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Deleted member 12837
Unconfirmed Member
Are there compatibility issues using any of these solutions with Macs?
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It's the NAS (Network Attached Storage) Thread, yo.
- Thread starter Jill Sandwich
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Kamakazie!
Member
Recently built myself a WHS box for around £430 inc. 2x1.5TB drives so much cheaper than an equivalent NAS.
Running a low power Athlon X2 & 2gigs of memory so it's plenty fast enough. With a few plug-ins WHS is very powerful & has been extremely reliable so far.
I have heard a few horror stories about recovering from the disk loss though so I will wait & see on that one. 1 of my drives is on it's last legs though but I don't want to replace it until I absolutely have too (and the fact that I am not 100% sure which one it is!).
Running a low power Athlon X2 & 2gigs of memory so it's plenty fast enough. With a few plug-ins WHS is very powerful & has been extremely reliable so far.
I have heard a few horror stories about recovering from the disk loss though so I will wait & see on that one. 1 of my drives is on it's last legs though but I don't want to replace it until I absolutely have too (and the fact that I am not 100% sure which one it is!).
Spiderjericho
Member
guise said:
I bought a Synology 209 last fall and have RAID 1 1.5TB. It's pretty solid and everything in my house sees it thanks to UPnP. The two main issues I have right now are the bottleneck created by my wireless router, a Netgear 3500 N router, and setting up the permissions. NTFS is so much easier, imo. But it's pretty cool.
I think the server options is probably the best option if you have the money or have an old computer you'd like to convert.
As someone who works as a Helpdesk manager in IT, I can't find a good reason for a NAS server for the general masses.
Obviously if you're looking for fault tolerance, then by all means, backup all your shit to a NAS and run streaming movies, TV shows or whatever but even my friend at Intel who is developing Intel's consumer NAS division says they're struggling in making them a "must have" item in a home for the overall populous.
Obviously if you're looking for fault tolerance, then by all means, backup all your shit to a NAS and run streaming movies, TV shows or whatever but even my friend at Intel who is developing Intel's consumer NAS division says they're struggling in making them a "must have" item in a home for the overall populous.
Marty Chinn
Member
Pctx said:
I can definitely see them as a hard sell. I mean it's hard enough to convince someone to buy an external hard drive for the sole purpose of backing up their computer. I've got my server as a NAS for two reasons:
1) A centralized storage that any computer or device can access. This way I can share access to documents, music, photos, or whatever files that I may need to access on multiple computers. As a result, storage on individual computers isn't needed since content is stored mostly elsewhere. This also works great for multiple media devices that are hooked to different TVs since it never requires a specific computer to be on.
2) I made it my new year's resolution for 2009 to not lose any files due to corruption or hard drive failure. Thus, an automated back up solution was required where you would never have to think about backing anything up as its all done for you by the NAS. It's all hidden so nobody has to worry about it but its there in case. It also is set to make sure nothing stored on the server is loss too. I was guilty about being lazy about backing things up because why use that hard drive space for back up when I could store more stuff on it. You just gotta take the plunge and I'm better off for it.
Those are two primary things you have to convince people that they need or should be doing if you're never going to get a NAS in the hands of more people. Another area is when we start having network media devices that want to pull stuff off the network, it'll be a good way to push such devices to store and access that content on multiple TVs or devices.
Pctx said:
I investigate NAS solutions every 6 months and come up with this conclusion every time. Right now I could set up 10TB of external USB hard drives for about 700 bucks, if not cheaper (1TB external drives used to cost me $700 a piece 3-4 years ago!). One of these 5-bay servers with five 2TB drives in it would be about a grand, minimum. There are also plenty of software apps out there for all kinds of media streaming to all sorts of devices, plus software to run auto backups. External HDs just seem to be getting cheaper and cheaper thanks to their popularity.
I really wish there was a "one box, one connection" solution that would give me 10TB+ for about the price of the same in external HDs, but there isn't as far as I can tell.
Well file sharing and media streaming works quite well on my Mac with the H340 (uses the SMB protocol). Although there are issues with Time Machine due to Apple restrictions, and the control software is Windows-only, so keep that in mind if you use a mac as your main computer.404Ender said:
WickedAngel
Banned
What is the benefit of a NAS over something like a powerful, fully functional media server with a lot of internal storage and something like Acronis True Image?
