NAS options

[dave.81]

Well for awhile now i've not been happy with our backup solutions and well to be blunt there has been no money given to make it any better. So new budget year i'm looking at buying a cheaper NAS system to put in another building to our servers to backup to over night.

I've been looking at a couple of external HDD that are networkable as well as things like the Netgear ReadyNASâ„¢ NV+ 1TB which will handle raid and hot swap.

What do you think my best option is bare in mind that funds are very tight and i'll struggle to stretch the budget to £500.

[User3204]

I have a couple of 500gb Freecom USB disks to use as backups.

They actually have network connectors on them, but I find it is slow to backup this way. They cost about £100 each, this is what we use as off-line/off-site backup.


We also have as an online backup two servers (one on each network), that copies across a full backup every friday, and an incremental every day. This is just a linux server with a RAID5 disk array, I think we have 1tb on it (in total).
The backup is run using a script, on the linux server. HOw cheap to build a server with some large disks in it ?

[Midget]

Get a cheap motherboard with onboard SATA-RAID controller or buy a PCI one for £30 and put on a spare PC, but try to get one with a Gigabit NIC

Stick 4 500GB HDDs in it (~£60ea)

Set Them to RAID5 in the controller's access control (accessed when booting the PC and after POST).

Install FreeNAS

You have yourself a cheap 1.5TB NAS that will survive a disc failure; as long as you keep an eye on it and don't let 2 disks fail - happens more often that you'd expect.

[mark]

I prefer not to raid at all for that reason. With 4 seperate disks, in my scenario where I backup mon to thurs and 4 fridays, I only loose 1 friday and one weekday should a drive die. If one drive dies the script falls over and I know about it.

[Midget]

depends how you want to do it, its fully flexible, i just say RAID5 due to the redundency it offers and having just one location increases the simplicity of a script for backing up.

[mark]

Agreed. \\backup\drive1\ isn't so different from \\backup\monday tho' :P

[mcrylett]

NetGear's ReadyNAS is a very good and cost effective option if you don't fancy the task of building your own. It also now comes with a 5 year warranty as standard on the hardware (including the disks !).

If you want it for redundancy as well as storage the XRAID technology is very nice. (Basically it just scales the RAID array as you slot the disk in, no intervention on your part. Just add disks and get more storage and redundancy).

On a tight budget you can get the lower end ReadyNAS+ for 500 quid. (Then as budget improves you can just replace the disks one at a time and the XRAID just scales up. (You dont even need to have disks of the same size for the XRAID to work).

[Midget]

so it isn't RAID then, it's a JBOD

[dave.81]

Taken from the netgear website

Supporting hardware accelerated RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) levels 0, 1, 5 and ReadyNAS’s own X-RAID™ technology, ReadyNAS ensures full data redundancy with protection against hardware failure – something previously only available in high end servers. If one drive fails, the data volumes can still be rebuilt with the remaining drives. Without RAID, once a failure occurs, you risk losing all of the data stored on the drive.

X-RAID Technology
ReadyNAS’s Patent Pending X-RAID technology automates the volume expansion for you as you scale from 1 HDD to 4 HDD. Most NAS devices on the market aren’t future-proof. You can’t add or replace disks for larger capacity. ReadyNAS allows you to start with one disk, then add the additional drives over time, without reconfiguring the system and shuffling the data. Additionally, as disk capacity becomes larger and cheaper, you can replace all four disks, one-by-one, while X-RAID automatically manages the RAID details for you.

So seems you can pick and choose which option you want whether it be raid or this X-raid they speak off.