Hey boys and girls,

I'm in the market for some backup storaging (yep, new word for the day).

I want to hook it up to my router rather than directly to my pc via usb. And the next point of consideration is RAID 1 (mirroring). It'd be pointless to trust a device as a backup if all the data is lost when the HDD blows up. I figure I need 1TB, so 2TB with RAID1.

The final requirement is noise. The few NAS's that I've encountered have been really noisy - are there any quiet ones around?

I was considering a WD My Book World Edition 2, but this CNET review whinged that it's really noisy.

Max budget is around $1000.

It may be that I have to either choose between silence or raid due to multiple drives needing more cooling, but I'm hoping someone knows of one that manages both fairly well.

http://www.umart.com.au/pro/products_listnew.phtml?id=10&id2=126&bid=2&sid=37121

This is a good one, no ethernet or RAID though.

http://z.about.com/d/rap/1/5/G/-/-/-/Nas-Illmatic.jpg

last edited by mission at 10:10:59 20/Feb/09

I used to work in the NAS industry, though the company I worked for (Data Storage Solutions) has dissolved in all but name.

But I knew a lot about optical media backup storage, if you were considering that (rather than drive storage). Probably not worth considering though, for home use. More expensive and noisier.

I've got a mybook world edition - it's absolutely silent apart from the very typically quiet clicking of the hdd's when you first power it up. I've got no idea what the hell that cnet article is going on about, maybe they used to be noisy or something. Bought mine about 6 months ago, I think it's a great little unit. Easy to 'hack' (enable sshd) by simply pointing the firmware update page to a shell script which issues the commands of your choice, letting you login and administer it via the shell instead of the html interface if you prefer. there even seems to be a bit of a community that puts together a few software packages specifically for it, although I haven't used any of them myself - I just wanted to be able to get a shell into it and rsync my data across instead of using SMB

Max budget is around $1000.

Just out of curiosity, is that with or without drives included in the cost? I've noticed alot of NAS's can be in that price range but don't come with drives. Also how many bays were you thinking?

My Thecus N5200 Pro NAS is nice and quiet, and meets all the requirements you list as far as I can see. It also has a jail-breakable Linux OS in case you decide to get funky with it.

You'll spend close to your budget without drives though.

I'm using a QNAP TS209 Pro II, yours with 2x large drives for well under $1000.

RAID 0 or 1 (I went with 1 for obvious reasons), ethernet, USB, wireless if you buy a standard USB wireless dongle, can act as print server (not that that is such a big thing but meh), and BitTorrent client/server etc...

A word on BT though, for private servers that employ white lists of allowable BT clients it may not work out of the box, as the client used has a weird tracker ID that many tracker sites won't recognise and hence won't serve.

I'm using a QNAP TS209 Pro II

Geez, that looks really good for the price. Where did you buy it from?

Hi to Lonny btw, I was born in the Queen Vic in Lonny. Always trips me out to go back there. I love the Cataract Gorge.

Thanks for all the suggestions guys. I'll have a good read up on all of them.

My budget is $1000, including drives. I think RAID 1 is enough, don't need to go so far as RAID 5 or RAID 10 so the best would be two 1TB drives. If the NAS has more bays then I can always add more later.

Jim, is your mybook world edition exactly the same as the one I linked to?

yes i have one of those world book edition at work... its very silence... i dont know what they are talking about it..

mine has 2x500gb - but otherwise yep exactly the same

Pinky: Hi, only in Launceston for study, it's raining as I type, soon it will get cold. I miss Brisbane.

The NAS I got from Skycomp, amusingly the price has actually come up since I bought mine months back, I guess because of the currency woes.

My Thecus N5200 Pro NAS is nice and quiet, and meets all the requirements you list as far as I can see. It also has a jail-breakable Linux OS in case you decide to get funky with it.

I almost bought one of those but a review or two saw the drives getting really really hot inside there, have you noticed any issues with over heating? I don't suppose you know how much power it draws either do you?

Apparently Data Robotics the makers of the Drobo are an aquisition target for Apple at the moment. They are expensive for just the chassis that they are although the software for it looks very slick.

http://www.drobo.com/

upd: no ethernet. FW800 for the Apple mob

last edited by trillion at 20:42:29 20/Feb/09

f*** illmatic is awesome

there is a network attachment for the drobo.. but its not a direct connection... it runs off the usb i think

mine has 2x500gb - but otherwise yep exactly the same

ditto but bought mine in May '07 - slow transfer, noisy and unreliable (ie crashy)... but looks sweet... sits turned off next to my computer.

