Nas

[Benny]

Right my winged technology monkeys it's about time I got with the real world.

I would like (I think) a nas device to sit in a cupboard somewhere to hold my movies/photos etc. do I need raid or is there a better way to mirror my photos etc. I reckon about 2tb will do. What do you lot have?

[Penfold]

Do you want to mirror the back up so it's doubly protected?

I have recently purchased on of these from Sharkoon. It can be set to all the Raid configurations and I currently have 2 x 2tb drives contained therein which I mirror in case one fails. It also has lots of pretty blue lights which is lovely. Oh wait, it's USB 3 which is not Nas. It's very quick though.

Perhaps the dMW perennial favourite of old - an ICYBOX .... this one is dual bay and NAS or DAS: http://www.scan.co.uk/products/icy-box-ib-nas5520-dual-bay-hybrid-enclosure-useable-as-(das)-or-(nas)-for-2-x-35-sata-hdd

[BrotherTobious]

I really like the synology boxes mate they are pretty rugged and work really well.

[DrunkenZombiee]

I really like the synology boxes mate they are pretty rugged and work really well.

I used to agree with you Toby but the power packs on them go pop and take out your HDD's. I had one of my HDD's Die on my 4 bay 411J and got all kinds of errors on the other disks. Luckily ordered new disks and server and got Synology to send me out a new power brick so was able to copy everything over before it went pop again. I don't personally trust it anymore with storing my data. This is a big thing on the web. This happened to me before I went to the US and I have just made a new NAS out of one of the small HP micro-servers with 8 gig of RAM and Daul 1.5 ghz processor, 5 bays for disks, ESATA port PCI-E for GFX and PCI-E 1x for expansion, 6USB ports all of the bells and whistsles for £100 + £15 for the 8 gig of RAM. 3 times cheaper than the synologies and better IMO.

Only downside to it is that is doesn't support hardware raid the the synology so there is the possibility of the odd bit of corruption here and there as its SOFTWARE raid. However software raid has its advantages as I can chuck the 4 2tb HDD's in any PC and get the data off them as long as the OS supports the software RAID. This makes sense with Moorselaw still holding firm as you are not bound to specific hardware. Anything with a sata port will do.

I spent a lot of time ****ing about with LINUX distro's as there are some good ones out there for this kinda thing but I was spending too long with MDADM ****ing about with the config... then it was going to take 30 hours to build the bloody thing. Couldn't wait that long to copy over with the HDD's in a poor state so I chucked server 2008 r2 on there and did a software raid 5 as I know that you can write to it while its building the parity. WINDOWS 7 and WINDOWS 8 will also do this if you are wondering. Copies over in no time and I can write to it at 80MB/s continuous write rather than about 25-30 with the old NAS.

Also put a half height GFX in there which was laying about and using it as a media server over HDMI into the TV. Other great things like using it as a VPN tunnel into my home network, it runs VM's a treat... Screw Hyper v just install Vmware or Oracle Virtual Box on there and remote into the Vm's. Anything your OS can do it can do as its fully featured.

Overall its cheaper and can do much more, highly recomeneded, also it looks frigging cool, all black with a nice finish.

For sub £130 You cant go wrong.

Some pics to follow of my new Toy and the Dismantled Synology.

Let me know if you need more info.

DZ

[T-Bag]

Went for http://www.ebuyer.com/290542-netgear-rnd4000-readynas-nv-v2-4-bay-no-disks-nas-enclosure-rnd4000-200eus for my lab in uni. Had no problems connecting to it from all over, it handles GBs of data being written to it for hours on end*. We then analyse those GBs of data, and while it's not close to the performance of a local drive, it's never once lost data or had an issue of dropping connectivity.

It's solid as a rock. I'd prefer if it had faster read/write speeds (more comparable of a local drive) but I'd definitely recommend it.

*When we run an experiment we write files continuously, each data recorded might only take 1/10th of a second and they can be run back to back for 48 hours or more and I've never notice even 1 missing file.

[TeaLeaf]

I have just made a new NAS out of one of the small HP micro-servers with 8 gig of RAM and Daul 1.5 ghz processor, 5 bays for disks, ESATA port PCI-E for GFX and PCI-E 1x for expansion, 6USB ports all of the bells and whistsles for £100 + £15 for the 8 gig of RAM.

Which HP micro-server out of interest?   I've been looking at the DS1512 NAS but I like the price of your version better.

[DrunkenZombiee]

HP ProLiant N40L 1P 2GB-U Emb SATA NHP 250GB LFF 150W PS MicroServer or on the internet just google HP N40L Microserver.

I forgot to mention you get a free 250 gig HDD with this and I think you get an MS:OS for free with it too.

This was on UKHD for £85 a while back after cashback... I got it for £100 from amazon when my other NAS went pop and put 8 gig of RAM in there. I would recommend putting 4x2TB in there and leaving the 250 gig drive you get with it as the OS Drive, Swap etc. In raid 5 this will give you just under 6TB across the 4 disks with one disk redundancy.
It lightening fast at everything and I am currently hosting VM's for work on it, have various shares on there, running my downloading and decompression software for free papers etc. It will even play GW2 quite easily on Low as I have have added a 6670 into it. Does everything I ask of it well. Dont be put off by what seems as a low spec of the dual 1.5 GHz as it easily destroys the AMD3200 chips which were the same spec.

