NAS Recomendations

[Prashun Patel]

I've been using a Buffalo Terastation for my small business for about 3 years. It's been too finicky this past year, and I'm looking for a replacement.

Any recs?

[John M Wilson]

I also used to have a Buffalo Terastation, and got tired of its quirks.

I purchased an HP Mediasmart Homeserver, and have been delighted.

It has ample storage, but more importantly, it uses the MS Home Server software, which is based on a very solid server foundation, and adds just enough user interface to make it easy to network and maintain.

There are a couple of different models out there, so you can check out which one best meets your needs. I would recommend the EX495 or th EX490, depending on how much you want to pay for the OEM drives.

Adding additional drives is literally a "snap", and just about any SATA drive is plug and play, so you can pick up storage fairly cheap.

Good luck!

[Neal Clayton]

build one and go with freenas.

the benefits are many...

a) ability to add any type of *nix app that will run on freebsd to the NAS itself
b) plain ole x86 hardware, you're not screwed if a power supply or motherboard dies
c) ZFS > linux raid (which all of the commercial ones use) for many reasons, a list of the highlights being..

• the array is on the drives, not tied to the hardware, you can take the drives and put them in another machine running the same OS and it will fire right up
• the write hole is fixed
• the OS can run on a memory stick, no OS-on-the-array which is a terrible design that many commercial NAS boxes use (if the array dies the OS crashes so you can't recover it without fixing the array...). since flash drives last essentially forever as long as they are only read and not written to, there's no worry of array corruption affecting the underlying OS.
• it checks data not just against the parity on the extra drive, but against the filesystem journal as well, persistently, even on reads, so it will know of a drive being flaky well before even SMART knows, unlike ext3 which is not very reliable in case of certain hardware issues
• due to the array being on the disks, and not in any way linked to the hardware, you can upgrade the machine any time you like, even part by part, up to and including replacing the drive controller, motherboard, whatever, and the raid array will not care. moving the array to a new motherboard, controller, etc is a process of about 3 clicks and 5 seconds
• no downtime for filesystem checks, it does that on the fly. kiss those 30+ hour 'volume check' fsck downtimes goodbye

caveats...

1) it likes ram, recommend 2 gigs. my machine was built for small and quiet as the primary concern, and it is a bit slow on writes with only 1 gig of ram, but reads are ok.

2) freenas is currently in the process of a new major revision with a UI overhaul, that isn't out yet. so for the meantime the way you get all this is using the development builds that have the current ZFS version but the old web UI. everything in the old UI works, though, so it's not really a detriment to using the software, it just could be prettier in some places . current thread with links to stable testing builds are here.

i've tested it after migrating up to and including putting known bad drives in the system, hot swapping bad drives for shaky drives, moving the OS to random other storage medium and hardware, and have not managed to get it to fail. currently storing about 1200 gigs on a 2tb array, no issues.

i use a sata to CF adapter to boot the OS from to keep everything internal, but that's personal preference, if your motherboard can boot to a USB key that would work just as well to install the OS on.

if you want to keep the machine small, these motherboards have 6 sata ports + an eSATA port, giving you a 6 drive array to start with plus external expandability.

[Prashun Patel]

Man, this is great information. But to be honest, I want a brainless solution. I'd like the drives to be preinstalled and formatted. I just want to point it to my domain controller and go.

My server and data is already daily backed up to a secure 'bdr' device which is backed up to an offsite 'cloud'. The NAS I'm looking for is a duplicate backup for less-than-fatal recoveries of files. So it doesn't need to be ultrafast, or huge, or that feature rich.

Synology devices get good reviews. Anyone use any of those?

[Stephen Massman]

I would recommend ReadyNas. I have one and also a Iomega Storcenter and the ReadyNas is a lot better.

[Matt Meiser]

No recommendations other than that there was recently a discussion where people liked the ReadyNas units. Watching this thread closely as I'm thinking about a NAS for backing up my Windows Home Server instead of a PC with a USB drive.

[Darius Ferlas]

I have been using the previous release of this QNAP NAS for the last 2 years. No issues.

[Prashun Patel]

I want something that's a little more industrial than a homeserver solution. I do have to set some permissions for access, which I'm hoping can be dl'd from the Domain controller.

The Terastation is Linux and can only import the user list; it can't enforce group level permissions. We're only 30 people in the company, but you'd be surprised how many security groups we got!!!

[Matt Meiser]

Since you want Windows Domain integration, why not just buy a fairly inexpensive server and load it up with SATA drives as needed? Or since its for backup and I assume doesn't see many concurrent users, maybe even a desktop OS.

[Jerome Stanek]

I have heard good things about the Drobo NAS. I use an Ximeta NAS that I like It only has a 250 gig hard drive in it but for what I do that is plenty.

[Bryan Morgan]

At work we use the Terastations as our "beater/throwaway" NAS devices. Their AD integration is flaky at best. Our "good" stuff is by Stonefly and NetApp, but its very expensive. I've also read good things about the ReadyNAS devices... if I were needing a small NAS that is what I'd go with, currently. Or build an OpenFiler box for a couple hundred bucks (I never had any luck with FreeNAS...it is slow and couldn't handle big files...maybe its fixed though, I don't know).

[Eric DeSilva]

+1 for ReadyNAS. I've got a 6TB ReadyNAS Pro, and like it. I also started with the Buffalo Terastations, and the ReadyNAS Pro seems as lot more industrial strength. I also like the idea of being able to hot swap drives in my ReadyNAS--I've done it now twice, and its worked flawlessly. My recollection was that there was no tracking of SMART errors on the Buffalo, whereas the ReadyNAS gives you a reallocated sector count that is helpful.

The other thing I really like about the ReadyNAS is that you can use a checkbox to install SqueezeCenter, which is the server associated with Slim Devices products to allow distributed audio throughout my house. I use iTunes to rip/tag, then SqueezeCenter interfaces with a bunch of devices that output digital audio or analog audio to stereos in different parts of my house. Works like a dream.

[Neal Clayton]

Since you want Windows Domain integration, why not just buy a fairly inexpensive server and load it up with SATA drives as needed? Or since its for backup and I assume doesn't see many concurrent users, maybe even a desktop OS.

agree, there are even small barebones nas boxes out there if you prefer the small footprint, just get one, plug in a usb cd drive, and install windows on it if you need windows domain integration.

http://www.e-itx.com/dq45ek-a7879-na...er-system.html

the above supports intel motherboard raid, it's software but bios controlled, not OS controlled, so there should be no issue setting it up pre-installation of the OS.

btw samba (the filesharing server every *nix uses for this sort of thing to communicate with windows) does support group permissions. might not be able to set it up in a pre-configured web-gui from netgear or Hp, but the server itself can do it, there's an active directory page on their wiki with instructions.

[Prashun Patel]

You guys are great. This is great info.

I think I am going for the ReadyNAS.

IT is a part-time hat for me, and I prefer to have as much out-of-the-box as possible.

I find - for better or worse - that I never end up scaling up my hardware. I usually just buy new, copy over, and give the old to someone down the food chain...!

[Bryan Morgan]

btw samba (the filesharing server every *nix uses for this sort of thing to communicate with windows) does support group permissions. might not be able to set it up in a pre-configured web-gui from netgear or Hp, but the server itself can do it, there's an active directory page on their wiki with instructions.

As much as I love Samba and have it installed everywhere, its AD integration used in "the real world" is not there yet. It always seems to work fine in a test environment and then crap out in a live environment. Throw a Mac into the mix and its a recipe for disaster.