I'm not in the market for one at the moment but I would like to get one down the line, for those that don't know NAS stands for Network Attached Storage. Basically it's just a little box with 1 or more hard drives in it that you can use to store media which can be accessed from any machine or unit on your network.

Does anyone here have any experience with them? I just want to store photos\mp3s\video in one place and stream from any PC on the network plus be able to stream to my Beyonwiz (it's a HD Tuner\Media Player) with the option of streaming to my 360 (though the beyonwiz seems to play everything so I doubt I'd use it)

What price range should I be looking at? They seem to start from around $150 for a cheap and nasty one (1x ATA 500Gb drive) to big beasty ones with a ton of space for many SATA drives and RAID setups.

if it's just photos/mp3s/video then one of the cheaper units will do. just make sure it supports RAID5 and can send failure alerts so you know when a has f***ed itself.

How any people have RAID? Seems a bit of overkill for home stuff. DVD backups for family photos and things are enough for me.

I'm also thinking of NAS, my old file server keeps turning itself off. There are some that offer ftp access to it, upnp and an iTunes server as well, which seems pretty nifty. Still not entirely convinced that cheap PC with some big drives in it couldn't do the same thing though.

I looked into getting one....almost 2 years ago now. Was looking for at least 2x SATA bays with good cooling etc. It was like at least 500 bucks...just for the bays, and then 2x 320gig drives made it lots more expensive. Ended up getting just a regular SATA drive, and a caddy with E-SATA for like...250~ bucks all up. And then bought a Media PC for like all up 700-800. Now I have put a 1tb drive in it, and there is still room for more! And i get to watch tv shows etc on it as well!

That was long wasn't it...CLIFF NOTES: Get a HTPC / old PC and have it host stuff. However you already have HTPC equivilant stuff, NAS have probably changed anyway.

How any people have RAID? Seems a bit of overkill for home stuff.

I used to think that a bit but I've gotten so used to the idea that I hate not having it now. It is such a f***ing pain in the balls losing a hard drive and the data on it, I simply don't care about the extra few hundred bucks it takes to get a second disk and run raid1.
I haven't personally used raid5 for home stuff simply cos I've never been in a situation where I have more than two disks at a time I want to create a set with. But I guess next time I build a box for storing s***e on I'd probably want it substantially larger than the largest available hard drive so I'd buy several and use raid5. Or maybe raid1+0 might make more sense, I think there's a fair bit of write overhead with raid5

get an old pc, fill it will hdds and get windows home server.

oh and to answer the original post, the only non-enterprise nas's I've had anything to do with are the netgear readynas 1RU ( http://www.netgear.com/Products/Storage/ReadyNAS1100.aspx ) and the western digital worldbook ( http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=279 )

the netgear is pretty good in terms of build and features (4 sata hot swap bays, 2 gbit nic ports supports trunking/bonding and also supports ldap and windows active directory in addition to more basic auth medthods). has some FUD features for other weird things like podcasting or some s*** which I immediately turned off and forgot about. supports nfs which is also useful for mounting shares from linux instead of using smb there.
negatives with this so far though, are fairly slow performance, painfully slow raid array build/rebuild time and the web interface can be slow as balls as well. I guess it's cpu/ram is a bit underspec'd. we've been running this for about 8 months or so. summary so far is nothing special, usually does the job but gets a few slowness complaints around the office at times. seems reliable so far at least.

the western digital worldbook is a more home-oriented solution, just a big white box that sits on a desk as opposed to a rack unit like the netgear. so far the worldbook is a great out of the box solution for home and probably small office as well. don't think it supports active directory auth tho which is unlikely to be an issue at home. only had this for about 4 months, performance seems good and no issues yet.

I am pretty easy to please tho, some people NOT MENTIONING ANY NAMES TROG would prolly find a massive list of gripes with them.

I've already got a spare PC which I don't use, it's too much of a pain in the arse to boot up without an extra monitor\keyboard\mouse and it's just bloody noisy, not to mention about 5 years old and would probably die if it ran longer than a day.

Those worldbooks look like a good solution, even if they are a bit expensive, they seem pretty no-fuss. Though the non-expandability could becoming an issue. What size did you get?. I will still check them out when the time comes and see if the price has come down.

