Need Advice... On Nas Devices

[Wolfie]

I need to upgrade my storage capacity, currently i am running 4 external (USB) drives with a combined storage capacity of 6TB, but alas these little work horses are pretty much full now and i need something a little more robust and upgradable. So i plan to decommission the smallest of hte four devices and upgrade it to something bigger, better, stronger, faster

So i am looking for a NAS device, as the Drobo is not available in Thailand, i was wondering if there is anything similar, or if anyone had any advice on what else to look at?

Ideally i want something that is easy to upgrade, i.e. slip in some larger HDD's when they are available, preferably without loosing all the data on the other devices!

I would like something that connects directly to the network, but i will consider something that connects to my base unit as an alternative. I dont really want to be spending silly money on a device, so some of the more 'pro' level NAS devices are too expensive for me. I would like something with Raid5, to give me some protection against HDD failures.

So does anyone have any advice or suggestions?

[Crossy]

Been down the same route, there's a thread somewhere.

I'm using an UnRAID box http://www.lime-technology.com/

Not free (if over 3 drives) but it works well on any half decent mainboard, boots from a USB stick so you don't waste a drive slot, but make sure the mainboard you intend using can boot from USB (Duh!).

Mine is in a NOX CoolBay HX ( http://verdisreviews.com/reviews/nox-coolbay-hx-case-review/ ) that came from Zeer. Ten 5.25" bays, use a 5 into 3 (or two or three) unit and crush 16+ drives in, there's space for a few more too if you don't mind a bit of metal bashing. You will need to improve the fan arrangements if you have a lot of drives but the automatic spin-down facility of UnRAID can save power and heat.

The nicest feature of UnRAID is the DROBO-like ability to add drives to the array at any time, so long as the parity drive is always the biggest (or the same size as the biggest) drive in the array you can keep adding as you need (or can afford).

[thaimite]

I use a Buffalo Terastation 3TB NAS which I am very pleased with.

I can't really recomend a particular device as I am not currently in Thailand ad do not know what is available, but here are a few suggestions of other features things you might like to consider

Many NAS drives have torrent clients built in which is good as good as you do not need to leave your PC on to download

Many devices also support streaming directly to your iPod or other device which is also useful

Network attached has many advantages especially if you want the data available to multiple PC's or network players, but is much slower than USB unless you go for one with a Gigabit Ethernet which in turn means your PC and router have to support Gigabit

RAID 5 gives extra reliabiliy for minum disk space, but takes a number of disks and to increase the capacity of the unit means replacing all the drives, which in turn means backing up and resotring all the data. My NAS can add extra USB drives to increase the capacity, but for these I do not have the security of RAID reliability.

Hope this information is useful

[MrSaliva]

Check out Qnap NAS devices. I am using one with 2 one TB drives, but they come in many different sizes/configurations. They have lots of built in software and it all works very well. Mine has been rebooted 3 times in the past year and a bit. Once to move it, once to do a firmware upgrade and once to change disk configuration to RAID.

I got mine at Panthip.

[Crushdepth]

I've got 3 of the QNAP NAS (2 x TS-639 and 1 x TS-439) and they are just beautiful devices, offer various RAID flavours and can upgrade the drives when you need to, SSH/webserver/media server/print server and many other applications built in. I found a way to install rsnapshot on them and have one at work backing up several remote servers automatically over SSH with key-based authentication. Dual power supplies / operating systems / gigabit ethernet connections for redundancy. Excellent choice if they are in your price range but they aren't the cheapest out there.

D-link make some robust yet cheap NAS boxes. I've got a little two drive unit (DNS-323), which is basic functionality but rock solid and quite nice construction if you just want a file server, 3 drive units are also widely available. A lot cheaper than the QNAPs, if you just want storage and nothing else these are a good choice.

[Crushdepth]

FOR THE MODS:

How can a thread have four replies but zero views? Either something is wrong, or maybe the cache time is wound up a bit high?

[Crossy]

FOR THE MODS:

How can a thread have four replies but zero views? Either something is wrong, or maybe the cache time is wound up a bit high?

