NAS

[ranj]

Dear All

I am looking to purchase a NAS box for home and i have been looking around and cant seem to make my mind up whether to buy a nas with a HD or one of those caddy and then use one of my old SATA or IDE drives.

One question I had was I noticed a lot of them cannot be formatted with NTFS. Is this common on all or are they NAS boxes available which can take NTFS.

I am only looking for a small home based solution, I aware that with the enterprise NAS boxes all the features are available.

If anyone has one can they offer any recommendation. A printer server would be very useful as well. I noticed a few which have this feature.

Thanks

[Midget]

avoid ALL netgear ones, and buy 2 and make a copy of your data on both.

seriously, most are totally useless

[localzuk]

What's the budget, and what's the space you're wanting?

[torledo]

Ranj, this must be the 4th thread i've read about home NAS box recommendations in the last couple month....not you're fault, but if you do a search you'll find the issues discussed and products mentioned.

[Geoff]

I'd DIY one with a bare bones PC, a bunch of SATA drives and a Linux OS CD of choice.

[tmcd35]

Dear All

One question I had was I noticed a lot of them cannot be formatted with NTFS. Is this common on all or are they NAS boxes available which can take NTFS.

Thanks

Am I right in thinking that almost no NAS would support NTFS? A NAS is a computer/server dedicated to file sharing. As a server it runs an OS. For the majority this would be Linux. NTFS support on any OS outside Windows is poor and unreliable. I believe writing to NTFS volumes as only recently been added to Linux in a pre-alpha use if you didn't want to keep the data state?

This being the case most NAS boxes would support FAT32 formating, but are likely to be formated with the linux standard ext3. The NAS would then use SAMBA to allow Windows to access the shared volume.

I can't think of a reason of requiring NTFS unless, perhaps it's being controlled by a domain? Even then SAMBA/LDAP support on boxes like the Linksys Terrastation would allow the NAS to be connected to a Domain and apply share/folder permissions based on AD groups/users.

[localzuk]

The reason I would require NTFS support is due to maximum file size, even at home. You can't download a 4.x GB DVD image onto a FAT32 partition.

If you're willing to spend £400 you can get a Adaptec Snap Server 110 250GB. This supports various enterprise level features which may do the trick better - snap server 110 - Google Product Search

I know if I were wanting some form of NAS, I would be looking at that.

[tmcd35]

Surely even on max filesize NTFS is not needed on a NAS. ext3 supports (according to Wikipedia ) between 16GiB and 2TiB max file size, far greater than your 4Gb DVD. Windows will read/write to it just fine as a SAMBA file share. Wouldn't know it was ext3!

For around £400 HP are now doing 'home servers' these are basically NAS boxes with Windows Home Server running on them. If you insist on NTFS, they'll do it.

[theeldergeek]

avoid ALL netgear ones, and buy 2 and make a copy of your data on both.

seriously, most are totally useless

I've had 2 Buffalo Linkstations chugging away for a few months now, and they have performed flawlessly - considering buying a 1TB solution with RAID next. Never had a problem with Buffalo kit.

[jamin100]

I have a Buffalo Terrastation Pro which runs RAID5. I picked up the 0.6 terabyte version for £170. It has 4 x 150gb drives in it and in Raid 5 leaves me with 450GB left to play with.

It also has USB ports on the back and i have a 500GB USB hard drive formatted with NTFS that it backs up to every week. I've never had to replace one of the drives in the terastation but i just use the USB drive as a extra failsafe.

I also backup to another USB drive every month or so and store it at my mom and dads just incase they either got nicked or the house burnt down.

Obsessive i know but my wife would be devistated if we lost the photo's / home movies of our son growing up..

So better safe than sorry

[Sirbendy]

I will admit to having a rudimentary external 3.5in 80gb disk enclosure with USB2 and Ethernet for mine. About £20 not including disk. Good enough for light backup over 'net, heavier backup over USB and more than enough for file sharing over wifi when plugged into the router.

Also has DHCP and FTP fuctions in the firmware, so I can in theory access it from here if I feel the need. Fat32 again though.

[flashsnaps]

I've had 2 Buffalo Linkstations chugging away for a few months now, and they have performed flawlessly - considering buying a 1TB solution with RAID next. Never had a problem with Buffalo kit.

Yeah I'll second that - Buffalo are awesome - we have about 6 of them here - no problems whatsoever!

[Geoff]

The Buffalo Terastations are just a Linux box with a customised distro. The file system format is XFS (if you ever need to recover data from a dead one!).

[richardp]

Hi,

How about the Drobo with the new nas addon, not cheap but seems to fit your requirements Drobo storage box gets NAS add-on | Register Hardware

Or what about FreeNAS, I know it is still in beta but it is free and will run off a usb key or compact flash card
FreeNAS: The Free NAS Server - Home

I have not used either of the above so I cannot comment on how good they really are. You could always get a copy of micro$oft windows home server 8-)

Richard

[Midget]

we get few of the Buffalo boxes, but they arent too bad as they use known filesystems (either XFS or Ext3). what ever you get make sure its got a file system that will allow you to just plug it into your PC and recover off it.