Anyone use NAS?

[machead]

There's another potential advantage to putting your music files on an Infrant NAS. Infrant has teamed up with Slim Devices to offer a 1GB NAS pre-loaded with the SlimServer software, plus two wireless SqueezeBoxes, for $1499. Given that the wireless SB3 normally costs $299, this represents $100 off the combined cost of the NAS and SBs. Details here.

 

[devin_mm]

Assume you mean 1TB

(That's also before RAID)

 

[Laptopia]

Quote:

Originally Posted by nfusion770 I built a new computer this spring, but since have moved it from a spacious basement office, to a main floor computer closet. The closet gets warm, and while I am pretty confident that it will be ok, I would feel better if I removed as much heat as I possibly can. Anyway, among other measures, I am pondering this in another networked room, rather than housing several hard drives my computer case. Anyone use one of these for mass media storage? It appears an ideal solution to me.

Sounds very appropriate--set it up for striping, and you're off!

 

[devin_mm]

If you're setting up a NAS don't use striping you don't need the speed. There won't be a speed increase but you will lose the security of an actual RAID. Even using gigabit ethernet you won't be able to max the hard drives. The only reason you would need a disk speed increase is if you have a bunch of people accessing the NAS at once and at that point you're using SCSI drives.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bob ? Sounds very appropriate--set it up for striping, and you're off!

 

[machead]

Quote:

Originally Posted by devin_mm Assume you mean 1TB (That's also before RAID)

Thanks for catching that one.

I'm old enough to remember when 1GB was huge and I must confess that I don't yet think in terms of terabytes. I'll probably get up to speed just in time for the first petabyte storage devices...

 

[flecom]

Quote:

Originally Posted by NiceCans Great find! Have you used this? Any comments?

I have been playing with it here at work, cant really say, works well, just had some issues when i simulated a disk crash on a RAID5... but no final comments yet...

I would definately recommend that if you are storing anything that you would like to keep that you make a RAID1 or idealy a RAID5 array...

RAID0 is nice becuase of the space, but you increase your possibility of a failure every time you add a disk... so I would not put anything important on there...

RAID5 is nice becuase you get redundancy and lots of space... you can calculate the amount of space you will have on your raid 5 as N * D - D or the number of disks times the storage amount on each disk, minus the storage amount on one disk... so if you have a RAID5 with 3x 200Gb disks you get a total of 400gb of usable storage... if you have a RAID5 with 6x 200Gb Disks you get 1Tb of usable storage... so the more drives you add to a RAID5 the less space you are "wasting" for the parity...

I store all my important stuff on my NAS box, which is an Athlon 64 box with 2gb ram and 4x 160gb SATA disks in a RAID5 on a 3Ware SATA RAID controller...

 

[dariusf]

I have been looking in to getting a NAS as well for my home storage needs. Right now I have 9 hard drives in my home box with 8 of them in double drive mirrors. Its nice and all but had to get a 700+w PS and the noise and cooling is a major issue now. I was looking at using one of my old servers IBM PC Server 330, a nice RAID card and drop it in to the basement. I have also purchased a Dell PowerVault 715N NAS with 4x120gb IDE drives and was going to try this in RAID 5 config and perhaps replace the drives with 4x250GB ones from my main system. You can pick one of the PowerVaults for a few $ on ebay BUT the support is almost none existent (there is a forum on Dell for NAS) and make sure you get the recovery disks that come with it or you will have a hard time finding a copy or reinstalling. This NAS does not take a head and you need to use HyberTerminal. There is also a way to use the unattended installation CD for windows.

To be honest the NAS sounds nice but its nothing you can't get done with a PC. If you have an old box just throw in a RAID card and some drives and you are set. You can also use it as a mail/FTP etc. server. Going with the NAS is always going to be more expansive but its easer to get hot swap drives with one etc.