Any NAS Server Geeks?

[Jim Meade]

I'm thinking of installing an NAS server to serve as a "cloud" in my home for my 5 computers and for wife's access to audio/video.

 

I've read the C/NET reviews. Do any of you have personal experience with NAS? I have a Windows Home Server that is many years old and it never lived up to it's promises. I'd like something that is easy to use.

 

TIA

[Anticept]

Sadly, there is no such thing as easy to use when it comes to networked storage. It might work fine for a while, but windows is so fickle with network drives, and NAS storage devices' firmware tends to be meh.

 

Just check newegg for an NAS enclosure. Go for a name brand, you don't want to be cheap on an NAS enclosure, unless you want to spend a lot of time troubleshooting. If you want extra features, let me know what you want, and how you access them, and I will let you know what you need to look for.

[Jim Meade]

I will now define myself to the group as the man who had to look up the meaning of the (word?) "meh".

 

 

[Anticept]

Pronounce it. It sounds like "ehhhhh" but the m sound adds in resignation. Basically it means the firmware is unexceptional, in a bad way.

[Jim]

I have several D-Link DNS-321's around the house and at work. Upside is they are cheap, easy to configure, and reliable with both windows and linux. Downside is they are old, no longer being updated, and writes are very slow in RAID 1 (mirror). Reads are plenty fast for home media serving. Which brings me to another point. You will want to run RAID 1. Anything else does not make sense because a drive will fail sooner or later and all the other modes leave you pretty much screwed.

[FlyingMonkey]

I think there is no problem with this, I have been thinking about it myself. You have to decide how complicated you want this to be. Do you need RAID 5 so that you can lose a drive at any time and never lose data, or just a simple JBOD ("just a bunch of disks") storage. The RAID setup will cost more for the same amount of storage, because you need additional parity drives for redundancy. Also, what platforms do you need to support? Windows, Mac, Linux...? Just make sure what you buy supports your OS choices.

 

Also think about connection. A USB connection is easiest, but slowest. Wireless is convenient, but also fairly slow. A hard cable fast Ethernet (100Mbit) or Gigabit Ethernet (1000Mbit) will be fastest, but you are tied to a physical location. If you plan to stream media to your TV, you might want to put your NAS next to the TV with a hard cable, and use wireless for all your other devices to access the NAS.

 

I stream Netflix and Amazon Prime video through my PS3 (which is surprisingly good as a media server and BluRay player) from my wireless router, and rarely encounter any slowness or problems, so a good 802.11n (54Mbit) or better wireless connection is probably fine.

[FlyingMonkey]

I have several D-Link DNS-321's around the house and at work. Upside is they are cheap, easy to configure, and reliable with both windows and linux. Downside is they are old, no longer being updated, and writes are very slow in RAID 1 (mirror). Reads are plenty fast for home media serving. Which brings me to another point. You will want to run RAID 1. Anything else does not make sense because a drive will fail sooner or later and all the other modes leave you pretty much screwed.

 

You are not screwed if you run it in a JBOD mode. If a disk dies you lose data on that disk, but not the whole array. A lot of people I know run JBOD with an extra disk in it for critical files. Anything they can't stand losing they copy to the extra disk and that way there are two copies if a disk fails. Also RAID 5 is often better than RAID 1. You still have fault tolerance to lose a drive, but you only take a 20-25% storage hit, instead of RAID 1 mirroring which makes fully half of your disk space unusable. The downside of RAID 5 is that you have to have at least 4 drives installed (IIRC, been a while since I worked with fault-tolerant disk arrays). But disks are cheap these days...

[Jim]

You are not screwed if you run it in a JBOD mode. If a disk dies you lose data on that disk, but not the whole array. A lot of people I know run JBOD with an extra disk in it for critical files. Anything they can't stand losing they copy to the extra disk and that way there are two copies if a disk fails. Also RAID 5 is often better than RAID 1. You still have fault tolerance to lose a drive, but you only take a 20-25% storage hit, instead of RAID 1 mirroring which makes fully half of your disk space unusable. The downside of RAID 5 is that you have to have at least 4 drives installed (IIRC, been a while since I worked with fault-tolerant disk arrays). But disks are cheap these days...

 

Then it comes down to personal preference. And mine is that 4 drives are too many for a home unit. And I can't afford the time and bother to either backup stuff twice or deal with a crash. Been there, done that, both ways. A two drive RAID 1 is cheap, small and reliable. The only downside is the write times and that's usually not a bother. Just saying.

[Anticept]

Remember, RAID is not a substitute for backups. It is for uptime, but does not stop a failure of the controller, which can destroy the entire array.

 

Anyways, check out open source network storage. Some people buy cheap old computers and use those.

[FlyingMonkey]

Remember, RAID is not a substitute for backups. It is for uptime, but does not stop a failure of the controller, which can destroy the entire array.

 

Anyways, check out open source network storage. Some people buy cheap old computers and use those.

 

Truth.