Board is very busy, the stats will update when things quieten down

[Nordman]

I bought a Synology DS1010+ last month and put 5 2TB hard drives in it in RAID 5 configuration. Once I figured out that their torrent software had some bugs and turned it off, it has run like a charm. (The bugs are mentioned in their forum, but no resolution date.) It is not cheap at all. But when I looked at what it did and what I guessed my storage requirements would be in the next 5 years and what the cost of the alternatives was, I decided to buy it.

www.synology.com

This unit can be expanded up to 10 hard drives, 2TB each. I hope that will hold me for 5 years!

Remember with RAID5 you will lose 1 hard drive. So you want to minimize that loss. Previously I had WD My Book Studio 2TB drives in RAID1. Since there were 2 hard drives and I was mirroring them, I lost 50% of my drives. With the DS1010+, I am only losing 20%.

Good luck!

[robblok]

I got a qnap 459 pro

You can ad 4 drives there in raid 5. I got 4 drives of 1 tb makes 3tb.

The one i got beats most of the competition in tests hands down and it is a pretty fast one with great software.

You can have an usb drive connected to it and if you set it up it will copy one of your shares there every night (or how ever you set it up) also it can backup your shares to the internet. (amazon s3 or other services)

It also has an built in ftp and torrent it is just a great machine.

Before i had (still have but dont use it) buffalo quad station and it was much slower and the software could not even compare. (but it was way cheaper). I paid 30.000 for the qnap exclusive the drives.

[siamect]

If you don't want to think and just install one package take a quick look at http://freenas.org

You can run it on hardware of your choice...

But if I were you I would just take any server edition of GNU/Linux and then you can install exactly what you need and you don't carry around unnecessary software.

The ready made boxes you pay too much... The hardware is usually limited.

Take care

Martin

[robblok]

If you don't want to think and just install one package take a quick look at http://freenas.org

You can run it on hardware of your choice...

But if I were you I would just take any server edition of GNU/Linux and then you can install exactly what you need and you don't carry around unnecessary software.

The ready made boxes you pay too much... The hardware is usually limited.

Take care

Martin

True you pay a lot, but the thing is you don't have to use linux and everything works and is tested. Its nice when your a geek and like trying things out. But when you have to depend on something its better to buy a box.

No offence meant, also my server is a lot smaller and more power efficient then normal pc's. I know i paid a lot more because i build pc's so i know the components aren't that expensive.

The thing is some want an out of the box solution because it needs to be good and work straight away this is what businesses need.

[Crushdepth]

The advantage of the NAS boxes is you don't need much technical skill to operate one, they are basically appliances that can be and need very little configuration or maintenance. If you have the skills to set up a traditional file server or have heavy duty requirements you may prefer to do that - but if your IT skills are limited they are a great way to go.

The NAS box hardware (eg. the QNAPs) is more than adequate for a small office. We have one serving about 20 people at work and it spends most of the time sleeping. The nice thing is if you ever do need more grunt you can just plug another one into the network.

Do not forget to back you NAS box up - otherwise you are asking for disaster! The QNAPs allow replication or synchronisation to an external hard disk. You can also install rsnapshot on them if you want an automated time series of backups.

[robblok]

The advantage of the NAS boxes is you don't need much technical skill to operate one, they are basically appliances that can be and need very little configuration or maintenance. If you have the skills to set up a traditional file server or have heavy duty requirements you may prefer to do that - but if your IT skills are limited they are a great way to go.

The NAS box hardware (eg. the QNAPs) is more than adequate for a small office. We have one serving about 20 people at work and it spends most of the time sleeping. The nice thing is if you ever do need more grunt you can just plug another one into the network.

Do not forget to back you NAS box up - otherwise you are asking for disaster! The QNAPs allow replication or synchronisation to an external hard disk. You can also install rsnapshot on them if you want an automated time series of backups.

Not that i am not backing my QNAP up but can you explain why it would be disaster, its a raid 5 setup it should be relatively safe.

(every night it makes an backup to an usb drive)

[siamect]

True you pay a lot, but the thing is you don't have to use linux and everything works and is tested. Its nice when your a geek and like trying things out. But when you have to depend on something its better to buy a box.

No offense meant, also my server is a lot smaller and more power efficient then normal pc's. I know i paid a lot more because i build pc's so i know the components aren't that expensive.

The thing is some want an out of the box solution because it needs to be good and work straight away this is what businesses need.

