Looking for my first NAS

[Acert93]

Ok, I am looking for a NAS. I always used RAID1 in the past but long story short we have 2 laptops in the house and no PC anymore and I need to get a NAS or something comparable.

I am not quite sure what to get. Our needs are simple: Regular backups for our Laptop HDDs; my guess is all we would need is a weekly backup. I have Win7, the wife Vista. I probably won't do anything special with it outside of that (we have a wireless printer; using it for media streaming and/or to the Xbox, if simple, would be nice, especially for our small music library--not a real need by any means though).

The D-Link DNS-321 is a couple years old but seems to have solid reviews from users and is the right price ($120 at Amazon, a little cheaper at NewEgg).

Does anyone have any recommendations?

Also, concerning software: Our HDDs have about 300GB of data between them (mostly my wife's pictures and videos for her cooking website + applications; + maybe 100MB of my academic papers I don't want to lose). Is the Windows built in backup software smart enough to not replicate? Or are we going to eat through 1TB really fast? And is the software clunky slow? I don't mind a slow initial backup but I want something that can do backups fairly quickly.

Thanks for any feedback.

Oh, and my laptop (NV bumpgate) died before it was even 2 years old. Supposedly the warranties were extended... Any tips on convincing the nice fellows at Dell that they knowingly sold me a defective product and they cannot charge me for repairs they got over 100M from NV to repair?

This has been a nightmare. If I had waited 1 more month the cat would have been out of the bag. If this is anything like the Xbox 360 even if I get a repair (and I better! the darn thing was EXPENSIVE) it sounds like it is destined to die again... am I wrong?

 

[BRiT]

In your situation, perhaps one of the easiest paths to travel down is having a Windows Home Server (WHS), but thats costs a bit more money.

Since speed doesn't seem to be a concern and you don't have much data, that DLink should be very usable/suitable.

If you were going to be serving up a lot of MultiMedia Music/DVDs/BlluRays I would highly recommend using unRAID [ http://lime-technology.com/ ] software on a small server (4 to 6 drive miniITX system). It's what I run for my home fileserver.

 

[flynn]

Why don't you build a PC and install something like FreeNAS? Around the time I built my soon to be upgraded fileserver I looked at the price of turnkey solutions and their performance and it was not worth it. My current fileserver is an Athlon64 box with 1Gib of mem and 5x400GB drives in RAID5. There are several volumes exported via NFS for my desktops and MediaTomb for the PS3. After enabling jumbo frames on my switch I was able to get pretty decent performance.

My new fileserver is going to be the cheapest multicore CPU I can find and a bunch on 1TB drives managed by ZFS.

In your case any Linux distro or FreeBSD running Samba could do.

 

[Acert93]

Thanks for the link.

The reason I am not considering building a PC is simple: Money. My performance needs are very, very low (#1 need: backup; everything else is only "oh, cool, I could do that?"). A NAS for $100 + $70-$100 in drive(s) is about all I can reasonable budget. I have very little room in our apartment and the footprint, noise, and cost of a full PC.

 

[Davros]

if your that short of cash, just but an external drive

 

[Acert93]

if your that short of cash, just but an external drive

I had one (Maxtor, slow and unreliable) and my wife has one (a small WD that as her HDD has filled is now using for direct file storage and now is pretty full with none of it backed up ). So having a number of HDDs running around+the issue of needing more storage in general a basic NAS with RAID1 seems like a better, cheaper solution. And a couple large HDDs with external enclosures, not accounting for space and wires, is still going to cost at least $100 for both computers. $200ish for a long term dedicated solution that resolves storage and backup issues seems more sensible than all these HDDs running around that still don't resolve the backup issue (if you are using an external because the laptop has little storage space then it really isn't a backup as I keep telling my wife lol).

 

[Davros]

funny, my external drive using esata is faster than my internal drive

 

[Acert93]

None of our laptops have eSATA.

 

[3dcgi]

I use a Western Digital MyBookWorld NAS and use ViceVersa to sync frequently changing files. Periodically I use the Windows Backup software, but only to make a full backup. I haven't tried incremental. It's worked well for me. Though for a true backup solution you might want to try online backup. It's pretty cheap these days.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Thanks for the link.

The reason I am not considering building a PC is simple: Money. My performance needs are very, very low (#1 need: backup; everything else is only "oh, cool, I could do that?"). A NAS for $100 + $70-$100 in drive(s) is about all I can reasonable budget. I have very little room in our apartment and the footprint, noise, and cost of a full PC.

Cheapest solution for that would be a HDD dock with USB + eSATA (even though you don't have it now, it'll be useful in the future). One of those will run you around 30-40 dollars.

