NAS advice

[Baldrake]

I want to get a NAS (i.e., HD I can mount on my home network.)

I got a NexStar LX, but despite what it says on the box, it appears to only support a 32 GB drive. Back to the store it goes.

I'm now looking at an IOMega Home Network HD or even a StorCenter Network Hard Drive, which supports two drives and RAID (but which is getting kind of pricey once you add in the drives themselves).

Does anyone have experience with any of the above? Or other home NAS recommendations?

[NiX]

Best kind of Nas!

[Engels]

Do you really need an actual NAS? If you're like me, you have a few old derilict computers who could just be turned into networked storage through a switch and subnet only file sharing.

[Baldrake]

Do you really need an actual NAS? If you're like me, you have a few old derilict computers who could just be turned into networked storage through a switch and subnet only file sharing.

Yeah, I was thinking about that. I was leaning to the NAS largely because of space - I have a small wiring closet that isn't going to accommodate an old clunker machine. Plus I was assuming that an old computer would burn a lot more power than one of those nifty little NAS units.

[Murgos]

After my recent NAS (Western Digital MyBook World 1 TB) woes, I am loathe to suggest anything other than just making yourself a barebones pc with Linux and Samba on it.

You will have 10x the flexibility and usefulness for about the same cost (or, stated alternatively, 1/10th the cost for a NAS with similar features).

The dirty little secret of the NAS world is that for the vast majority of them you are really buying a small embedded processor with minimal ability that is running some stripped down version of Linux.  If you are extremely lucky the NAS you buy will be hackable so that you can actually load software on it to do things you want, like serve iTunes or serve media to an X360 or actually just serve files.

If you are dead set on getting a little hard drive in a cute box do your homework, I was fortunate in that the NAS I purchased is easy enough to get into that I could actually make is somewhat useful by doing things like reformatting its share partition so that it didn't have corrupt sectors or configuring the ethernet port so as not to time out on file transfers larger than 300mb.

If I had taken my 300 bucks I could have built a 'good enough' mini pc with similar (and vastly more upgradeable and RAID-able) drive space, way more useful features, and enough RAM and Processor ability to actually max out the transfer rates.

[fuser]

Does anyone have experience with any of the above? Or other home NAS recommendations?

Find a cheap pc for decent parts and reliability and throw some 1tb disks in it. Take any Linux/BSD based distro built for NAS so you don't have to do much outside the box and run with it.

Example:
Dell OptiPlex 330 (deal on the site for a midtower e2180 + 1gb ram + 17" lcd for $434, 2 internal 3.5", 1 external 3.5", 2 external 5.25")
2 xWestern Digital Caviar GP WD10EACS 1TB for $159
www.freenas.org - Bootable from live CD or USB key (so your disks are just full storage)
~$750 before taxes for 1tb raid 1

So you gain a very energy efficient PC, new hardware its going to be very quiet with future upgradeable and running cool.

[TripleDES]

WD Green Power drives under Linux, if they have as silly default settings as Seagates, that'll be hilarious.

[Salamok]

I have heard good things about Buffalo

http://www.buffalotech.com/products/network-storage/

[justdave]

I've seen good things from FreeNAS. It's dirt cheap for basic stuff, and can extend beyond said basic stuff. Al of those <brand> NAS things are overpriced junque!

[Kageru]

Not impressed by a NAS for personal use. I don't want some overly clever, expensive device offering to run services for me, I just want fast bulk, reliable storage and the ability to swap out HD's like the storage cartridges they are. So I ended up with a http://www.istarusa.com/storage/mini_trayless/v7age220sau.aspx (which cost a heap to get mailed to Aus). It's pretty brutally unfinished (the manual might as well be in taiwanese and the firmware thinks the product name is "12345678") but the chip it's built around (silicon image steelvine) does exactly what I expect. Switch it on and it looks like a big external eSATA or USB drive, raid-1 being handled entirely within the device. No drivers needed and when the drives are full pull em out and put new ones in (using an eSATA dock to read the now full drive).

[Baldrake]

Thanks for all the ideas. Didn't know about Buffalo before - good tip, thanks.

I've had this fantasy forever that I'll build my own server. I haven't put together a *Nix box in a long time, and I'd love to poke around and see what's new. I didn't know about OpenNAS either, and that also looks very interesting.

But realistically, we have a new baby in the house, and I'm looking for a solution where all I need to do is take out of the box and plug into the router.

[Baldrake]

So in case anyone cares, I bought the IOMega StorCenter Double. I paid $270 (Canadian) for 2 x 500 GB, and am running with RAID 1. The software is very flexible, and I was able to have it up and running easily. So this met my needs, and was very inexpensive.