Well the Synology and other NASes are usually built on GNU/Linux or BSD anyway and that is really a very good thing... Gives stability and flexibility and a filesystem that can be read from any other computer.

But even if NASes are using GNU/Linux or BSD, they sometimes have quite odd setups... Even if you think you get something that works out of the box, you spend hours on the simplest little extra thing that would take minutes on any other OS.

Have you tried to schedule some cronjobs or setup a git server on a Synology DS207+ ... then you know what I'm talking about. It easily kills more time than what it would take to install a normal server OS from scratch plus all applications needed.

"... it needs to be good and work straight away this is what businesses need."

May be correct, and that's what you get if you use a server edition of just about anything, but that's not what businesses buy...

They spend large amount of time and money on things that they know will go to shit before it is even paid for... stuff that is difficult to install and even more messy to configure and impossible to maintain... rejecting stuff that they know will work fine...

That's the reason why you have an IT department of 6-7 people just to maintain 400 workstations and a dozen servers... plus some 280k CHF budget to setup GL and payroll on SAP and one full time programmer to make it running, and external contractors for cabling and other stuff, then we haven't even thought of all the production equipment that has computers and other programmable devices.

But OK... NASes usually comes in a nice box... and I don't mean it is wrong to buy one... actually the ones I have looked at, Synology, are very good and they also have some features that at least I didn't really think of before... I could easily recommend Synology to anybody, but that is under the conditions that you use what is installed out of the box and don't have any additional requirements.

And then we can discuss the security updates... some of the NASes will be exposed to the internet because people put homepages or arrange SSH or FTP services that they use when they are out... On my public SSH service I have around 200 or more break in attempts every single day... disable password authentication and use Keys instead...

Take care

Martin

[robblok]

Martin,

Your experience is different from mine mostly because i worked with medium - small companies (up to 10ppl) and there it does have to work out of the box.

I have been the IT guy for those companies (added to my normal accounting job) and send to some classes (windos nt server) at that time. I have never gone into linux but i must say i really love this NAS drive and i wont be doing cron jobs.

For me its just about safe file storage nothing much else.

[negreanu]

OWC will ship the drobo to thailand. Got mine in 3 days from them.

Got a droboshare at the same time but found i am not actually using the droboshare so if anyone wants to buy it for a few thousand baht PM me

Edited May 6, 2010 by negreanu

[welo]

Those of you who have already bought a NAS - did you choose any specific disks for that purpose? Low power, server editions, or just some specific model?

Did anybody do a cost comparison for PC-based vs. NAS-box?

welo

[negreanu]

Western digital Green drives, low noise, low heat, low energy and decent drives also. (never had a failed one).

WD Caviar Green

Edited May 6, 2010 by negreanu

[robblok]

Those of you who have already bought a NAS - did you choose any specific disks for that purpose? Low power, server editions, or just some specific model?

Did anybody do a cost comparison for PC-based vs. NAS-box?

welo

If you compare costs then the NAS box will loose. But like many said its an out of the box solution. Its nice and small and does what is supposed to do right away. But i guess if your good at linux and like to tinker then get a pc and make it do the same stuff.

[Wolfie]

Well i just bought a Buffalo Linkstation (4bay) - it came with a 1TB drive in it, but i bought 4x 2TB instead.. after a bit of messing around trying to get all 4 drives to work, i finally got it sorted.

I like this little box, its a proper NAS device, has a bit torrent client built into it. It seems very good so far.

Now just to copy over my 4TB of Media onto the box - which is proving to be *very* slow across the network!

The box was 10,000b, the hard drives 4800b each. Not a bad price overall.

