.04 firmware
- The device has a tendency to pretend that it wrote a file when it actually failed. This is most noticeable when I copy huge directories that contain many thousands of small files (e.g. doing rsync backups). This failure occurs chiefly over the SMB server provided, and still occurs in the 1.04 firmware (so it could be a filesystem problem?). It has happened to me recently when running rsync from the DNS-323 to sync up to a remote machine over ssh, so I'm not 100% sure that this a samba problem...
- There are quality control issues in the hardware (the leds tend to fail, often the ones that tell you that your hard drive has failed)
- You cannot load your own firmware on the device to fix any of the problems that I've mentioned, without soldering a serial port onto the mainboard
- D-Link support sucks
It has been about two years since D-Link released the thing, and it still isn't right. I don't think that they have enough incentive to fix the problems that it has, which is funny because all of the problems are already fixed in the latest versions of the open source software that they use. I'd really like them to just make us able to load our own firmware on the device easily, as that would allow me to fix all the troubles. Anyway, I'd stay away from this one unless you want to play with a soldering iron.
Reid
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Dealing with the same issue myself... (Score:4, Informative)
I've been using an old desktop with large HDs for years, always looking for that perfect, small NAS with minimal RAID that I could put in a corner. Unfortunately I was always frustrated since the majrotity of units were directed at business and ran over $1k (that's just too much to pay when a desktop is so cheap).
However, recently there has been a real surge in the market, with a number of more home directed products available. These often include streaming services, in some instances are OSS friendly or even hackable, and have small form factors with RAID1 or RAID5.
The best reviews I've found are at SmallNetBuilder.com... very thorough, always show the boards, etc. The best units I've found (or at least the ones that look the most interesting for my needs) are the following:
Synology DS207+
Looks like a great unit, with lots of control over the drives (RAID0, RAID1, and other drive configurations). However, it's a little pricey for a BYOD NAS ($350+). The support for NFS in external USB drives is nice, and the reviews are excellent. The fact that it doesn't have slimserver support (or not natively) is another weakness... I've been eyeing adding a squeezebox or other player to my stereo, and would like the option. One thing I can't figure out... is it worth going with the "+" unit, or is the old 207 adequate? It's a lot cheaper...
Netgear ReadyNAS Duo
This is obviously the most expensive option, and is about on par with the Synology unit from a performance perspective. I like the fact that it has Slimserver as a native option... seems very well rounded. Also has internal NFS support, which both the other units lacked. Negative seems to the weak photo sharing app (requiring a local install) and the lack of drive controls (RAIDX being the only option). The fact that the 1TB unit costs $600+ also sucks (that's with just 1 1tb drive)... I want a 1 terabyte x2 setup, and I can get a nice 1TB drive for a hell of a lot less than the $275+ (that's the difference between the 500gb and 1tb versions of this sucker). Basically means the 1 drive is a throw-away for me, which I have a hard time swallowing...
Hard choice to make... but I think I'm going to go with the Synology and two 1tb WD caviar drives I can get for $160. Total cost around $650... a little more than I wanted to spend, but this should be good for years to come.
-rt
ReadyNAS (Score:5, Informative)
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.
I like the buffalo (Score:4, Informative)
I used to set up my own linux fileservers... then someone else asked me to do one for them, then someone else... and so on.
So I bought a couple of the Buffalo NAS TeraStations. Slightly pricier, but worth their weight in gold for 5 second configuration.
SmallNetBuilder.com (Score:4, Informative)
See www.smallnetbuilder.com. They review NAS devices regularly. As well, they have a set of NAS charts with benchmarks.
Don't use a NAS device (Score:4, Interesting)
Let me say this, as someone who runs a small network which has something like 10TB of total storage, don't use a NAS device if you want anything more c