Diy 1tb Nas Drive

[greenalien]

I was looking for a reasonably priced Network-attached Storage (NAS) drive but wasn't happy with the cost and size generally available, so I decided to put my own together. The housing came from eBay My World - xcshop - it was a GIGABIT DUAL NAS housing, capable of taking 2 x 1TB SATA drives, and I paid £83.04 at auction, plus £14.50 P&P. I bought a 1TB Samsung drive from Novatech Samsung Spin Point F1 SATAII NCQ 1TB 32Mb Cache Hard Disk Drive <8.9ms 7200rpm - OEM : sam-s100s2
- free delivery - and both items arrived by post in a few days.
Fitting the drive into the housing took 5 minutes, then the drive was connected to my home network and powered up. The drive takes a minute or two to complete the boot up process. The CD supplied with the housing has a detailed manual showing all the configuration options - for now, I've just set the drive up as a simple, single drive but will add a second drive and reconfigure it as RAID-1 in a couple of weeks if the housing proves reliable. Formatting the 1TB drive to ext3 format took about 40 minutes, and then it was a simple matter to set it up via the WEB interface, map it as a network drive and start loading data.
Has anyone else tried this solution? I'm happy so far!

[Cosworth]

No but it sounds very interesting.
I'm currently running three computers on a home network and I'm beginning to find out that it's going to cost me a small fortune to get sufficient external drives to back up each individual machine. This could be a cheap alternative as 2Tb should be sufficient for all three of us, as I'm sure much of the data saved is duplicated over and over again needlessly. I know there's being safe but still, who needs for example a music file stored on each machine internally and then again on externals a further three times.
I'm certainly not going to go through each file on all the machines to check, but a single main storage for all could be the answer. Good idea - Thanks

N.B
Just noticed the item is from Germany does this mean having to buy another power supply?

[greenalien]

just noticed the item is from Germany does this mean having to buy another power supply?

No, the PSU is a small switch-mode 12V 4A job that works OK (so far!!) on UK mains. The detachable Mains lead had a Euro plug on, but is just a standard IEC lead, so I substituted one that I had already with a UK plug on. I'll hang on to the original lead just in case something goes wrong and I have to send it back.

[greenalien]

Update - I've had this up and running for a week now, a few things that might be of interest :
1) When trying to load large numbers of files onto the NAS in one go, e.g. trying to copy an entire 320 GB drive, the NAS box 'freezes' unpredictably, and needs to be powered off by unplugging it before restarting. This problem does not occur when copying smaller numbers of files, and could just be a 'feature' of the Windows 'copy' process being unable to keep track of a lot of files in one go.
2) Streaming MP3 files to a laptop via Wi-Fi LAN was always one of the reasons for this project. The drive features DLNA, which is the standard network streaming protocol. This works fine with Windows Media Player 11, so I was able to enjoy some music in my garden last night - although the laptop batteries only lasted a couple of hours! However, I was unable to get Winamp to work without intermittent drop-outs, so I guess Winamp doesn't support DLNA. If anyone has managed to get Winamp to work for streaming MP3s via Wi-Fi, I'd like to know how they did it!

[arthurleung]

Update - I've had this up and running for a week now, a few things that might be of interest :
1) When trying to load large numbers of files onto the NAS in one go, e.g. trying to copy an entire 320 GB drive, the NAS box 'freezes' unpredictably, and needs to be powered off by unplugging it before restarting. This problem does not occur when copying smaller numbers of files, and could just be a 'feature' of the Windows 'copy' process being unable to keep track of a lot of files in one go.
2) Streaming MP3 files to a laptop via Wi-Fi LAN was always one of the reasons for this project. The drive features DLNA, which is the standard network streaming protocol. This works fine with Windows Media Player 11, so I was able to enjoy some music in my garden last night - although the laptop batteries only lasted a couple of hours! However, I was unable to get Winamp to work without intermittent drop-outs, so I guess Winamp doesn't support DLNA. If anyone has managed to get Winamp to work for streaming MP3s via Wi-Fi, I'd like to know how they did it!

The copy problem is quite commonly for low-end NAS. Perhaps try transferring file through FTP instead of windows network drive. Small files don't have that problem because you're sending less bits with bunch of small files than a few large files.