Zombie James
Banned
D-Link DNS-323
It still gets updated firmware (latest was released on Feb 17th) and it's pretty hackable, too. Nice, quiet little box.
It still gets updated firmware (latest was released on Feb 17th) and it's pretty hackable, too. Nice, quiet little box.
DJ_Lae
Member
I've got a cheap little Dlink 323 that I've been using for about a year now.
Have two 1TB WD Green drives in there and got the enclosure on sale for about $100. Someday I'll upgrade to a larger, dedicated server, but for now it does its job well and uses very little power. The only downside is that it's so energy efficient I have to wait five or ten seconds to access a drive that's been put to sleep, but it's not a huge issue.
Also functions nicely as a print server, and contains some other basic features from supporting iTunes to ftp to pulling torrents on its own. It's solidly built, too, other than the weirdly easy to remove front panel.
My only gripe is that if it ever dies I'll have to buy or borrow another to get access to the data, or install Linux on one of my computers as it uses EXT instead of NTFS.
Have two 1TB WD Green drives in there and got the enclosure on sale for about $100. Someday I'll upgrade to a larger, dedicated server, but for now it does its job well and uses very little power. The only downside is that it's so energy efficient I have to wait five or ten seconds to access a drive that's been put to sleep, but it's not a huge issue.
Also functions nicely as a print server, and contains some other basic features from supporting iTunes to ftp to pulling torrents on its own. It's solidly built, too, other than the weirdly easy to remove front panel.
My only gripe is that if it ever dies I'll have to buy or borrow another to get access to the data, or install Linux on one of my computers as it uses EXT instead of NTFS.
Marty Chinn said:
*nods*
Agree. What's interesting for me is on my MBP, having a 1TB drive and doing Time machine backups pretty much puts my data on cruise control.
That and having dropbox sync stuff across my MBP, iPhone and work PC, having a NAS in our house just doesn't add up to be a value.
I think the potential benefit as you stated is definitely the sharing aspect of which is a blessing and a curse. If people play fast and loose with permission based shares, how does the NAS report a breach? Ugh, god my brain just hurts thinking about it. :lol
The other part that is catching on is cloud based backup (Dropbox, Carbonite, Mozy etc.) which I think people are using, but don't quite get yet. (in terms of disaster recovery and all of the options that are available to them if something crashes.)
also---
I think the rate of which the non-flash drives are dropping in price thanks to the flash based drives, maybe in the next 3 years we'll see something like this.VALIS said:
I also wouldn't put it past Apple to do something more with it's time capsule device but who knows at this point... the consumer just doesn't seem interested yet.
Gaz Pwnage
Member
could i build my own server and whack a copy of home server on it?
i looked at a bunch of them. i have an older one from a few years ago that i used to keep running all the time, but it's kinda slow and i've had problems recently with harddrives dying.
i've decided the only real way to go is to build a low powered linux server and just tweak it to do exactly that. you can get some really low powered solutions now that are more than fast enough to do everything i'd want them to do, and so long as there's SMB support, i'm good.
a simpler version would also be in the same range or cheaper than a lot of the commercial ones i've seen. only downfall would be the effort involved. it's not simple plug-n-play unless there's a distribution for this already.
i've decided the only real way to go is to build a low powered linux server and just tweak it to do exactly that. you can get some really low powered solutions now that are more than fast enough to do everything i'd want them to do, and so long as there's SMB support, i'm good.
a simpler version would also be in the same range or cheaper than a lot of the commercial ones i've seen. only downfall would be the effort involved. it's not simple plug-n-play unless there's a distribution for this already.
I haven't worked out why I need a NAS.
I have a Mac mini as a central server/HTPC/newsgroup client. Attached to that I have a WD studio mirror edition, with 2x1TB drives, set up as a single 1TB drive with RAID backup. It does it internally so I don't have to worry about it.
Need more storage? buy another one of those.
I have a Mac mini as a central server/HTPC/newsgroup client. Attached to that I have a WD studio mirror edition, with 2x1TB drives, set up as a single 1TB drive with RAID backup. It does it internally so I don't have to worry about it.
Need more storage? buy another one of those.
