I’m looking to buy a NAS unit for my home network.
Do any of you have any experience with it that you’d care to share?
There seem to be two main options. On is a unit where I buy my own hard drives and place in the unit, the other type seems self contained of a plug and play variety.
I’m looking to spend $200 - $400 hopefully.
What are your likes and dislikes? What should I watch out for?
Thanks!
E3
I’m not much familiar with the home versions but I’m well familiar with the corporate versions. Are you intending to share this among multiple computers? That’s one valid use for these. Even then, though, you could add disks to a single computer and then create a share out to the others.
What’s your attraction to NAS disks?
There’s a pretty significant speed penalty for network attached storage. 100Mbs network will support 10MBytes/sec transfer rates minus overhead (and Microsoft’s protocols are high overhead).
Valid uses for NAS? Adding a common disk storage area to a network of multiple machines, not dependent on any individual computer remaining up. Also convenient for mixed OS arrangements since some NAS boxes are capable of mixing NFS (Unix) shares and Microsoft shares. Note, though, that these use completely incompatible security methods.
My suggestion? Add DAS (directly attached storage) to your most powerful PC, take advantage of the speed of it on that machine - share as necessary to your secondary computers.
Well, my home network consists primarily of laptops. There’s only one desktop, and it’s in my daughters bedroom. I don’t really want to use her computer as the DAS computer. I have an old desktop that I suppose I could add a hard drive to. I’ll have to check and see how old the bios is, and what’s it capable of. It’s at least 4 years old though.
I went back and forth about building a domain/file server from an old computer (and loading it with a bunch of drives in a raid 5 array), building a NAS (much like above but streamlined to be a NAS), using my large workstation as a storage site or finding a pre-made NAS.
I ended up getting a Linksys NSLU2 (aka the Slug).
It is a small NAS device with one Ethernet interface and two USB ports. I plugged two Western Digital 500 Gig MyBook drives into the USB and the Slug into the switch off my wireless router. I assigned the Slug a static IP and I can attach to it via SAMBA from any of the wireless laptops (3) or from the hardwired workstations (4). It also support FTP and has a web interface for admin and browsing files.
Because there is no redundancy on the drives (Raid would have been safer) I have a routine that transfers files between the two drives as well as one important directory in the NAS which bounces over to the larger workstation.
I’ve been quite happy with the solution. I wouldn’t recommend it for heavy loads, but it is fast enough for me to run my VMware images off it.
Added bonus. It runs Linux so it has an active community (which means support for it will be around for a while).
I think I paid about $100 for the slug and $250 each for the Mybooks. That’s $600 for a terabyte NAS. It would have cost me around $800-1000 to build a terabyte NAS with Raid 5. The Slug solution has no moving parts outside of the drives and it pretty low power… and is QUIET!
I’m considering getting another and converting it into my media server.
I would recommend going for a device that supports the SMB (Samba) protocol, or something else that most machines can attach to without needing to install proprietary drivers.
I believe the one you mentioned where you have to slot in your own drives may be the Netgear Storage Central - it’s a nice-looking device, but you have to install their software on the client machines in order to access it - this could be bad if you upgrade your machine(s) in the future and Netgear has stopped supporting it or releasing drivers.
Try it with SME7 - an easy linux distribution that makes a great storage server (as well as a web server, mail server, and firewall). Does not require much grunt, either. They run for years, just requiring the occasional update and reboot.
Simon
My mail server at work runs SME7 and it’s really, really good. I don’t use the file server side of it much, but I know it works, and works just fine. It’s very simple to administer.
Indeed. My home SME server runs file storage (60Gb mirror + 350Gb), email with spam filter, webmail, a personal website and photo gallery, our small business website, web based jukebox, media streamer, VPN (for me away from home), SSL access for when I can’t use a VPN and binary newsgroup downloader. All on an Athlon 1500 with 512 Mb RAM PC that I had replaced with a dual-core (my old server was a Athlon 900).
I kill most spam, have a shared LDAP address book that gets whitelisted, and pick up everyones email from hotmail automatically.
SME rocks.
Linksys NSLU2 (aka the Slug) is ok, but I get the feeling that people try to shoehorn too much into them - they only have a few Mb of Ram (especially the new ones) and the processor is not great. You end up with more Slugs doing less per unit - probably good for redundancy but not so good from a price point of view.
However, for a pure storage unit, it could do very well.
Si
Yes. I think the Slug would drag as a linux box. As a NAS I’ve no problems.
I hear it serves Twonkyvision well, but I wouldn’t want it to be doing that, serving files, email, etc.
My attaction to it was no moving parts (outside of the drives). There is little to maintain and few failure points. It’s clean and simple. I spend my days at work maintaining server hardware and software. When I get home I just want my devices to work. 
Amen.
But I do want it to do EVERYTHING - maybe with a bit more memory, and the storage is looking a bit light, and I really want to compile a new kernel and …
Where did my weekend go.
Where did my *wife *go :smack:
Si
I have a Ready NAS that is in your price range, though drives are extra! It’s fast enought to stream movies or edit pictures and video, and does a good job of hosting itunes music and video content.
I just wish it were a BIT faster. I have a gigabit network with jumbo frames, but it still doesn’t quite approach the advertised speeds.