NAS for Home
Dear Lazyweb,
Does anyone have suggestions on what to use for centralized storage at home? I have a lot of music/photos here piling up and would like to put them on some energy-efficient NAS box. Ideally it would have some sort of of built-in backup solution as well. A lot of the NAS-in-a-box solutions seem to have RAID 1, but that really only helps for HA. I am more concerned with never ever losing this stuff than having it available 24/7.
July 4th, 2008 at 12:02 pm
Intel D201GLY2 + USB-Stick + 2xHDD + MiniITX-CASE + FreeNAS -> http://www.freenas.org/
July 4th, 2008 at 12:05 pm
use dropbox: http://www.getdropbox.com/
July 4th, 2008 at 12:21 pm
An Intel box with OpenSolaris and ZFS can serve as quite powerful NAS. ZFS can do most RAID modes with an implementation that is faster than most hardware controllers out there.
July 4th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
As the other commenters implied - buy a suitable case / pre-built system and roll your own with a Linux, BSD (or, heck, Solaris) distro. When I was going to do this, this is the system I was looking at:
http://www.norcotek.com/item_detail.php?categoryid=8&modelno=ds-520
Just throw some drives on that, load up an OS with decent software RAID, and you’re laughing.
In the end, though, I just threw three 750GB drives in my HTPC and set them up as a RAID-5 array using software RAID. That works fine.
July 4th, 2008 at 1:01 pm
I know that this might be fairly uncool for the linux community, but I recently got myself a drobo (after much resistance both on price, lack of hackability, speed (limited to usb2 even with the $299 Droboshare addon for NAS), lack of anything but SMB Sharing on the droboshare, etc) and am quite pleased with it.
Yes, it does have all the limitations above (though they just released an SDK which will increase it’s hackability greatly, there’s already a linux dashboard version I see), but it has a couple of big pluses (for me) over a roll-your-own linux system (which is what I was using before, a 3×250G+3×120G evms/raid setup)…. keys being it’s turnkey, easily upgradable and it’s physically small. I have way too many computers and whatnot to deal with another case sitting on the floor and running cables etc.
Also my old setup didn’t have a lot of ability to swap out a disk for a larger disk. For the drobo you can just pull out the smallest disk and put in a bigger one, allowing incremental upgrades instead of mass changes of “I have to swap out 4 500G drives for 4 750G drives, now where do I store 1.5T of data while I reformat and re-raid the new setup. Now I splurged and got myself 4×1T so upgrading disks isn’t going to be an issue for a while, but if you’re using older disks this is a big plus.
I’m sure there are ways to get around this using evms or lvm and growing/shinking filesystems and the data on them, but honestly, that scares me especially if I have only one copy and these are things valuable to me like pictures. Yes, you’re trusting a closed source system, but honestly I trust them more than I trust myself to not screw up or pull the wrong drive out of the case
Also while a full linux box doing this allows you to do way more (webserver, daap server, seti@home cruncher, or whatever, I wanted to simplify a bit, and if having less available meant less hassle (and less desk space).
No, I’m not a shill or paid by drobo or victoria belmont or anything like that, yes I am a linux guy (pre-slackware 1.0) and yes, I did all this with my own linux/raid box and various other distros (ie: openfiler) already and concurrently to having an evil, closed source, and expensive black box
Just thought I’d give a bit of input.
July 4th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
I second the suggestion of looking at the Drobo. There is now a network add-on so you can access it over the network (although you can still hook directly up to it over USB2 if you need the speed) and it does its own magic RAID-like reliability thing. Linux client support is “in beta” now at last so you can format it ext3, there is a SDK so you can build your own applications to run on it (the example is fuppes, a UPNP media server) and so on. All in all it looks pretty need.
Personally I have a Thecus N2100. This is a ARM based box with two SATA disks and RAID-1, wifi and ethernet. For the price I got it, it was a steal. You can also install Debian on it easily which is very cool from a geek point of view, although then you dont get the insane kernel patches which means disk IO is slower than it should be. That said, being able to run mt-daadp, CUPS, rsync and NFS on the NAs is pretty useful.
For backup, have a look at Amazon’s S3. I use it to back up my photos using s3sync (which has a rsync like cli). It’s remarkably affordable if you don’t access the data much at 10 cents per gigabyte per month.
