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About LinkBacksRead more.Four-bay NAS available in desktop or rackmount flavours for home or small business users.
Read more.Four-bay NAS available in desktop or rackmount flavours for home or small business users.
How about a feature pitting a home built file server vs a NAS like this.
I guess the simplest things to cover would be things like cost, power draw, transfer speeds etc...
If you wanted to be flash you could compare different options for the home built NAS, such as FreeNAS or even installing a ubuntu server on it.
These NAS's always seem overpriced for what they are. I've been meaning to look into a good home-built set up, but I've always had in mind that you could put something together that would take at least 4 drives for about £200. (assuming you don't use a hardware raid card). Actually, A third option of a homebuilt but with hardware raid card would get extra points
you could put and Atom based PC together and use FreeNAS for about that kind of money but its a pain in the arse to do when yu could just buy one of these.
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The hard part if building a PC that is a similar size to a NAS. You end of with expensive mini-ITX boards, struggling for RAID cards, and a decent case is near impossible to find.Originally Posted by GaryRW
These NAS's always seem overpriced for what they are. I've been meaning to look into a good home-built set up, but I've always had in mind that you could put something together that would take at least 4 drives for about £200. (assuming you don't use a hardware raid card). Actually, A third option of a homebuilt but with hardware raid card would get extra points
That said, I still think they are over priced generally.
Then don't use hardware raid cards. The NAS boxes don't.
Well my custom built unraid box cost £100 for motherboard, processor and memory. Case would have been £60 if not repurposed and the licence was £40.
so for £200 without disks I got an all singing machine expandable upto 7TB or so (6x 1.5tb disks if required).
As I'm a hacker its actually running a full version of Slackware so it easily runs everything I want including 2 virtual machines for some windows programs I need.
Power consumption is also just 45w raising to 60w if I'm reading from all the disks.
Funkstar, I would question why do you need to a case the same size as your typical NAS. Personally bigger and more expandable would be better?
Last edited by eek; 10-09-2009 at 09:45 AM.
If I was looking at buying one of these at the mo I'd rather save around £64 (over the article price) and buy the Drobo (currently coming with the droboshare network adapter) for a couple of pennies shy of £356 (it does look rather impressive when in operation I have to say).
I looked at the drobo but there are enough rumours around the web of total data lose that I wouldn't want to risk it.
The core reason for me going the unraid route is to have some redundancy. Unless I lose two disks at the same time I can recover my data. Even if that does occur I won't lose everything just the data on the disks that died.
I know that, what I was really meaning I guess is it is often difficult to get hold of RAID cards with more than 4 ports for decent money. Then you need to use the PCI or PCIe slot on the motherboard too, making the system bigger than many of these boxes straight away.
It does all depend what is most important to you. Convenience and size, or performance and value for money. Just saying that NAS boxes are expensive compared to PCs is only half the story. Yes they are, but they also have distinct advantages too.
I used to have two N5200s so I know their limitations. I now have a full tower quad code with two hardware RAID cards. The price/performance ratio is much better with my server equivalent to 8x N8800s really) but it is much larger, more complex and can be a pain in the ass to administer at times.
In short, both approaches have their uses.
When I had my N5200s, they fit in a couple of small cupboards perfectly. I didn't have the space for a full server at the time.
Now I do, so I built one. Keep meaning to write up the details of my system and setup.
Which is why I think an article pointing out the pro's & con's of the options would be interesting
Hopefully I didn't give the impression in my first post that I thought the NAS's aren't a valid product. I can certainly see that the ease of use factor would be important for a lot of people. It's quite sad, but I enjoy tinkering with this sort of stuff. Size and noise would no doubt be important for some, though not for me as I plan to put it in the loft. etc...
Funkstar - I'm curious as to what continuing admin problems you had? what was the setup that caused those problems? (EDIT - sorry I've just read your post and you explained clearly it was hardware RAID cards, just obviously not clearly enough for me...) I had in mind just using FreeNAS or something similar, and my impression was that setup could be a hassle, but it wasn't something that required a huge amount of maintenance.
(I think performance may not be top notch with FreeNAS as it would be software RAID, but then I think a lot of "consumer priced" NAS's aren't great on the performance front as they don't have hardware RAID either.)
To be fair, my setup problems are more to do with other services my server runs, rather than the simple file sharing. But I wouldn't have these problems with a NAS because I couldn't run these services, and I can't tinker with it quite so much. I really think I need to look into moving to Server 2008 and running some virtualisation, that way I can shut one 'server' down without effecting anything else.
As for the RAID cards, LSI cards and their management software might be a little daunting to use, but they are awesome pieces of kit.
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