I got 1TB which is 2 x 500gb disks, and since I used raid1 I actually only have 500gb. You can get them in 2TB tho (2 x 1TB disks)

http://forums.overclockers.com.au/forumdisplay.php?f=44

Storage and backup sub forum of OCAU, there's people on there with home NAS servers in the 10's of terrabyte capacity ranges.

I looked at getting or making my own NAS device a while ago but because I wanted enough room to upgrade to a terrabyte or two later down the line they started getting up there in price and had features I simply wouldn't use/need.

My friend bought an asus wireless hard drive years ago, it can be accessed either by wireless, 10/100 ethernet or USB so you're pretty set for accessibility. I have no idea where he got it or how much or even if they're still available.

I think your first step should be determining how much space you're going to require. Are you going to use it as a permanent storage solution for ALL your media or are only music/photos going to be permanent while videos come and go? Are the photos important enough to warrant fault tolerance or are they all backed up safely to a DVD somewhere? Lastly how are you wanting to access it; wireless, ethernet, usb or a combination of all 3?

so: how big?
fault tolerance?
connectivity?
extra features like web/ftp servers & print servers etc.

Then just go looking through all the different units that meet your requirements.

edit: I was going to get one of these

last edited by whoop at 19:56:58 29/Oct/08

get an old pc, fill it will hdds and get windows home server.

What is this home server you speak of?

I was thinking maybe SBS, as I actually have a few users and PCs to look after. I have 4 PCs (one just runs XP and serves up files) and 3 laptops, 2 printers and 9 users. That's a believable small business I would think. I'd also like to get some more control over internet access, as I'm be reactive to things as opposed to proactive and centralising email and the way it's accessed so I have more control over that as well.

I currently just point peoples My Documents to the file server so they can have the same documents and things on whatever computer they're on. The trouble is that they can have different passwords on different machines (no matter how many times I tell them) so centralised authentication would be cool too.

Any recommendations?

running a full c7000 blade enclosure pretty happy with it

Earlier this year someone recommended me a Thecus to throw some money at and I haven't looked back. My Thecus 5200 Pro is bloody awesome, its got a mini Linux distro on it (omg I'm using open sauce!) so I have been able to install a torrent client on it for d/ling all my distros.

Lots of raid support etc etc, have about a TB on it now, capacity is about 3TB and it cost just under 1k online, which is awesome for business as its a 100% write-off. Actually its pretty rad and probably deserves a mention in the materialistic whores thread!

last edited by Hogfather at 21:13:33 29/Oct/08

cool, iscsi

Yeah the THECUS stuff is good, the 5200 will cost about 1500 bucks loaded with 5x1tb drives though.

Yeh that iSCSI stuff looks cool but I just mount (haha, mount) the shares defined in the raid anyway, works pretty well. I reckon I need to upgrade the network to 1G tho, as it takes a while to unRAR stuff across the shares etc.

Also - yeh the drives will bump the cost up, but if you buy them individually no individual item gets above 1k which is great.

last edited by Hogfather at 21:25:28 29/Oct/08

Iscsi I cool though because you can have say 4tb of storage on the network and split it up over multiple pc's, and access just like the drive is connected to the pc.

as it takes a while to unRAR stuff across the shares etc.

ssh into the thing and unrar them that way?

How any people have RAID? Seems a bit of overkill for home stuff.

raid is not overkill, not by a long shot
raid is seriously cheap & easy when you consider you get so much peace of mind vs. the extra initial outlay

dare I say drobo?? Its the Data robot! or something.. i've read its pretty much plug in and go style of data protection.. but.. it does take a while to sync if you change a drive or remove one.. still looks cool

Thecus user here.

I've got a 4100+

To be honest, i regret not spending the money on the 5200. The 4100 has been painful, still has a few random crashes and stalls. And thecus support is...... well horrible. alot of it is very dependant on the user community with very little input from thecus themselves. (I believe thecus are owned by abit, and are korean? or the like, based).

It just doesn't seem to like working with windows shares, not sure why, just doesn't. But i can't get the media server to be detected on my 360 either tbh. But it loves working with FTP, and for just mass file storeage, it's been good. But watching stuff off of it, or streaming mp3's off of it, it's been horrible. Considering just sucking it up, and upgrading.

I love having a nas box though. And on the topic of raid, well, i'm running 2 x 1tb drives in raid. The thought of loseing 1tb's data, be it music or what ever, would just be extraordinarily painful. Especially when you can get 1tb drives for ~$200? just seemed silly to not do it.