[thaimite]

I have had my Buffalo (terastation) NAS for about 3 years and I am very pleased wit it. No torrent client on mine, and of course as I stataed earlier even the Gigabit netowkr is much slower than USB 2 but all in all a good sturdy device

[welo]

I have had my Buffalo (terastation) NAS for about 3 years and I am very pleased wit it. No torrent client on mine, and of course as I stataed earlier even the Gigabit netowkr is much slower than USB 2 but all in all a good sturdy device

That's interesting. Gigabit Ethernet suggests a huge advantage over USB 2.0 (1000MBit/s vs 480MBit/s theoretical maximum), but this article here states that real world speeds only show a slight advantage for Gigabit Ethernet.

source: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/03...throughput.html

I wasn't aware of that!

welo

[robblok]

I have had my Buffalo (terastation) NAS for about 3 years and I am very pleased wit it. No torrent client on mine, and of course as I stataed earlier even the Gigabit netowkr is much slower than USB 2 but all in all a good sturdy device

That's interesting. Gigabit Ethernet suggests a huge advantage over USB 2.0 (1000MBit/s vs 480MBit/s theoretical maximum), but this article here states that real world speeds only show a slight advantage for Gigabit Ethernet.

source: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/03...throughput.html

I wasn't aware of that!

welo

Not so surprising the NAS drive he bought is a dog. I had it before and was suckered in because of the gigabit Ethernet port. The problem is it has low internal memory and a slow processor. After i bought it and i got annoyed with the speed i researched it and found out that many had been suckered in by the gigabit ethernet port on it.

Anyway if he is happy with it then its his luck, i just went out and bought a the much more expensive QNAP and there is a big difference in speed and options. But you get what you pay for.

But its ok for its money, he should have told me he wanted it he could have gotten mine for 4000bt.

Edited May 10, 2010 by robblok

[JSixpack]

If you don't want to think and just install one package take a quick look at http://freenas.org

You can run it on hardware of your choice...

But if I were you I would just take any server edition of GNU/Linux and then you can install exactly what you need and you don't carry around unnecessary software.

The ready made boxes you pay too much... The hardware is usually limited.

Take care

Martin

No, it's not clear that "you pay too much." Particularly considering the extra power consumption:

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/content/view/30571/77/1/2/

"So it looks like the combination of the Intel Atom mobo, a gigabit PCI NIC, FreeNAS with Large read/write and Tuning tweaks enabled and Vista SP1 running on a client, yield a NAS with slightly-better write and much better read performance than you can get from an off-the-shelf, comparably-priced dual-drive NAS. The extra performance comes at a $20 - $50 premium and 2X power consumption compared to the D-Link DNS-321/323, however. And, at least for my build, the Atom-based result isn't anywhere near as small or attractive!"

Maybe if you've got old hardware lying around to use. But w/ the old hardware you probably don't have SATA, gigabit ethernet, or hot swappable bays. Etc.

[welo]

That's some good articles on that website on self-build vs. stock-NAS.

I digged into the question of power consumption a couple of days ago, but didn't post anything yet because I'm not all that sure that my conclusions are correct.

Nevertheless, here is what I found...

netbooks/laptops vs. desktop PC

QNAP should be pretty low energy due to the netbook like platform (30-40 Watt under load), but then the QNAPs ship with 250W PSUs!? A harddisk takes only about 5-10 Watt AFAIK - with 5 drives that'd be 50 Watt max. Of course a 250Watt PSU still consumes only as much power as the system draws, maybe there is just no point for QNAP to go smaller than that?

Power consumption for a self-made box mainly depends on motherboard and CPU used. Nobody will put a power-hungry 3D graphics card into a NAS box, so that's a non-issue here - with Linux you don't even need a graphics card at all (headless mode).

Desktop Systems draw considerably more power than netbooks and laptops. Choosing your old PC as the platform for a NAS box might seem tempting, but might cost you over time due to the higher electricity bill. Here is a comparison from 2007

System power consumption starts from about 50Watt (Idle) and goes up to 100Watt (load) depending which CPU is used. Unfortunately it is not clear to me what system components were included in this comparison, I assume the numbers include CPU, motherboard, RAM, but not graphics card and harddisk, etc.

source: http://www.anandtech.com/show/2340/13

With more powerful CPUs power consumption can go up considerably, 200 Watt and more under load for some modern quad cores, check here.

The lowest you can get with standard PC platforms is probably something like the Celeron E3200/E3300 product line. This chart compares the Celeron E3200 platform to Atom platforms (iNM10 being the newest, ION being Nvidia's board and i945GC Intel's older motherboard with the relatively power hungry North Bridge).

source: http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/displ...o_12.html#sect0

How much in THB?

Let's get into some maths.

