Anyone use NAS?

[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.

 

[flecom]

thats kind of expensive, for that get some 250gb hd's and an old computer and put http://www.freenas.org/ on it

 

[nfusion770]

Quote:

Originally Posted by flecom thats kind of expensive, for that get some 250gb hd's and an old computer and put http://www.freenas.org/ on it

That was the original plan, but if I build a computer for this I would just move my current pc out of the closet (athlon x2 3800, 2gb memory, 300gb raid storage and a 300gb backup) and build a similar sff for my cramped area. Building this sff would cost me about $1500 just because I used to be in the business and that's how I am. The NAS unit costs $1000 but affords similar ability to hot swap drives as storage capacity cheapens and increases. Plus I could also accomplish the sff by simply buying a sff case ($225) and transfering all of my current stuff into it (not to mention selling $150 dollars worth of xtra parts).

So the NAS is actually cheaper- in a twisted kind of way.

 

[NiceCans]

Quote:

Originally Posted by flecom thats kind of expensive, for that get some 250gb hd's and an old computer and put http://www.freenas.org/ on it

Great find! Have you used this? Any comments?

 

[floydenheimer]

I have a Infrant ReadyNAS NV. Nothing bad to say about it except that it's a tad loud because it's so small (I'm used to my dead silent PC); I've been thinking of replacing the fan with a higher quality one. I keep it in an armoire with all my other networking gear in another room. There's a hole in the back to let the heat excape. X-RAID is wonderful if you ever want to increase your storage capacity without losing data. Highly recommended!

 

[nfusion770]

Quote:

Originally Posted by floydenheimer I have a Infrant ReadyNAS NV. Nothing bad to say about it except that it's a tad loud because it's so small (I'm used to my dead silent PC); I've been thinking of replacing the fan with a higher quality one. I keep it in an armoire with all my other networking gear in another room. There's a hole in the back to let the heat excape. X-RAID is wonderful if you ever want to increase your storage capacity without losing data. Highly recommended!

Thanks-

X raid does sound very useful. I like the idea of being able to buy a 750gb drive when it hits that $150 price point in a couple of years. It should be possible to do that drive by drive if I understand x raid correctly.

 

[floydenheimer]

Yep, you just replace drive-by-drive and it'll adjust the RAID volume size once all the disks are 750gb. Invaluable feature when dealing with that much data. Also, I like how they have a forum with a company rep. It shows they listen to and care about their customers.

 

[Bob_McBob]

I installed one at work, and I don't have any complaints other than the volume of the fan as another poster mentioned. At home I would just keep it in a separate room (or closet).

 

[devin_mm]

I have a NAS but it's a little over powered. It's a Dell Poweredge 4400 (Dual 1GHz Xeon) I have gentoo linux running on 2x8GB SCSI drives(hardware RAID 1), and 6x75GB SCSI (hardware RAID 5). There is not a lot of space but when I store anything on it I know nothing is going to happen to it

.

 

[nfusion770]

Thanks for the feedback everyone.

One more question- I only really have experience with raid 0 and 1 (striping and mirroring). How does x raid handle the drives? I know about the redundancy, I guess, but is the claimed terabyte an actual terabyte, or is it really like 750gb of actual storage with a redundant drive? These are raid levels that are beyond my experience.

 

[devin_mm]

X-RAID doesn't appear to be a RAID technology. It seems to be a proprietary technology used to make expanding the RAID array by adding hard drives easier. If you are using more than 2 drives and you care about redundancy then I believe RAID 5 is the way to go since you don't lose as much hard drive space as RAID 1.

 

[nfusion770]

Quote:

Originally Posted by devin_mm X-RAID doesn't appear to be a RAID technology. It seems to be a proprietary technology used to make expanding the RAID array by adding hard drives easier. If you are using more than 2 drives and you care about redundancy then I believe RAID 5 is the way to go since you don't lose as much hard drive space as RAID 1.

I will play with it and see what works for me for sure.

How does raid 5 handle the drives? Roughly how much actual space are you working with if you have 4-250gb drives? 750gb perhaps (just theoretically, not counting format loss)?

 

[floydenheimer]

Check out this thread on Infrant's boards. It explains how to calculate your actual RAID volume size (snapshots are an optional thing, I personally don't use them). X-RAID will use a little bit more space than RAID-5 but for the added flexibility I think it's well worth the difference in storage capacity.

 

[devin_mm]

Yeah, I think you lose one hard drive no matter how big the array. So you could have a 100 hard drive array and have the space of 99 drives.

 

[nfusion770]

So I essentially lose a drive and change- terabyte will be roughly 700 very secure gigabytes. Cool.

Thanks for all of your input- you just cost me a future grand.