NAS Storage Systems

Has any of you used any Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices?

I dug out an old PC today, a 600MHz Pentium III with 128Mb RAM, and stuck a 160Gb HDD into it.

FreeNAS runs from CD, saving its configuration to a floppy, and it took only about 20 minutes to get the whole thing configured and running on my home network. The system can also be configured to run from HDD or Flash Memory. Once booted, it all runs in a 64Mb RAM DIsk (apparantly)

It uses web based admin tools so once configured, it doesn't need a monitor, keyboard or mouse.

It looks pretty good to me. I'm now looking for a very low power consuming PC to have it running permanently for video/still images and music files storage.

I have had a Linksys NSLU2 NAS running for a couple of years now - more as an ethernet->USB bridge for my PVR than a dedicated file server, although it's designed as a fileserver.

It's a bit smaller than a paperback book, runs on <10W, has 2USB and one ethernet port and the firmware is Linux based. If you're a techy you can replace the stock firmware with a much fuller Linux installation and have it do all sorts of stuff. As it comes out of the box, it will share hard disks plugged into the USB ports across the network and (I think) printers.

These things are remarkably cheap - mine was about £40. You can also get ones with built in wi-fi for a bit more. I expect that something like this, along with an external USB enclosure for your 160gb disk (~£10?) might be the best solution for you.

Robin

Just a few thoughts

Without a Monitor/Keyboard/Mouse is your old PC consuming that much power?

Do you have options in the PC bios to shut down unused peripherals, ports or maybe even throttle back the processor?

Does FreeNas allow the machine to be woken up from a low power standby state?

A more modern processor based machine should be more efficient power wise but the cost is likely to rival that of a purpose built device.

Steve

I use NAS all the time

At work we have two "Snap Appliance" Snap servers running RAID 5. Very nice systems, but a couple of grand each.
I just bought a Freecom Network Drive Pro:
http://www.freecom.com/ecproduct_detail.asp?ID=3705&CatID=8020&sCatID=11...

Runs on a Linux kernel. Not RAID, but excellent as a general storage area with shed loads of space. Couldn't argue with the price either (bought it from Dabs who had an offer in December).

HTH!
Matt

I doubt it's much less than with them, the monitor would take most, kbd & mouse next to nothing.

I don't know, I'll check.

I think so, but haven't tried it. It will allow the drives to go to sleep after a period of inactivity, but I don't know if the PC will go to sleep.

Cheap, or free, is my main criteria. A new PC is not an option for me. I would be willing to shell out (no pun intended, this is a UNIX/LINUX box) a few shekels for a very low power system that'll hold 4 disks which I'll configure in RAID 5.

The only problem I've found so far with FreeNAS is that when I shut the NAS box down, it doesn't turn off the power, "Press any key to reboot" is the message I get. Not a major issue for me, but might be for others wishing to try it.

Thanks for your comments.

Thanks Matt, the freecom box might be an option for me. Low power consumption is the key for me.

SOunds cheap enough, and certainly not much power used.

Thanks for the info.

Some of you might be interested in this:

http://www.lacie.com/uk/products/product.htm?pid=10953

Not as cheap as reusing some old hardware or the Freecom drive but it has a "SAFE mode" which mirrors data on both disk (Raid 1). I’ve had mine for a couple of weeks, it’s easy to setup, looks good on the desk and so far no complaints.

Nyami

I happened to have a plug-in power meter lying around, so I just tried it on the NLSU2 to find the real power - with a memory stick in one of the USB ports (no hard disks) it draws 4-5W. The PSU is rated 5V 2A. Theoretically each of the 2 USB ports should be able to supply 500ma @5V, which would take to total power draw pretty much up to 10W.

If power is really important to you, you might want to consider getting a laptop style hard disk rather than a desktop one, as the power draw will be considerably lower.

Robin

Just don't forget the considerable price difference!

Especially since Peter says he already has a 160Gb drive going spare ... Depending on where you put this sort of thing, noise can be an issue too.

Robin

I've actually got 3 160Gb drives, 2 are in unused firewire enclosures (Vista fails miserably to use them).

I've used 1 for my initial trial. I'm planning on putting all 3 into this box.

I just need to decide whether to use JBOD RAID or RAID 5. I haven't decided yet whether capacity or data security is more important. I've used RAID 1 and 5 extensively in my career, but never JBOD. As I understand it, if 1 of the JBOD array drives fails, I lose everything that's on the entire array. Correct?

If that is the case, how does this differ from RAID 0 where array size = disk 1 + disk 2 + . . . + disk n?

Looks like JBOD is spanning - multiple drives in one partition, rather than RAID 0 which is striped. http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/raid/levels/jbod.htm. I wouldn't put data you care about on either, since if any one of the disks fails, it's gone.

With 3 disks you could go for Raid5 quite nicely, or Raid1 with the 3rd being an offsite backup, since RAID is no more resistant to fire or theft than boring single disk drives

The NSLU2 doesn't support RAID in the default firmware, but apparently you can if you reflash to a complete linux OS (http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/FAQ/RAID). I'm sure that some of the more expensive NAS hardware devices would support this out-of-the box.

Robin

Having done a little research since my last post I discovered that my understanding of RAID0 was not correct. A 10Gb + 30Gb drive in RAID0 = 20Gb striped array. It's JBOD that adds drive capacities. The above drives in JBOD would = 40Gb.

I've decided to use tried and trusted RAID5 with my 3 disks. Software RAID admittedly, which will impact on CPU performance, but it'll do for now whilst I have a play with it. It'll be purely for backup at the moment, I'll progress to my goal of a low power media server eventually.

Fire/theft isn't much of an issue (it's difficult to type with fingers crossed) because I have essentially a 2 storey building with no access between the two floors other than separate outside locked steel doors. It's all concrete and brick too, nothing to catch fire. We have had burglaries around here where PC's have been lifted but to my knowledge, nobody has had their underhouse storage area broken into unless it's obviously living quarters. My security arrangements are sufficient to deter even the most determined thief, or at least good enough to encourage them to move on to easier prey.

Possibly our biggest threats are flooding and earthquake. We do get the occasional tremour, nothing serious as yet. Flooding happens about once a year during spring but everything I have under the house is on pallets or benches and I have a live sump/pump arrangement to get rid of the water at the rate of 600 litres a minute.

I'm rambling a bit here, back to building my RAID 5 NAS box.

Cheers,

I used to use NASLite, since at the time it had a better feature set than FreeNAS (havn't looked recently so either or both have probably been upgraded since)

It is a very similar idea, boots from CD or USB stick (latter recommended since it leaves another IDE channel free for a HDD) and just shares all the HDDs it finds across the network.

The system worked great with both Windows (samba) and NFS networking, but it had one flaw.

If the server was not shut down properly, about 30% of the time it would loose the partition table on at least one hard drive. I could never identify why this happened, and although other users reported not having the problem it occured on all 4 machines with which I used the software (different CPUs, motherboards and chipsets). On each occasion I was able to recover all my data by plugging the hard drives into a machine running full fledged Linux, where they would mount properly, but this was a hassle and a worry I didn't need.

I now run a machine on Ubuntu 7.04 server edition which I have configured to do broadly speaking the same thing, with the added bonus of automatic timed backups, and in the event of a power cut I don't loose all my data.

I would strongly recommend you test any NAS system you impliment in all conceivable error states before you trust it with vital data.