I was looking at NAS but ended up just chucking 4x1T in my DELL SC430 and using software raid5. It's reasonably quiet and does a great job.

Running Win2k8 Server.

I want to play with OpenSolaris + ZFS with an old pc, I can imagine it ending up being my nas. at the moment I just do time machine backups to a fw800 disk. won't be long until I out-grow this and need a raid nas.

I'd love a Drobo, but way too pricey :| two disks in an old pc sounds good. and as for the noise issue, sticking it under the house will do :P

I am pretty easy to please tho, some people NOT MENTIONING ANY NAMES TROG would prolly find a massive list of gripes with them.

If it's not ZFS it's not worth using

You want to look at the Western Digital ShareSpace. It's their new device just released recently, the next level up from the MyBook - does RAID5, and comes in 2 or 4TB configurations. The 2TB one is about $700, the 4TB $1400 - so what you do is buy the 2TB one then buy 4 of your own 1 or 1.5TB drives to go in it - use the existing 500GB drives that come in it for whatever you want.

Cons:
No linux/native bittorrent etc.
Pros:
MUCH cheaper than every alternative out there, and performs just as well.

Beyonwiz

WAAAAAAAAAIT.. tell me more about this device! It looks like it's an all in one STB, DVD and HTPC front-end??

I've got a thecus 5200 at work for crap, and a smaller one at home. They're brilliant! but a little bit slow, especally noticeable if you're ACDSee'ing through photo galleries.

being linux there's modules to do pretty much everything, I stream video to my 360 via upnp to it which is great.

thecus 4100 and 5200 here...

started with a 4100.. modded it for ssh access and the ability to use modules / plug ins etc... then moved up to the 5200 becaus ei lvoed it so much

one thing with nas, there is NO POINT having it unless your going to raid. i looked for something that could handle a single disc failure and add further disks later... so raid five was perfect.

considering my family photos are no longer stored in a photo album but on a hard drive along with my tax, spreadsheets, etc etc you CANNOT risk a data loss these days.

WAAAAAAAAAIT.. tell me more about this device! It looks like it's an all in one STB, DVD and HTPC front-end??

There are different versions, but if you get the right one then yes.

one thing with nas, there is NO POINT having it unless your going to raid.

Generalize more there skippy?

well i mean if you cant handle a loss a single of EVERY file, considering your going to spend quite a sum of money, for a small bit more you can get a decent redundant raid setup...

for instance a small two hdd nas with one hdd = 200, for 60 extra dollars you could have another hdd in a small two hdd nas with redundancy raid setup.

same thing with a larger nas... like a 5200 and 3 1tb hdds... you could easily chuck em in just a bunch of disks mode to have all 3tb of space but seriously why not have 65% of that avaiable space but have fully redundant data?



last edited by Scorp at 12:43:06 30/Oct/08

http://australia.emc.com/products/detail/hardware/celerra-ns80.htm

Got NAS?

WAAAAAAAAAIT.. tell me more about this device! It looks like it's an all in one STB, DVD and HTPC front-end??

Yeah I got the DP-P1 which is a dual HD tuner, 200Gb HDD and networked HTPC, been very happy with it so far (got it august last year) it seems to be identical to the DP-S1 execpt without a DVD player (which I just use the 360 for) There's firmware updates every quarter roughly, they added MKV format in the latest update which covers everything I've thrown at it now.

running a full c7000 blade enclosure pretty happy with it

pfft, just one. what a noob.

Promise NS4300 user here, pretty happy with it and its dirt cheap at $700 nzd running it with 4 x 500GB raid 5

Been having a serious look at freenas with a 3Ware 9650SE-8LPML and 10 x 750gb Raid 6 (two spares in case s*** hits the fan) well I am hoping I can get raid 6 working

last edited by HerbalLizard at 19:27:14 30/Oct/08

I've been wanting to setup a RAID5 array in my main rig for ages and have finally done it. I was sick of having 5 partitions with s*** spread all over the place.

4 x 500gig HDDs in RAID5 running off ICH10R on my mobo
Bit slower than my old RAID0 array but its not bad at all.

Now I have 2 clean and tidy partitions and I'm lovin it

200gig OS/Games/Apps install
1.16tb storage partition

I have a nice collection of TV eps, 350gig and climbing pretty much every day. I would be pissed if it was on a single drive and it died and I lost it all.