Maybe there are patches, I should prolly check again, wont help with the noise though...

I had to lol...


2 of my vendors offer thorough encrypted backups of my shiz...

I still dupe my shiz locally over to my *box and and encrypt from there.


get some freeNas Upya if you need to go cheap, and customise from there

tell haxors want they want to hear.. if it'll leave you alome

;)

ditto but bought mine in May '07 - slow transfer, noisy and unreliable (ie crashy)... but looks sweet... sits turned off next to my computer.

Maybe there are patches, I should prolly check again, wont help with the noise though...

heh bizzare
when I posted earlier I was at work and the drive is here at home atm - reading your post reminded me to check it again I literally have to stick my ear against the vent holes to hear a low humming. naturally when I access the share you can hear the usual hard disk clicking sound but that's it. I didn't get mine as long ago as you though, it would've been around mid '08 I guess. maybe the drives they use are a lot quieter now. that cent article that reckons they are noisy is also dated '07

I honestly cant remember what the sound is, i thought it was a the cooling fan that was noisy, I am sure the disks themselves are fine. I believe they are decent disks, and I actually wanted to move them to my desktop but lack of space and not knowing how to reformat them, prevented that idea from going ahead. Another idea was to setup an old desktop as a NAS, crashed and burned, as I read reformatting has a potential of bricking the disks, and I really dont know what I'm doing.

However, your more than welcome to log in and "do stuff", as I wouldnt mind the TB back!! :)

last edited by twat at 02:11:34 21/Feb/09

"do stuff" - the detailed description of all IT tasks by non IT people. :)

Jim, I've seen a number of comments around where people complain about the speed of the world edition. Is yours fast enough for backup purposes and streaming media?

yeah the speed is great, it's doesn't tear holes in the fabric of time but it's fine

and yeh I use it for both backing up and storing media which I just browse to and watch directly off the nas from my laptop plugged into a tv, via my crusty old ever-reliable belkin wireless AP


here's some system info from it:


[JASON@worldbook1 home]$ cat /etc/issue
Oxford Semiconductor NAS.


[JASON@worldbook1 home]$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
Processor : ARM926EJ-Sid(wb) rev 5 (v5l)
BogoMIPS : 99.73
Features : swp half thumb fastmult edsp java
CPU implementer : 0x41
CPU architecture: 5TEJ
CPU variant : 0x0
CPU part : 0x926
CPU revision : 5
Cache type : write-back
Cache clean : cp15 c7 ops
Cache lockdown : format C
Cache format : Harvard
I size : 32768
I assoc : 4
I line length : 32
I sets : 256
D size : 32768
D assoc : 4
D line length : 32
D sets : 256

Hardware : Oxsemi NAS
Revision : 0000
Serial : 0000000000000000



[JASON@worldbook1 home]$ cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal: 30032 kB
MemFree: 1392 kB
Buffers: 1280 kB
Cached: 14648 kB
SwapCached: 12 kB
Active: 15208 kB
Inactive: 9720 kB
HighTotal: 0 kB
HighFree: 0 kB
LowTotal: 30032 kB
LowFree: 1392 kB
SwapTotal: 104312 kB
SwapFree: 99740 kB
Dirty: 0 kB
Writeback: 0 kB
Mapped: 14216 kB
Slab: 2212 kB
CommitLimit: 119328 kB
Committed_AS: 19748 kB
PageTables: 296 kB
VmallocTotal: 483328 kB
VmallocUsed: 64 kB
VmallocChunk: 483264 kB



[JASON@worldbook1 home]$ w
10:42:15 up 10 days, 1:44, 0 users, load average: 0.05, 0.03, 0.01

[JASON@worldbook1 home]$ uname -r
2.6.17.14

I've got a thecus n2100 with a single 500Gb drive in it, supports two drives in RAID 0 or RAID 1. Works really well, isn't super fast, but quick enough to stream media over SMB to my XBMC box.

If you want expandability I'd get the 5200, but the n2100 is just fine. Like the others it's linux and can be hacked to crap.

df -h Jim?

