Best NAS solution? (1 Viewer)

[karlc_uk1979]

Funnily enough I've run both a Freenas box, and a ubuntu server before getting the NAS box.

The big advantages are:

1) Lower power consumption.
2) Raid tends to work (Freenas Raid support without an £££ hardware raid card is a bit beta ;-))
3) Size, it's alot smaller than a normal desktop pc. About the size of my shuttle XPC, but has more hard disks inside
4) Has remote admin, emails me that the backup has happened etc, all out of the box.
5) You can add funky stuff to the Synology box, such as subversion etc.... it's basically a linux box.
6) Maintainance - I do nothing, it backs itself up, and is connected to a UPS. Job done.
7) It's quiet.

and the biggest, and this is the single reason we went for it, rather than a ubuntu home server, is that my girlfriend can even fix it! This is a big issue as it stores a lot of her photos, and we agreed as I work away from home, she must be able to fix it herself.

 

[Eeyore]

I fully agree with Karlc. A store bought NAS is better for all of those reasons. Also, once you've been in IT for 15 years, you want something that just plugs in and works. tinkering with linux for my HTPC does not fill me with joy!

In australia, the Drobo + Drobo Share is about AUD$1200. the Synology CS407 is $1080. The $120 price difference for the Drobo justifies the ability to handle different drive sizes. Eg. 1 have 4x 1TB at the moment, then when i want to upgrade, I can just replace one drive at a time over a period of a few months (for financial reasons) with 2TB drives. The Drobo will support 4x 4TB drives when they become available. so 12TB of space will do me just fine.

 

[pilehave]

I think the answer "What is best?" cannot be answered without another question: "What do you need?"

If you need a plug-and-play solution with itunes/web/ftp/torrent/security cam/whatever (the full package) then you're probably best of with a "real" NAS (a cheap one, but a NAS nonetheless).

If all you need is the occasional access to say, 8 TB of backup- or mediastorage in RAID, well then put the cheapest MB and CPU in the shopping-basket together with 2 GB of RAM and you're all set to go (with whatever disksize you want). This could be run on something fancy like Windows XP or Windows Server 2003.

The performance will at least be at par with a NAS at twice the price.

 

[Gixxer]

nitro i completely agree, even if i went into raid in my server i would think about a NAS box as to forget about raid configuration, expanding etc..

but another point for a dedicated server is teh multiseat tvserver with mp.

so i guess its a matter of depending on your situation, i think in the future i will have both. but drobo and similar are very $$$$

 

[jsimmons]

I built my own out of spare parts.

 

[ep0n]

I prefer the new Drobo, with Ethernet connection. Older one is slow. Ability to run up to 16TB and in any combo of drive setup. Lots of Apps also for it. $700+ with no drives last time I looked.

 

[Moonracer]

I'm seriously considering purchasing the Synology DS409 and running a 4TB Raid 1 NAS with 4 2TB drives. The Synology products I've read and heard from friends are very good and they seem to be the way to go for NAS. My question is, would RAID 1 offer enough performance for Blu-ray material. I own a WD 2TB RAID 0 External and the RAID 1 (1TB with two drives) did not offer enough performance to run Blu-ray content. I've been told that Synology's RAID controller is far superior but I'd like to hear from someone here that they have successfully ran RAID 1 off one of these boxes and was able to play BD content.

These devices don't offer RAID 10 per their website and I don't want the hassle of trying to rebuild a RAID-5. No experience with RAID 6.

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!
mr

 

[Guzzi]

I use "unRAID" (limetechlogogy) for media storage. You can throw harddisks of any size in it, during operations only the HDs running, that are currnetly accessed (not all disks like in raid-5) and the box is usually in S3, if not accessed - which is <2 W power consumption. Mediaportal clients wake the box via WOL when starting or waking up from S3 themselves from any client. It's free for the 3-disk-version for testing. It's not a solution for small home, where I would prefer having all on one box but as soon as you think of "putting media stuff somewhere else" it offers some advantages. But as said before: Depends of what someone is looking after and thus the requirements - there is plenty of alternatives available ...

 

[pilehave]

The limitation is in the processing power and/or chipset of the NAS. A cheap RAID in a PC will give you +100 MB/s performance, too bad all NAS' under €500 performs like a mid-90's PC

Unless you need all the glitter a NAS can offer, build your own cheap server and run a free NAS software of some kind.

 

[Deco]

Unless you need all the glitter a NAS can offer, build your own cheap server and run a free NAS software of some kind.

STRONGLY agree with this.
Used to have a QNAP TS-100 NAS. It had a gigabit ethernet port, don't know why, never a hope of using capacity of even a 100 port, due to processor! Promised a lot, delivered little.

Purchased almost 2 years ago cheap Dell Xeon tower server, about €200 (cheaper than the NAS!). Loaded Ubuntu, to see what all the fuss was about. Runs headless and using 3 HDD's - 1 for Ubuntu OS and 2 in software RAID1 for media storage. Extremely reliable and never looked back. Runs:
- Samba for Windows file sharing to MediaPortal
- Apache/mySQL/PHP for webserver (use for content management system for managing weblinks etc.)
- Webmin for Ubuntu administration (as Ubuntu is tricky for us Windows users, despite what anyone says!)