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October 15, 2006
Reliable NAS on the Cheap?
I've been thinking about trying to move some of the data on my workstation onto a network-attached storage server of some kind. Among other things, it would simplify accessing key "stuff" from both Linux and Windows, and would mean that Dawnise's access to our photos and music doesn't live and die with my machine.
I was thinking about a Linksys NSLU2, which costs about $80, and will take two USB hard drives. It also runs Linux, and has been pretty extensively hacked.
The $80 seems like a reasonable price, but supporting only two drives means that reliability isn't really an option. Using the hacked firmware I could RAID two drives - but that means either a stripe set (which doesn't help reliability) or a mirror set (which means buying 2x the storage I really want).
What I'd like to do is have enough drives (3) to create a RAID 5 set.
The D-Link DSM-G600 looks interesting, since it houses one drive internally and supports two more external drives, but it seems way less (easily) hackable. The current revision of the hardware is MIPS based (rather than ARM) and as far as I can tell, no one has gotten a usable replacement firmware that would enable this sort of trickery yet.
Anyone (who's bothered reading this far) have any other suggestions? I'm looking to spend way less than the arm-and-a-leg most "real" RAID'ed NAS devices cost, but I'm not willing to put a bunch of data on the thing without reliability. I've been running software raid on my workstation for years and it's made two hard disk failures basically non-events.
Posted by dberger at October 15, 2006 9:29 AM
Comments
This undoubtedly falls outside your definition of "cheap", but my Infrant ReadyNAS NV has worked out great for me (paid about $850 IIRC, with drives). Compact little unit, room for four drives internally, supports RAID1-5 and "RAID-X" - which is essentially RAID-5 with smart expansion. Replace the internal drives one by one with higher-capacity ones, and as soon as they're all upgraded, the existing volumes on the RAID set are automatically expanded - no backup/reformat/restore.
Posted by: Hendel at October 16, 2006 9:17 AM
Don't go cheap. Get something that (1) has reasonable performance over the network, esp. if you plan on streaming audio/video over it while doing real work, (2) Makes RAID easy to manage because I don't know about you, but I don't feel much like being a sysadmin at home anymore... (3) Has good mechanicals for the same reason as item 2.
I got the Infranet ReadyNAS NV and have been very happy with it. With a pair of 500M drives and space for two more, the total price was something like $1300 incl. tax. The box sustains about 300Mbps throughput over a GigE link which makes managing photos over the wire responsive while playing MP3s, etc. The unit also does a simple form of snapshotting (a-la NetApp) so unless I feel like I need offsite backups, I'm not as rushed to do regular backups. The mechanicals are nice -- adding and swapping drives is a breeze and doesn't require a screwdriver. The RAID-X support that Hendel mentioned is super-cool. When the time comes, I just need to slap the disks in and it automatically reconfigures the RAID without having to remove the data. Right now I've got 50% capacity since it is mirroring the disks, but with an additional two disks it'll automatically snap up to RAID-5 and give me 75% capacity.
OS support is solid. Heidi's Mac found it and saw the shares without any jiggering on the Mac or the box. The Windows boxen didn't have a problem either. Haven't tried a Unix box yet, but if the Mac can use it, I have faith.
Lots of other cool little features including the abilility to backup other devices via ftp, scp, etc. automagically. It'll also serve as a UPnP streaming server for a media PC and Squeezebox. GUI is well done too.
The pricing is higher, but competitive units with similar capacity were about $1000 incl. tax. and building it myself came out to around $1000 with reasonable parts and case. I valued my time enough to pay the extra money. Competitive boxes didn't fair nearly as well at Tom's Hardware in terms of usability, features, and stability. The next closest thing with snapshots are the new low end boxes from NetApp which are about $5k.
Posted by: Steve S. at October 16, 2006 4:20 PM