Marty Chinn
Member
WickedAngel said:
No real advantage a NAS has over setting up a media server like the HP Media Smart Server. The HP just gives you more flexibilitey and functionality over the NAS. I used to have a Linksys NAS before I upgraded to this and would simply never look back. The ability to run Windows applications just can't be overlooked or under stated.
A simple example is I have my HP plugged into a battery backup power supply and in the event that the power goes out and my backup power supply kicks in, it can communicate with my server and when the battery runs down to about 10 minutes of power remaining, it can tell WHS to start the shut down procedure since it just runs the APC power utility in the background to manage and interact with it.
That's just one small example of having the flexibility of WHS over a standard NAS. Don't get me wrong, my first NAS was great but it was extremely limited. Worth the $100 back then, but really, spend the extra couple hundred or building your own WHS machine is well worth it.
Buying the HP is great because it's compact, they simplify things, and they give you additional software that works really well. Unlike most things, it's not bloatwear, and there's a good chance you'll use it. It's also headless and meant to be treated as more of a device or appliance that you setup and forget about rather than doing constant maintenace but it has the flexiblity of being essentially a full computer that you can remote desktop to.
Marty Chinn
Member
mrklaw said:
Well essentially, you've made your Mac Mini a NAS assuming you use it as central storage that other computers and devices can access. The only advantage a NAS would have here is you don't need to have the Mac Mini on and it would be a lower powered consumption option. But otherwise, it is a NAS. The one advantage that is nice is with a NAS or a server, it takes all storage and combines it to one central storage where as I assume on the Mac, you would be accessing different drives. I've got 6 drives in my server, but anything accesses it essentially see is it as one large storage pool and not 6 individual drives.
thedrizzle34
Member
I've got a QNAP TS-209 Pro II NAS at home, and I'm a big fan of it. It's basically a headless linux server with replaceable drives. It definitely can duplicate functionality that you can get from an extra computer in the house, but I like that its power consumption is relatively low and I don't have to have a computer turned on to stream media to my 360/PS3 in various rooms around the house. Also, it's very compact and provides a separate point of failure in case my laptop(s) are burglarized or anything like that.
Marty Chinn
Member
Magnus said:
To sum it up, it's like a hard drive but instead of being inside your computer, it's on your local network. Often they are headless which means no monitor is hooked up to it and it's just a device or computer that is plugged into the network.
What is the advantage of this? There's the simple purpose of backing up your computer or multiple computers. There's the ability that any computer or device in your house has access to the same files rather than needing a copy on every computer. There are other reasons to have one but those are prime examples.
Marty Chinn
Member
Here's what it looks like with the door open. The hard drives are hot swappable without needing to power down too. The server is on the left. My additional eSATA bay is on the right so I can have 8 drives connected by SATA.
and here is a size comparison to show how small it really is:
and here is a size comparison to show how small it really is:
crazygambit
Member
I've been looking into DAS (Direct Attached Storage) rather than NAS, since I just need to plug it to my HTPC (a new Mac Mini), which is in turned plugged to my receiver and TV. If I need to serve files over my network (not much point since I'm already connected to the HDTV) I'd just use the Mini.
They seem to be much cheaper and faster, since you can use esata, firewire or USB (in that order of speed), instead of network port.
However for some weird reason there are considerably less choices than NAS devices.
The original Drobo and the S are the best known DAS to date. However they are pretty expensive and their propietary RAID tech, while awesome in ease of use and using different kinds of drives, makes them slow.
I've been seriously looking at the Smartstor DS4600. It has 4 bays, RAID 5, firewire (great for a Mac mini) and it's about $320.
I haven't been able to find worthy alternatives yet, so I was hoping you guys would have some ideas.
Building my own is kinda out of the question, it must be 4 bays or more, RAID 5, cheap AND silent. Otherwise it's no good.
With this one you have to use drives of the same size or waste space is not very upgradable (buy 4 new bigger drives), but I can live with that. I'll be getting 4 2TB drives, which should keep me covered for a while.
I'd also like to know how the daisychaining of more than one of these would work. Can you hook up 2 and make an 8 drive RAID 5? That would be beyond sweet, but somehow I don't expect it to work.
Any comments are appreciated since I'm close to pulling the trigger on that one.