[FlyingMonkey]

Then it comes down to personal preference. And mine is that 4 drives are too many for a home unit. And I can't afford the time and bother to either backup stuff twice or deal with a crash. Been there, done that, both ways. A two drive RAID 1 is cheap, small and reliable. The only downside is the write times and that's usually not a bother. Just saying.

 

The write times and only being able to use 50% of disk you buy. As far as cost, RAID 5 the same price per gigabyte than RAID 1. Assume you need a total of 1 terabyte (1000 gigabytes), most NAS units and controllers will do RAID 1 or 5, so the only cost difference is disk storage. Here are your storage needs:

 

RAID1 : You have to buy 2 Terabytes (2 x 1Tb drives)

 

RAID 5 : You have to buy 1.25 Terabytes (4 x 325Gb drives)

 

If you look at Newegg you will find that the cost of these two solutions is similar, and if you scale to larger storage sizes the RAID 5 becomes cheaper per gigabyte. There is nothing wrong with RAID 1, but cost is really not an advantage of one over the other, while speed and usable storage favor RAID 5.

 

If you go with RAID 1, I'd suggest you use solid state drives (SSDs)...they will cost more, but pretty much eliminate the write penalty since their writes are measured in microseconds instead of milliseconds. Additionally, SSDs are far less prone to shock and vibration, and have mean times between failures (MTBF) far longer than spinning disks. And they make no noise.

[Jim]

The write times and only being able to use 50% of disk you buy. As far as cost, RAID 5 the same price per gigabyte than RAID 1. Assume you need a total of 1 terabyte (1000 gigabytes), most NAS units and controllers will do RAID 1 or 5, so the only cost difference is disk storage. Here are your storage needs:

 

RAID1 : You have to buy 2 Terabytes (2 x 1Tb drives)

 

RAID 5 : You have to buy 1.25 Terabytes (4 x 325Gb drives)

 

If you look at Newegg you will find that the cost of these two solutions is similar, and if you scale to larger storage sizes the RAID 5 becomes cheaper per gigabyte. There is nothing wrong with RAID 1, but cost is really not an advantage of one over the other, while speed and usable storage favor RAID 5.

 

If you go with RAID 1, I'd suggest you use solid state drives (SSDs)...they will cost more, but pretty much eliminate the write penalty since their writes are measured in microseconds instead of milliseconds. Additionally, SSDs are far less prone to shock and vibration, and have mean times between failures (MTBF) far longer than spinning disks. And they make no noise.

 

Your points are all valid, but they solve a problem I don't have. Two terabytes of data is all I'll need in the foreseeable future. Two 2 terabyte drives are cheap enough for me. The write time is a bit annoying but not a deal-breaker. Again, just saying.

[Anticept]

You don't need to be worrying about write time. You are transferring over a network connection, which needs to be a gigabit link if you want to xfer more than 12 mbits/sec, and your computer will also be a bottleneck. In order to fully utilize a drive in an NAS, the uploader and the link must exceed the storage capability, after overhead. This is usually not the case, because windows's file transfer, and the network stack, are incredibly inefficient for network shares.

[FlyingMonkey]

Your points are all valid, but they solve a problem I don't have. Two terabytes of data is all I'll need in the foreseeable future. Two 2 terabyte drives are cheap enough for me. The write time is a bit annoying but not a deal-breaker. Again, just saying.

 

Fair enough, you have to balance ease of setup and use, cost, convenience/annoyance, etc. I'm not trying to push you a certain way, just point out some stuff I have learned over the years. Any solution that does what you need it to is a good solution.

[Adam]

Wow, and I thought we were all just pilots.... I know whom to call when I need an airborne geek squad...

[Anticept]

Pilots tend to be a cut above, simply because we are willing to throw absurd amounts of money at something that, from a financial standpoint, is completely foolish. That, and our incomes tend to be higher too, because you have to have nice paychecks in the first place in order to throw money in the air!

[CT4ME]

We've had good luck with Synology brand NAS devices. They have everything from single drives to monster raid units. They are rated very well, and have good performance. Some of their units actually can have "apps" installed, and have great cloud services. It's even possible to have the NAS back itself up to the cloud (to crashplan, for instance).

 

We have to watch out about recommending NAS devices as servers to some people, as some programs need to have an active PC program running on the "server". For instance, Quickbooks wants to have the program (actually, their database manager) running on the "server".

tim

 

ps. I have to Buffalo TeraStations at my home now, but will be replacing them with Synology soon.

[Doug G.]

I used an HP Homeserver for about for years to back up three computers RAID 1 without a hitch until the software didn't keep up. Now I backup two computers to portable hard drives. May need to change that.

[Jim Meade]

Thanks for all the suggestions. I'm a rank novice at this. I, too, have a Windows Home Server which never did what I want of it.

 

I guess I need to learn more about the capability. I know what I want it to do, but don't know how expensive and technically difficult achieving my goals will be. Back to research.