System w/o harddisks

Considering a NAS box that runs 24hrs a day for 1 year, and an idle:load ratio of 90:10 (picked that up from one of the sources - no idea if this is a realistic ratio), excluding hard disks, 4Baht/KWh (This rate is taken from a TV thread from 2009 - not sure whether prices vary much)

Buffalo Terastation III (15W sleep, 40W idle, 40W load)**: 24.5 * 24 hours * 365 days / 1000 = 214 kWh * 4Baht = 858.48 THB (3yrs: 2575,44)

Atom-based system (25W idle, 35W load): average 26W -> 26 * 24 hours * 365 days / 1000 = 227 kWh * 4Baht = 911 THB (3yrs: 2733 THB)

Celeron E3200 (46W,76W): average 49 W -> 49 * 24 * 365 / 1000 = 429 kWh * 4 Baht = 1716 THB (3yrs: 5148 THB)

Intel Core2 Duo (127W, 172W): average 131.5W -> 131.5 * 24 * 365 / 1000 * 4 = 4607 THB (3yrs: 13821 THB)

Some notes:

- Not sure whether a low-budget NAS (other than the QNAP) has an even lower power footprint than the Atom. JSixpack's link rates the self-built Atom-based system as twice as power hungry as a ready-made NAS, which back then were based on more specialized CPUs than the Intel Atom (e.g. Marvell).

- **Added numbers for the Buffalo Terastation III (source here) which uses a Marcell CPU. Not sure if Watt numbers include harddisks or not - which of course could change numbers significantly (not so much in absolute numbers though). Device has a sleep mode with automatic wakeup function. Whereas this could also be setup on a FreeNas system hardware/driver support seems to be a big issue. I assumed a usage pattern of 50:40:10 (sleep, idle, load).

- I picked the Intel Core2 Duo as an example for a 2-3 year old computer that might be considered for replacement as a desktop PC this year and used as a NAS. Intel Core1 Duo has a similar or higher footprint AFAIK. The power consumption stated for the Core2 Duo include GPU and harddisks in IDLE mode (source) Different Code2 Duo models differ quite profoundly in power consumption under load (148W-245W).

- Older Pentium3 systems might be a good pick for a NAS system. In terms of CPU performance a Pentium 1.6 Ghz is comparable to current (single-core) Atom CPUs, however, performance will probably suffer due to the older platform (RAM and onboard components) and it will require an addon card for SATA and gigabit ethernet. Many of the Pentium 4 models and nearly all models of the Pentium D series were very power hungry CPUs, so be careful, often the cheaper and slower CPUs are a better pick. Checkout the 'Thermal Design Power' column in this list this list.

Harddisks

I am a bit unsure about harddisk usage patterns. The system could even power them down when idle for some time (during night hours), but in that case the owner would probably even power down the whole system. If going with one of the modern 'green' drives idle consumption is very low anyway. For now let's stick to the 90:10 ratio and just take the idle value and the random read value for one standard and one 'green' drive.

Seagate Barracuda XT, 2GB (7.0, 8.8): 7.2 * 24 hours * 365 days / 1000 = 63 kWh * 4 Baht = 252.3 THB (3yrs: 756.9 THB) | 4 drives: 1009 THB (3yrs: 3027.6 THB)

Samsung EcoGreen 2GB (3.8, 7.0): 4.1 * 24 hours * 365 days / 1000 = 35.9 kWh * 4Baht = 143 THB (3yrs: 429 THB) | 4 drives: 1716 THB (3yrs: 5148 THB)

Conclusions

When building your own NAS-box based on ordinary Desktop components (your old PC, cheap 2nd hand PC, etc) the cost savings compared to a ready-made NAS box might easily be 'eaten up' by the higher electricity bill! A Core2 Duo based system might cost you more than 13.000 THB over 3 years (running 24/7) compared to about 2500 THB for a ready-made NAS.

However, selecting more efficient PC components - and an elderly cheap Desktop PC with a low-budget CPU might actually fullfill this criteria - this seems to be a valid choice IMHO.

Another option might be to build a system based on the Intel Atom platform - not sure about the hardware costs here compared to a ready-made system.

