Looking for a NAS for shared storage for home lab

Haswell

I am looking for a NAS for shared storage for home lab.

The Synology DS112 looks good. I just need the enclosure, I have tons of extra hard drives.

QHalo

Can't go wrong with either Synology or QNAP. I have a QNAP and my boss has both at his place and they're both great performers. Go with which feature set you like better. I wouldn't stray from either of those two though. Drobo's and Iomega's are just bad.

Asif Dasl

You say you have a bunch of hard drives but does the Synology allow you to swap out the hard drives and dynamically adjust the RAID array? I've a ReadyNAS Pro 4 (now replaced by a newer model) and it has XRAID2 which allows you to swap out the hard drives one by one. I am planning to replace my 4 x 2TB with 4 x 4TB fairly soon as a matter of fact. Drobos look nice but are junk IMO.

taternuts666

I don't have a lot of experience with home NAS devices but STAY AWAY FROM THECUS. I have a Thecus device and I hate it. I even lost about 4TB worth of data when I had 1 HDD in my 4 HDD RAID 5 config fail. The NAS couldn't rebuild the RAID.

Aside from that it's quite slow and lacking in features.

I would say to go with Synology as well.

SimonD.

I have owned a couple of Iomega IX4200D's in the past, moved to a Synology DS1513+ and love it, I have also tried FreeNAS, OpenFiler, NexentaStor and Open-E, for a comparison have a look at some testing I did a couple of years ago here (Home Lab NAS/SAN Shoot-Out Part 1 « Everything Virtual and Home Lab NAS/SAN Shoot-Out Part 2 « Everything Virtual).

Working on up dating the testing to include newer version of FreeNAS, OpenMediaVault and the Synology.

santaowns

I run a freenas box on a HP DL380 g4 with 2 HP MSA70 storage connected to it. I can expand to about 150 TB of raw data. Right now i am testing with 25 HP 72 gb 2.5" drives.

The Lord of Nightmmares

I am looking to build a home lab myself, and I was wondering would it be possible to install FreeNAS in a virtual machine to store the VMs for the hosts?

santaowns

Lord, yes that is possible. When I originally ran my lab I had my home theatre pc as my NAS/ISCI for esxi. There are many tutorials on how to run freenas inside a VMware virtual machine as well. I saw them when I was googling some stuff back when I setup my environment.

EV42TMAN

I have a Synology DS212j in my home lab and I love it. It works perfectly as an iscsi target for my ESXi server. At work we use QNAPs they are pretty good too. I do have to disagree Asif Dasl though the Netgear NAS devices are only good when they work, but if there is an issue you're pretty screwed. Also I've worked with a different number of the NAS OS's like FreeNAS, Openfiler, Open-e, OpenMediaVault and they all have their own advantages and disadvantages, out of all of them i'd go with OpenMediaVault. I don't like how FreeNAS has turned into a sale pitch iXsystems. Open-e and Openfiler are basically the same Openfiler is basically the free open source version of Open-e and they are both a pain to deal with. OpenMediaVault is simple and works very well.

Overall though for a lab setup get a 2 bay nas with some 1tb WD Reds; overall it will be the cheapest, most energy efficient, and reliable solution you can use for a lab set up. Then if you want to make a storage server for your home you can branch out into something larger but it is much easier to keep production and lab set ups separate even at home.

Asif Dasl

EV42TMAN wrote: »

I do have to disagree Asif Dasl though the Netgear NAS devices are only good when they work, but if there is an issue you're pretty screwed.

My Netgear is going strong after a year of use but having a RAID NAS device is no substitute for having a good backup - there is a reason why there is an automated backup button to another external USB device is on the front of the device. Obviously you won't be able to backup everything to USB if you have 4 x 4TB but then if you are running a single or double drive NAS configured in RAID 0 then you have just as much a chance of drive failure as running in to a problem expanding the RAID array. I've ordered 4 x 4TB and I'm going to expand the RAID array in a few days - fingers crossed!