Great bit of Kit way faster for file transfers than my Synology by a long way (3-4 times faster). As stated earlier you can run what you want on it as its x64 so you can run a fully featured OS on there and any software you want.

http://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/hp-n40l-micro-server-185-90-85-90-after-cashback-sold-elevenfirst-fulfilled-amazon-1331196

Hope this helps.

DZ

[ArithonUK]

1 x Buffalo LinkStation Duo 2TB
1 x Western Digital MyBook Live Duo 4TB
1 x Buffalo LinkStation Duo 6TB

The WD drive has a cloud facility, to give you web access to your files stored on it.

The LinkStations are more fully featured. They have PHP/MySql webserver, Bittorrent client, FTP server and can join Workgroups, Domains & Active Directory. They support Mac TimeMachine backup and can support an external USB drive for additional store or backup.

Both drive types support auto-wake, but the LinkStations can be given a programmed wake schedule.

[DrunkenZombiee]

Just to give this a bump found this post on UKHD today..

http://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/hp-proliant-n40l-microserver-194-29-delivered-94-30-after-hp-cashback-box-co-uk-1404081

This one is even cheaper:

http://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/hp-proliant-n40l-microserver-187-99-87-99-after-cashback-morecomputers-1404499

[Benny]

Thanks DZ, and thanks TTB for screwing my FTTC so I haven't seen this until it expired.

[kregoron]

Synology are brilliant NAS boxes, Nice performance / power consumption.
You can pretty much get a "app" to make the box do anything you want.
Recently replaced one of my NAS boxes with a Qnap, worst thing ive ever done.

[DrunkenZombiee]

Synology are brilliant NAS boxes, Nice performance / power consumption.
You can pretty much get a "app" to make the box do anything you want.
Recently replaced one of my NAS boxes with a Qnap, worst thing ive ever done.

With the Synologies its worth googling the power bricks as a lot of customer seem to have problems with them too like me. Seem to be the cheap part of the unit and a point of failure. Was happy with mine till it went pop however it was a little slow and didn't do everything I wanted. The apps don't work too well on them TBH as they are normally pretty underpowered. Rinning SABNZB or Squeezebox causes issues as there simply isnt enough RAM in those little boxes and not enough Horse Power in terms of CPU. Running as webserver with PHP is a very bad idea and media transcoding on the fly is a no go! It will do the basics well but for less money you can get superior performance in almost every criteria with  Micro Server.

I am getting gigabit transfer speeds from my HP microserver while before with my Synology it was 20-30MB/s write at best. The HP wins there with 4 times that. 8 gig of RAM and a proper CPU makes a huge difference.

I have a friend with a Q-NAP and I am not too impressed with it. Noisey 2 bay horrible thing and the software interface is pretty poor compared the Synologies DSM which has a really nice OS style web interface with a desktop and everything.

A lot of routers have some nice options for attaching USB HDD's these days. While not a redundant NAS wioth RAID 1 or 5 etc its pretty useful for backups if your in a pinch or for use as a tersary archive that you can just eject and use and you have the data when your going out of the door.

DZ

[kregoron]

With the Synologies its worth googling the power bricks as a lot of customer seem to have problems with them too like me. Seem to be the cheap part of the unit and a point of failure. Was happy with mine till it went pop however it was a little slow and didn't do everything I wanted. The apps don't work too well on them TBH as they are normally pretty underpowered. Rinning SABNZB or Squeezebox causes issues as there simply isnt enough RAM in those little boxes and not enough Horse Power in terms of CPU. Running as webserver with PHP is a very bad idea and media transcoding on the fly is a no go! It will do the basics well but for less money you can get superior performance in almost every criteria with  Micro Server.

I am getting gigabit transfer speeds from my HP microserver while before with my Synology it was 20-30MB/s write at best. The HP wins there with 4 times that. 8 gig of RAM and a proper CPU makes a huge difference.

I have a friend with a Q-NAP and I am not too impressed with it. Noisey 2 bay horrible thing and the software interface is pretty poor compared the Synologies DSM which has a really nice OS style web interface with a desktop and everything.

A lot of routers have some nice options for attaching USB HDD's these days. While not a redundant NAS wioth RAID 1 or 5 etc its pretty useful for backups if your in a pinch or for use as a tersary archive that you can just eject and use and you have the data when your going out of the door.

DZ

The cheap boxes doesnt pack a lot of horsepower to run huge amounts of services.. Most run ARM chips or small Atom cpu's, with good reason tho, most are made with cheap uptime in mind.. Its a NAS not a server..
Your microserver has a lot more horsepower to handle it all, tho it also comes with a higher consumption cost
Tho my Synology box is running, Samba, Twonkeymedia, print server and a number of other services without a hassle..
The best Synolgy i got has no problems hitting 80-90MB/sec without link aggregation active..

Ive had 6 Synology boxes over the last 5 years, (running 2 atm, and a Qnap(what a horrible idea))

My IBM Eserver also beats the crap out of my NAS boxes, and anything else i got server related, but again it comes at a price.. usually in the power consumption range..

[Snokio]

sorry to hijack this thread, but in the interest in keeping things tidy, thought i would post here,

I have an external USB HDD which i have put some movies etc on, can I put this on a network (attached to a PC) and be read by other devices, mainly thinking of TV's (using Smartshare) which has wifi etc.

I can already send video's straight to the TV, but I would like to be able to choose from the TV instead. Possible?

Thanks

[kregoron]

Most new routers have the option to act as a NAS by plugging in a USB drive in the USB port, tho the drive might have to be reformatted as a EXT3/4 drive