Harddisk power consumption is rather low with modern drives and generally below 10W. In a 4-disk setup a green drive will save some money in electricity (with 4-disks up to 2000 THB over 3 yrs in 24/7). Not sure if product prices are higher for 'green' drives...

welo

Edited May 11, 2010 by welo

[Crushdepth]

To me the main advantages of an off the shelf NAS box is actually the reduced labour costs of setting it up and maintaining it. You don't need to have a professional IT guy. It might take a moderately computer literate person 3-4 hours to fiddle around with the web interface settings and then it just works (until it breaks). Building a home brew file server (and securing and maintaining it) requires much higher level of technical skill, well into enthusiast territory at a minimum.

Re. power, the QNAPs let you turn the drives off after a specified idle period, and you can schedule shutdowns as well. So you can have the machine sleeping outside of office hours if you want and the drives spun down when nothing is happening.

[robblok]

If anyone wants a buffalo linkstation i got one without drives maybe used for 1 week. Price 3.500bt.

[welo]

To me the main advantages of an off the shelf NAS box is actually the reduced labour costs of setting it up and maintaining it. You don't need to have a professional IT guy. It might take a moderately computer literate person 3-4 hours to fiddle around with the web interface settings and then it just works (until it breaks). Building a home brew file server (and securing and maintaining it) requires much higher level of technical skill, well into enthusiast territory at a minimum.

No question that the off the shelf NAS is easier to setup and less labor intensive!! As soon as labor costs have to be considered an off the shelf NAS will win for sure

I dont have any experience with FreeNAS or another Linux based NAS box - but I assume that this option is nothing for the average user, and some Linux experience is probably recommended. If using a specialized distro such as FeeNAS I doubt though that you need any extra effort in securing it.

The comparison was meant for the geeks amongst us and should evaluate whether higher energy costs would diminish any cost advantage in hardware costs.

welo

[siamect]

Dear All

It is interesting with the energy consumption aspect of it. I would like to point out that older hardware usually is more hungry if you calculate energy consumption per instruction so it is not for sure that you gain anything by using a slower cpu of older model even if the cpu consumes less power.

If you need have your NAS powered on all the time and it is under no load during most of the time then the important thing is to make sure you have a good power management setup.

The max frequency of a cpu is determined mainly by the max power that can be dissipated and is affected by the capacitance of the high frequency circuits. Smaller dimensions means smaller capacitance means less power consumption per cpu cycle. Modern processor have smaller conductors and smaller transistors and therefore they are more efficient if you calculate per cpu cycle or instruction.

So for a given task to run, you have probably lower energy consumption with a fast cpu compared to a slower "low power" cpu. But that is only true if you can put it to sleep when the task is finished.

Netbooks need to be awake all the time because it is a desktop environment waiting for a person to do some input . But no one expect a Netbook to be a high performance animal. Response time is more important than overall performance. There you gain a lot by having a low power low frequency processor that is alway running when somebody is typing.

A NAS that is mainly used for backups does not have to be quick in response and you can put it asleep and spin down the disks. But it does need to be fast once given a task.

The next question is: What is the idle/sleep consumption... and how much of the time is spent on idle. Can your hardware support sleep mode and wake on LAN...

Are your clients happy to wait for wake on LAN delays? If you have a low power CPU but it need to go on full speed all the time maybe it consumes more that a fast cpu that can sleep 90% of the time...

Based on this... throw away old hardware...

And i think you can build a very "green" server from scratch if you look around for the right components.

Installation...

We have to admit that we are comparing apples and bananas here. A NAS is usually packed with tons of functions in order to be "worth the money". To set up the same functionality on a standard GNU/Linux distro is not realistic at all.

But usually you or your customer (if it is a professional environment) have a specific demand of functionality and it is usually limited to a few things.

Typically you set up a system for backup storage or some networked volumes.

You need some package to administrate the access rights.

And maybe you want to host a Intra/Internet web portal and a database server.

Stuff like that is easy and it really doesn't take any time to set up.

I setup like that can be done in 2 hours or less... if you have done it a few times before.

A NAS on the other hand, invites the users to play around to see all the functionality and some of that may not be for any business reason at all. It may very well take longer time to stop all the services not needed than to set up the stuff you need.

On the other hand there may be additional functionality that turns out to of great value once you see it running, and you would never discover that unless you bought that NAS...

Martin

[britmaveric]

Also have a buffalo 2TB NAS DUO. Great piece of hardware!