Then just use whatever SATA HDD's you can get your hands on. Switching and swapping is as easy as turning it off and swapping HDD's. That's what I use for my offline backups (use a WHS server for live backups). But I have friends that also use it for live backups. If you use it for live backups however, make sure to use low power "green" drives. As there is no forced air cooling, depending on your ambient temps a high power (high temp) 7200 rpm performance drive (which is overkill for backups anyways) can get might hot to the touch.

Also if you have a free SATA port on your MB, just get an el-cheapo SATA -> eSATA bracket and you'll be able to use eSATA. Some external DIY HDD enclosures actually include said bracket.

NOTE: If you want to use eSATA for plug and play swapping of drives, the eSATA port must be set to AHCI (to allow hot swapping), otherwise you'll only be able to swap drives before you boot your computer.

Regards,
SB

 

[MfA]

My current fileserver is an Athlon64 box with 1Gib of mem and 5x400GB drives in RAID5.

RAID5 is a dangerous proposition with near identical drives with identical usage patterns in this day and age when rebuilds last so long.

RAID6 is okay, RAID1(0) with drives from multiple manufacturers is better.

 

[flynn]

RAID5 is a dangerous proposition with near identical drives with identical usage patterns in this day and age when rebuilds last so long.

RAID6 is okay, RAID1(0) with drives from multiple manufacturers is better.

Agreed, my next fileserver will use drives from multiple manufacturers. RAID1 can get expensive, I will most likely use RAID-Z (ZFS) but haven't discarded RAID6 either.

I have to say I haven't had a single problem with the current one and it's been up 24/7 for 3 years and it only gets rebooted for system upgrades (i.e. whenever I rebuild the "world")

 

[BRiT]

RAID5 is a dangerous proposition with near identical drives with identical usage patterns in this day and age when rebuilds last so long.

RAID6 is okay, RAID1(0) with drives from multiple manufacturers is better.

Agreed. That's what sparked my interest with unRAID [ http://lime-technology.com/technology ]. It's basically Parity protection over any collection of drives. The only restriction is the Parity drive is as large or larger than the largest data drive. The data does not span disks. In the worst case of 2 drive failures at the same time, the data on the remainder of the drives is perfectly safe.

 

[MfA]

Agreed, my next fileserver will use drives from multiple manufacturers. RAID1 can get expensive, I will most likely use RAID-Z (ZFS) but haven't discarded RAID6 either.

RAID-Z has a dual parity mode now too (RAID-6 equivalent).

 

[MfA]

Agreed. That's what sparked my interest with unRAID [ http://lime-technology.com/technology ]. It's basically Parity protection over any collection of drives. The only restriction is the Parity drive is as large or larger than the largest data drive. The data does not span disks. In the worst case of 2 drive failures at the same time, the data on the remainder of the drives is perfectly safe.

Another advantage is that drives can spin down individually ... a RAID array is always fully spun up when it's being accessed.

 

[Ty]

RAID5 is a dangerous proposition with near identical drives with identical usage patterns in this day and age when rebuilds last so long.

RAID6 is okay, RAID1(0) with drives from multiple manufacturers is better.

Can you tell me why? Is it because you're worried about common defects across different but identical drives?

 

[Blazkowicz]

Thanks for the link.

The reason I am not considering building a PC is simple: Money. My performance needs are very, very low (#1 need: backup; everything else is only "oh, cool, I could do that?"). A NAS for $100 + $70-$100 in drive(s) is about all I can reasonable budget. I have very little room in our apartment and the footprint, noise, and cost of a full PC.

you can use any piece of junk PC, using if needed a cheap SATA PCI card.
that would be $0 + $20 + $70-100 in drives. that would require a smallish, mini-tower piece of junk and reworking its noisy cooling, and/or getting wake-on-lan to work - that would be a cool feature, getting your script or backup software to wake the NAS up, transfer file then have it shutdown.

else, I can't argue with your choice, it sounds decent and it does that vital aspect all computer users need.
/edit : but that nobody does. mine isn't backed up yet

I should point out that a full PC still is pretty cheap as you would only need the cheapest Atom board (or the gigabyte D510 one with 4 SATA ports), a 512MB stick of memory, mini ITX or micro ATX case + PSU and a disk drive.

regarding RAID modes, gigantic cheap drives make things simple if you can or are willing to fit all your data on a single 1.5TB drive (or raid 1) .

 

[MfA]

Can you tell me why? Is it because you're worried about common defects across different but identical drives?

Not just common defects ... even if they break down from normal wear and tear their service lifetime will be more highly correlated than "normal" because they come from the same manufacturing batch and have seen the exact same usage patterns.

 

[Gubbi]

Not just common defects ... even if they break down from normal wear and tear their service lifetime will be more highly correlated than "normal" because they come from the same manufacturing batch and have seen the exact same usage patterns.

Friend of mine ran the infamous IBM Deathstars in a RAID-1 configuration. The second drive died during rebuild. Bought at the same time, installed at the same time with serial numbers very close to each other.

Cheers