Best NAS Box for under £300 (without drives)

[tri_94]

All the info is in this thread. If it's all going over your head just use windows. Losing years worth of photos etc because you don't understand the OS/FS/etc would be a killer.

 

 

 

I wouldnt say that it all goes over my head, just mainly ever used windows or mac os, and of course therefore using FAT32, NTFS and HFS/ HFS+ . have done some with linux and use of SMB. but justing wondering how to get the best of out the idea.

i could quiet easily setup a windows server with dchp dns raduis but i really have not reason to do such like, not dealt with nas boxes only the synogolgy DS1010+ and DS2411 which we have working fine for shares and backups. So if im gonna build a nas box want to do it right first time, nothing worse then using this filesystem and then finding out that i cant access it from .... and having to possibly transfer all the data off and reformat etc. not to meation reconfig all over again...

[Geoff]

As for Linux filesystems I would stick with ext4 (or ext3 if you are paranoid). Only consider XFS if you have a UPS. JFS is a bit naff and ReiserFS is depreciated and unsupported. BtrFS is worth keeping an eye on too but I wouldn't use it on a production system just yet.

[tri_94]

As for Linux filesystems I would stick with ext4 (or ext3 if you are paranoid). Only consider XFS if you have a UPS. JFS is a bit naff and ReiserFS is depreciated and unsupported. BtrFS is worth keeping an eye on too but I wouldn't use it on a production system just yet.

 

so what about ZFS?

[Geoff]

I wouldn't use ZFS due to the license issues.

[mavhc]

Run debian/kfreebsd then you get zfs without all the pain of freebsd.

 

RAIDZ1 replaces RAID5, ZFS should always be used with the individual drives, turn off any RAID features of your HBA/bios.

 

ZFS offers many features, compression and deduplication are advanced features, read up on them before using them.

 

For home use an E350 motherboard is good, although they stopped selling the asus e35m1-i, which had 6 internal sata ports. I run that, plus an 8 port LSI card (don't get the 1068 ones, only support 2TB drives, evil LSI don't mention that)

 

For work use more cpu = faster access

 

Only issue with RAIDZ is you can't add drives to the RAIDZ, you have to create a second RAIDZ, which you can then pool with the original to make 1 massive filesystem if you wish.

 

Current best practise is RAIDZ2, like RAID 6, as the time taken to resilver a new drive is too long, a second drive is too likely to fail in that time for people whose data is worth money.

[dhicks]

ZFS offers many features, compression and deduplication are advanced features, read up on them before using them.

 

Just to repeat something that I think someone in this thread has already pointed out, check the RAM requirements for ZFS' block-level deduplication before you buy any hardware (and if you want block-level deduplication, obviously). It's a great feature, but it takes a suprisingly large wodge of RAM, and the larger your disk array the more RAM you need. RAM isn't expensive these days, but check the motherboard on the machine you are buying can accept enough RAM for it to do what you want.

[Guest Guest]

...Software RAID... In fact the server at my parents house has just died, haven't had a chance to look at why (probably PSU) but it really doesn't matter as all I have to do is pop the HDs in a different PC and they should be recognised as a RAID array.

 

 

Just to update the above. The PSU was dead, so was a HD. Popped them in a new PC, worked out which one was dead and removed it from the array. Brought the array back up in a degraded state and retrieved the data (once 1 HD goes, the rest are sure to follow). Found a spare HD and added it to the array.

Edited October 9, 2012 by Guest

[mavhc]

Apparently with ZFS you can unplug all the drives, mix them up, plug the drives back in pretty much anywhere and it sorts them all out for you.

 

Also it's faster to replace a dying drive that's still online if you have room for the replacement as well, as it just copies the drive instead of recreating it from the other n-1

[SHimmer45]

i used a via c7 and a couple of drives in a MDAM mirror worked really well, only recently replaced it with a buffalo nas and imo its got a few niggles.

if it was me id home brew something and then put a media/streaming server over the top.

 

though tbh alot of the 2 bay un populated stuff is pretty good straight out of the box

[twin--turbo]

My friend uses a Raspbery Pi as his Storage server.

 

Rob

[tri_94]

My friend uses a Raspbery Pi as his Storage server.

 

Rob

 

 

Surely that's really painfully slow?

[Guest Guest]

Surely that's really painfully slow?

 

If he's running software raid then yeah just a bit. If it's just a usb HD connected then I'd expect adequate performance. Maybe he's got flash storage connected, it's quite cheap now - assuming you have little data.

[twin--turbo]

USB storage, and he uses it as a media server so it's capable of streaming HD.

 

Not BALLS out performance but for £30 + a £50 1TB HDD it's a very low cost low power solution.

 

Rob