They seem to be much cheaper and faster, since you can use esata, firewire or USB (in that order of speed), instead of network port.
However for some weird reason there are considerably less choices than NAS devices.
The original Drobo and the S are the best known DAS to date. However they are pretty expensive and their propietary RAID tech, while awesome in ease of use and using different kinds of drives, makes them slow.
I've been seriously looking at the Smartstor DS4600. It has 4 bays, RAID 5, firewire (great for a Mac mini) and it's about $320.
I haven't been able to find worthy alternatives yet, so I was hoping you guys would have some ideas.
Building my own is kinda out of the question, it must be 4 bays or more, RAID 5, cheap AND silent. Otherwise it's no good.
With this one you have to use drives of the same size or waste space is not very upgradable (buy 4 new bigger drives), but I can live with that. I'll be getting 4 2TB drives, which should keep me covered for a while.
I'd also like to know how the daisychaining of more than one of these would work. Can you hook up 2 and make an 8 drive RAID 5? That would be beyond sweet, but somehow I don't expect it to work.
Any comments are appreciated since I'm close to pulling the trigger on that one.
THREAD NECRO ALERT
So, I bought a Synology 211j yesterday, along with a pair of Seagate 2TB drives. Going to put them in RAID 1. I could do RAID 0 and back up to USB, but honestly, I don't trust that kind of service to cheap "green" hard drives. 2 TB will be plenty for my needs.
What inspired me to start looking into this, weirdly enough, was Amazon's Cloud Drive thing that came out last week. I started to see how cool the idea was, but got smacked in the face with limitations. I wanted my full media library, not just a small subset that fits within what Amazon has on offer. I want logins and direct drive mapping, so my family can all use it as well, and allow easy PC backups. Etc. etc...
Well, the Synology devices are certainly the right price, and do what I need and a whole lot more. Sure, I could toss together a cheap Linux box and do the same thing, but this is going to save me a TON of time.
So, I bought a Synology 211j yesterday, along with a pair of Seagate 2TB drives. Going to put them in RAID 1. I could do RAID 0 and back up to USB, but honestly, I don't trust that kind of service to cheap "green" hard drives. 2 TB will be plenty for my needs.
What inspired me to start looking into this, weirdly enough, was Amazon's Cloud Drive thing that came out last week. I started to see how cool the idea was, but got smacked in the face with limitations. I wanted my full media library, not just a small subset that fits within what Amazon has on offer. I want logins and direct drive mapping, so my family can all use it as well, and allow easy PC backups. Etc. etc...
Well, the Synology devices are certainly the right price, and do what I need and a whole lot more. Sure, I could toss together a cheap Linux box and do the same thing, but this is going to save me a TON of time.
claviertekky said:
Yeah, I've looked at Windows Home Server, but it is way less flexible than the Synology stuff. However, it's a hell of a lot easier and cheaper than building your own Linux NAS, which is essentially what a Synology is.
The market as a whole is fairly immature; I would be shocked if Apple didn't have a solution for this in a year or so that blows everybody away.
Ceres said:
Hah, sorry about that. I just hate creating new threads, I never feel like I can do an OP justice.
this.Zombie James said:D-Link DNS-323
It still gets updated firmware (latest was released on Feb 17th) and it's pretty hackable, too. Nice, quiet little box.
Cheeto said:
You save alot of electric bill in the long run. A NAS box consumes 1/10th the power of a home brew box.
I have 2 DNS-321 myself. I was going to buy the 323 but came across a good deal on the 321. I saw that the 321 can do torrent too so I picked it and save some money. The reason I brought a 2nd 321 is that I have run out of space on the first one and I want identical hardware for maintainence reason.
lachesis
Member
hyp said:
If you don't mind slow speed, yes, it's definitely an viable option. I actually connected external hdd to my router, and was just fine with it. I'm building a new home with CAT6 wiring in every room, so I'll be going with Synology 211 later this year though - but if it comes down to basic fuction of file sharing - simple external HDD hooked up to router works.
Cheech said:
Make sure you checkout synology's apps from android/ios that let you stream music from anywhere.
I recommend anyone with more than one computer in their house to get a NAS. They are so inexpensive and feature rich, it'd be ridiculous to get a "server" unless you plan on running virutalization. (Even some of that can be done on NASes now.)