July 4th, 2008 at 1:49 pm
Use openfiler, it just released as 2.3 which runs even as a Virtual XEN machine. It rocks!
July 4th, 2008 at 2:07 pm
Personally, I suggest a Synology (www.synology.com) DiskStation. If you buy two, one can back up to the other using rsync (this is built-in). They can also back up to a plugged in USB drive, so it should be able to fulfill your data recovery needs.
I found this DS-108j (a one-bay box, see link below) for less than £90 (about $180, I guess), and includes integrated backup, downloader (downloads via BT, FTP or HTTP), recording from IP cameras, media server, and web server.
http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?SYN-DS108
It’s essentially a Linux PC inside, and also includes a telnet service so you can log in and get to the command line, and has an active modding community.
When I buy my second one, I’m going to stick a big drive in it, and set a backup from one to the other.
There’s also other solutions from competitors that offer some of the same functionality.
This might save you some money over a full PC, will certainly use less power, and should also take up less space.
Hope that helps.
July 4th, 2008 at 2:18 pm
FreeNAS
July 4th, 2008 at 2:22 pm
I have a Koolu, running Debian, with two big external USB drives, one data, one backup. Cron script uses rsync to back data up every night.
This system works well for me, is pretty low power, and very quiet.
http://koolu.com/Koolu-WE-Appliance/Works-Everywhere-Appliance.html
July 4th, 2008 at 2:26 pm
The QNAP systems look good, although expensive.
http://www.qnap.com/
I’m looking at getting a TS-409 Pro and plug in 4 1TB disks setting it up with raid5. That should get me storage to last a while. Then i can just access it with NFS.
I’ve got a few external USB drives, but I just don’t trust the linux usb drivers. They aren’t stable enough, the drives keep randomly getting disconnected after a lot of I/O.
July 5th, 2008 at 3:28 am
Whew, where is the love for the slug here?
http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/OpenSlug/HomePage
cheap device, there is a debiangroup supporting it, it runs linux out of the box anyways that can be extended and uses like 20W with a harddrive connected
just usb link to harddrive though, but can be used to attach printer and other things to the network too, a small very energy efficent homeserver
July 5th, 2008 at 5:04 am
Have you considered OpenFiler? http://www.openfiler.com/
July 5th, 2008 at 6:20 am
I just bought this: http://www.fujitsu-siemens.com/home/products/personal_computers/scaleo_homeserver.html
Uses at most 80 watt, but with power savings can go to 2 watt.
Intell has this http://www.intel.com/products/server/storage-systems/ss4200-e/ss4200-e-overview.htm It’s totally the same but without Windows Home Server pre installed. You can install linux…
I use linux on this thing, but the features of the windows version/price convinced me. (Volume shadow copy backups, smart software raid, ease of use)
It can do more then just nass, and doesn’t really cost more…
July 5th, 2008 at 9:26 am
If you don’t mind some kind of slowness really consider the good ole NSLU2. There’s a relatively full fledged Debian Port for it, so you can do nearly anything you will ever want. Energy consumption is really low, the only backdraw is raw performance. Don’t expect to get more than 5mbyte/s out of it.
July 5th, 2008 at 11:50 am
I just picked up an Acer Altos Easystore for cheap on Ebay, 2TB (4×500GB SATA drives) in a RAID-5 capable can, 2 external USB ports to share extra disks/backups, 1 Gig-E port for network and Linux on an ARM processor that exports FTP, SMB and NFSv3. Quite nice. Comes with some shonky windows backup client and can apparently do PXE booting for image restoration but I haven’t messed with that.
It is, AFAICT, essentially a rebadged Intel SS4000-E, which is also quite nice.
July 6th, 2008 at 7:55 pm
Off-site is safest. I use Amazon S3 via Jungle Disk.
July 7th, 2008 at 9:14 am
I’m also a Drobo fan. It has the set-and-forget thing going for it, but also, it draws a lot less power and is quieter than your typical Intel box, which was important to me. It’s also one less box to administer!
My only wished-for improvement would be true GigE-like speeds from the DroboShare instead of being bottlenecked by USB 2.0.
July 11th, 2008 at 7:41 am
[…] Tangerine « NAS for Home […]