NAS Advice please?

Howdy!

I was hoping some of you might already have a NAS device that you're using and could perhas give me some pointers on what to look for for my SOHO.

The one I'm looking at right now is here:
Amazon.com: Iomega StorCenter ix2 2 TB USB 2.0/Ethernet Network Storage 34299: Electronics

Any thoughts??

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Comments

dynamik

Do you have any old machines laying around? You could always just toss OpenFiler or FreeNAS on one of those (that's what I do).

genXrcist

I do... I have an older HP that I was gonna use for my lab but now that I got the virtual up and running I don't really need it anymore. Hmmm.

I did some reading on FreeNAS and that would work...I'd just have to put in a Gigabit NIC in... Except that I'd like to have (2)HDD's in it and XP can only support RAID1.

Do you use Software RAID or Hardware RAID on your NAS server? Or do you use RAID at all?

Which brings me to another question, what sort of network utilization do you see? I get 5% max of my gigabit connection (around 4MB/sec out of 125MB/sec possible) and I think it's because of the Ext HDD processor I write to. It's connected to the USB2.0 port on my WRT610N router so I figured it would be fine. At a 60MB/sec data throughput rate I should at least be seeing 40MB/sec if not more.

Any thoughts on that? I was thinking a dedicated NAS processor would protentially speed this up. I use BESR 8.0 and it takes forever to run backups!

dynamik

It supports various levels of software RAID. To be honest, I don't think any of the processors in those SOHO units are going to offer significantly better performance than that. There's a reason a good RAID adapter costs ~$800 by itself.

I never bench-marked my stuff. It was always just good enough for what I needed. I'm down to a single machine now (added a RAID-10 card with 4x1TB, which definitely satisfies my needs).

If you are interested in some other units, check out these: Home of Sans Digital - Your One-Stop Storage Provider

Pash

Im interested in this topic as well. One thing that has turned me off getting a NAS box at home was that hard drivers come and go so quickly from production to no longer in production that sometimes sourcing the hard drivers alone can be difficult.

I mean in terms of long term investment i wouldnt wanna lose one hard drive and the be forced to move all data about and then seat new hard drivers, would piss me off to no end.

Is this just the risk of getting a NAS at home?

dynamik

Pash wrote: »

Im interested in this topic as well. One thing that has turned me off getting a NAS box at home was that hard drivers come and go so quickly from production to no longer in production that sometimes sourcing the hard drivers alone can be difficult.

I mean in terms of long term investment i wouldnt wanna lose one hard drive and the be forced to move all data about and then seat new hard drivers, would piss me off to no end.

Is this just the risk of getting a NAS at home?

You can usually find them on overstock sites, ebay, etc. if you throw the serial number in. I also typically buy an extra drive when I initially set things up.

Pash

dynamik wrote: »

You can usually find them on overstock sites, ebay, etc. if you throw the serial number in. I also typically buy an extra drive when I initially set things up.

Cheers dude, i was kinda guessing thats the answer, I guess im gonna have to stop being cheap and just get one and stop thinking about it

I know you mention you have just recycled a spare box lying about your home, but how do you find the power consumption on one of those things, around the same s a NAS box or more or less?

ally_uk

EDGE10 - Application Specific

Or save yourself some dosh and go with old hardware and freenas

dynamik

Pash wrote: »

I know you mention you have just recycled a spare box lying about your home, but how do you find the power consumption on one of those things, around the same s a NAS box or more or less?

I didn't even check. I would assume the difference would be negligible unless you used some ultra pimped-out system. A triple-SLI gaming system would more than likely be overkill for a NAS