[JASON@worldbook1 home]$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
rootfs 2.8G 179M 2.5G 7% /
/dev/root 2.8G 179M 2.5G 7% /
/dev/md3 950M 151M 751M 17% /var
/dev/md4 455G 291G 165G 64% /shares/internal

md4 is where the shares are, the rest I presume is on some onboard flash memory, I've never opened it up to look inside. you can see it has plenty of room on it's / partition for installing goodies without chewing your actual storage partition which is cool

just did a couple of sample speed tests, it's taking 6 minutes for a 1.9gb iso from my local windows machine to the worldbook via SMB over a 100mbit link. it supports gbit but my switch here at home doesn't

I also tried the same file from my linux box to the worldbook with rsync via ssh - that was 8 minutes, the cpu got a bit loaded in the worldbook - understandably, given the encryption. I haven't bothered putting an ftp or httpd server on the worldbook, I presume file transfers via those protocols would be at least as fast as via SMB, likely a bit quicker

so yeh, not particularly fast but not too shabby

The new World Edition isn't available here yet and that's a good thing because, based on what I've read, although it's faster it only has one drive in it - so no raid.

So if I am going to get one I'd better get my finger out while the old ones are still in stock. For the price harris tech is asking it's hard to go past it.

disks are WD5000AACS-0
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?DriveID=338


and yeh that is a great price imo

For some review and benchmark reading you might check out these

http://www.wegotserved.co.uk/
^ This place really burns through the posts, I went to link to a nice NAS I saw on there in late Jan and it's already out of the linked archives.

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/content/view/85/93/
NAS @ SmallNetBuilder. The skinny on all the goods.

Jim which FS does that Worldbook use?

ext3

Well, I bought the My Book World Edition and it sucks!

More specifically, the software it comes with sucks. I set up RAID 1 no problems using the web interface. But from there it just went downhill fast.

The WD mionet software mapped a network drive fine and I created a backup set in the WD Anywhere Backup software which then ran without a hitch. But the next day after a reboot the network drive wasn't mapped, and mionet reported "Failed mount" under the Resources tab. Restarting either the pc or nas didn't fix the problem. The only way I could get it to work again in windows was to use the browser interface and stop/start the nas under General Settings. Then mionet would get its act together and mount the drive properly.

Unfortunately after the next reboot, the same problem would occur. The threads I've found online show it's a common problem, but the standard "solution" is to check the pc firewall. So not a solution at all as if the firewall was to blame it'd never work.

To add insult to injury, my pc has hung a number of times after logging into windows. Not a blue screen, it just hangs (regardless of whether the nas is turned on or not). I lost patience with it this morning and have uninstalled all the software.

/rant.

So, can anyone recommend either a solution to my problem? I'm going to start looking into the various hacks that are around to enable ssh and ftp, etc. I'd still ilke to use the WD Anywhere Backup software, but just connect to the nas via a standard network share if at all possible.

I used the moinet thing the very first time I got it out of the box, until I realised it was just a piece of useless junk that I didn't need. I didn't have any technical issues with it like you, I just didn't see why I should use it. The NAS runs samba which can be configured by the http interface and I can simply map the samba shares from windows directly - therefore moinet is just unwanted bloat

I'd actually forgotten about it otherwise I would've mentioned it

I almost bought one of those but a review or two saw the drives getting really really hot inside there, have you noticed any issues with over heating? I don't suppose you know how much power it draws either do you?

Just saw this sorry. No idea on power, but it seems to run really cool. Without opening it up, the unit's metal casing feels cooler than the room by a few degrees and the intake etc areas are all without noticeable heat.

Its been running for about two months non stop I think, power interruptions aside.

I almost bought one of those but a review or two saw the drives getting really really hot inside there, have you noticed any issues with over heating? I don't suppose you know how much power it draws either do you?

Power I dont know about but heat is bugger all. Im surprised to be honest with 5x500gig drives and its constantly turned on. Its in a small bedroom due to my current living arrangments and I discovered its actually my PC that generates all the heat in the room if left on, not the thecus. It is possibly one of the most usefull things you can purchase if you need mass storage. Iv had to use it a lot recently moving a crap load of data around and its fast and efficient.

If you build your own you get good things like ZFS, which is the win.

There's a good start to building an alternative to a Drobo here

http://pegolon.wordpress.com/2009/01/13/build-your-own-drobo-replacement-based-on-zfs/

oh s***, mission did it already :(

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/73/Nas_2006.jpg

another vote for something that has zfs (like running an opensolaris box).