So I was thinking about getting some form of NAS for storage + redundancy. Last I looked into Raid5 you needed to use all the same size drives, and you couldn't just upgrade to more drives without rebilding your raid. So this seemed kinda impractical and turned me off. I didn't realise stuff like this ( http://www.readynas.com/?p=656 - This flash image best sums it up ), was possible and now I'm keen.

Is this kinda thing normal on NAS these days? I was looking at the Thecus N4100PRO (http://www.umart.com.au/pro/products_listnew.phtml?id=10&id2=126&bid=2&sid=37121), from the reviews I had a look at it didn't seems like you could use different size drives, though I think you can grow the raid. Slowly taccing on more storage or upgrading existing drives sounds way better than having to replace all the drive at once with a matched set (what i was expecting), and probably no where to back up my data when I do this.

Just looking for a bit of a catch up on what these things can actually do, what's the norm, what you need to pay extra for, how practical they are, recomendations etc.

NAS's have been discussed ad nauseum here over the past few months, a search will likely be rather profitable to you.

Also

in b4 Nas the rapper reference

A good place to start would be

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/

You'll be surprised what they've done with raid since you first heard that it's impossible to do odd sized drives & on-the-fly rebuilds/upgrades
they're an awesome bit of kit, if their 4100 is on part with the 7700 it's a winner

*my opinion represents only having used one device (N7700)

To this very day I dont know why idiots come onto a DISCUSSION forum only to post s*** like google links or tell people to use the search function.

Dude I would reconmend a QNAP or a TheCus (I use two QNAP nas's). Get something that does raid 5 and takes a spare disk (auto rebuild on failure). Also make sure wahtever you get has raid expansion capabilities, so you dont have to destroy and rebuild your raid 5, you can just upgrade it by replacing the disks with larger disks etc.

How much are you willing to spend on the nas? Around a grand?

not sure why idiots do it - possibly for the same reason as others I guess - that they want to truly help someone by helping them learn to help themselves instead of spoonfeeding them which isn't really helping them much at all

To this very day I dont know why idiots come onto a DISCUSSION forum only to post s*** like google links or tell people to use the search function.

What a wonderful place a discussion forum would be if they only discussed the exact same topic 100 times eh? Bit like going to your mates house and talking about the exact same thing every day. Go ahead and try that and then come back to report on how interesting you find that.

On topic: I have a Netgear ReadyNAS and it does its job of storing my stuff but good god is it slow at doing anything. Computer Alliance recommended it over the Thecus, do not ask me why but I wish I hadn't listened and gone Thecus instead.

yeh I find netgear seem to way under-spec their cpu's to save a buck which is bad news for software raid systems. but apart from this, our own readynas has been very reliable over the past two years we've run it

Just buld a pc out of hardware you have lying around and install freenas

I haven't run mine long enough to know anything about reliability in the long term but yeah it's always just worked in the short time I've had it, although I don't leave it turned on 24/7. It just makes me wonder what the hell is going on inside it when my wrt54g serves up its web interface about 10x faster and it's probably 5+ years old by now. The actual serving of data isn't too bad and I have no complaints about that as the limit seems to be the hard drives themselves (they're mirrored as far as I know) but holy hell is the web interface ever slow on this thing in firefox, safari, opera and IE. Good thing I rarely ever have to access it.

How much are you willing to spend on the nas? Around a grand

I'd like to spend as little as possible getting the features i want.

Just build a pc out of hardware you have lying around and install
freenas

I can easily get a P4 2.8g machine with a couple of gig of ram for the task if i were to do this. Can I add / upgrade hard drives without rebuilding the raid if I go this way like I could with the NAS option?

ps. Thanks greazy!

last edited by JaYMan at 02:26:51 16/Dec/09

use <> instead of [] and you're golden.

I can easily get a P4 2.8g machine with a couple of gig of ram

You could always source something like a dell sc430 server which has four sata ports would set you back about $150 and use freenas

So in this scenario you would use
Small Usb Drive which you would install freenas embedded onto the installation footprint is tiny
Add the drives you require
Configure software raid 5 or zfs (can't remember if it suppoort raidz off the bat)

And it would support smb - samba (basically windows file sharing) it would support a ups, and cups (think network printing) and it also has an option for viral scanning as well. Bolt on TorrentFlux and you have a torrent client on it. And can run afp and a whole host of s***

Backup is simple enough as there is a script that allows you to mount an external usb drive run DD which will then create a copy of your data and then unmount the drive

I would imagine it would set u back
msy pricing wd
1.5tb are 140x5 = 560
dell sc430 - 150
2x 3.5 to 5.25 mounting brackets $5
$715

Another option is look at clarkconect and running the either the simple file sharing or flexishares plus it will give you firewall/proxy/qos which can manage your network. fyi if you had a modem which supports bridging then you could get clarkconnect to handle the pppoe authentication and use its nat table instead of the modem improving torrent performance. In this config I would add two tiny drives in raid 1 (ide would be fine) for the os and run the shares off 4x raid 5 so total of 6 disks

Off the shelf you will find qnap ts4xx series good value for money, however if you intend on growing your storage I would be looking at models higher up the range or using either mdadm + lvm or a zfs implementation on something like freenas or openmediavault once it gets forked off freenas.

Do you have any other specific requirements

last edited by HerbalLizard at 05:27:34 16/Dec/09

last edited by HerbalLizard at 05:30:08 16/Dec/09