IrishNinja
Member
i never sleep, cause sleep mode is the cousin of death
Copernicus said:
Oh, I know, it's great. It really lessens the need to buy expensive ass 64 gig Touches/iPads when you can just stream your entire media library wherever you are.
The situation with my stuff is insane. I literally have 6 entire 50 gig copies of my music library floating around on various computers/external drives, and obviously they are not all in sync. There is one "master" copy, that I plan on copying over to the NAS and ending that nonsense once and for all. I'll have 6 copies of iTunes hitting the same media library so I'm not sure what kind of issues I'll run into, but it shouldn't be that bad. I can probably use something like Synctoy to keep everything in check.
My wife and I also have family pictures and crap scattered all over the place, and she keeps the lions' share on a Sony laptop that gets abused and rarely backed up. I have 100+ gigs of family videos stored on two cheesy external drives that are again, scattered around the house.
A NAS is pretty much what needs to be done here, and has for awhile. The Synology will also let me create remote accounts for our parents/siblings, so they can store crap on it too. The torrent feature will be interesting to play around with as well.
GameplayWhore
Member
At work, we have a QNAP 809U-RP doing RAID6, and it's worked pretty well. Had a scare a couple weeks ago where it suddenly insisted that the hard drives were missing and the volume didn't exist, but after reseating them they worked fine. And we back up to an additional JBOD NAS.
At home, I have a SheevaPlug which I used as a NAS from anywhere in the world (the joys of port 22) as well as an app server and proxy server and web server and mail aggregator/server, et al, but a couple weeks ago (that must have been a week of bad juju), it suddenly had a conniption and ate itself. I'm using my regular home machine (a 3GHz Shuttle-based Athlon X2) for those functions now, but I hope to repair the little plug, as it uses only a few Watts at peak.
At home, I have a SheevaPlug which I used as a NAS from anywhere in the world (the joys of port 22) as well as an app server and proxy server and web server and mail aggregator/server, et al, but a couple weeks ago (that must have been a week of bad juju), it suddenly had a conniption and ate itself. I'm using my regular home machine (a 3GHz Shuttle-based Athlon X2) for those functions now, but I hope to repair the little plug, as it uses only a few Watts at peak.
Marty Chinn
Member
Cheech said:
How is it less flexible out of curiosity? I would imagine being able to let it run actual Windows software makes it insanely more flexible than other solutions out ther like Drobo.
WickedAngel
Banned
I bought a Thecus N4100Pro and 4 x 2TB drives. Put them in RAID5 for ~5TB usable space after parity.
xxracerxx said:
I seriously spent 2 hours research this yesterday. I chose the new Seagate drives, because they aren't the first gen 2 TB drives. They also are very quick for the price; look up some reviews. They were the only 2 TB drives I could find that didn't scare the crap out of me.
I sport the Netgear ReadyNAS Pro Business edition, this is actually my 2nd. I had the NVX prior.
I'm using 3 3TB drives at the moment.
For the most part no, you just need to realize accessing it is a bit different, especially since macs handles servers a bit different in your finder.
I have a macbook pro/W7 laptop on my network and it works fine.
truth!
I'm using 3 3TB drives at the moment.
404Ender said:
For the most part no, you just need to realize accessing it is a bit different, especially since macs handles servers a bit different in your finder.
I have a macbook pro/W7 laptop on my network and it works fine.
Rentahamster said:
truth!
Marty Chinn said:
Look at the Synology feature web page.
The main problem I have with WHS is just that, it's Windows. I have to pay $99 for the software, and then whatever the hardware costs, which certainly isn't going to be as energy or cost efficient as a dedicated NAS device. Poking around the WHS pages, it looks like you can get some dedicated WHS devices, which are universally more expensive than what I spent on the Synology device.
As far as flexibility, unless I'm mistaken, WHS doesn't do half of what the Synology device can. Any type of RAID using a modern filesystem(EXT4), baked in support for various mobile devices, e-mail server, torrents, news server, FTP, DDNS, web site hosting, and yeah, it does ADS/ACL through Samba (which obviously WHS is going to do as well, heh).
WHS looks like a neat product. It's something that I'd set up for my parents. But the Synology appeals to the IT nerd in me.