I'm looking for a NAS with a decent number of protocols and that has RAID, can anybody suggest anything? Thanks
Multi-drive NAS boxes can be very expensive, especially ones that do RAID. You would probably be better off building a basic PC with a RAID card and sticking Linux on it.
Like Sam said. Some of those NAS boxes can be very expensive. You can also find some cheap ones as well, but they might not be up to par depending on your needs. Going out and buying a server/pc and setting it up yourself could cost a lot to. What I would do is find a NAS box or if you decide to build a server/PC, get something that has a really good NIC - something like Gigabit speed. Your are going to want a nice RAID controller as well. Something that at least supports RAID1, RAID1+0, and RAID5. You also want one that has it's own cache module as well as it's own processor. I'd at least roll with a Dual-Core processor as well. You can probably get away with just a one to two gigs of RAM - I'd throw four in that baby! You don't have to go with a RAID controller like I specified, but something like I suggested will give you better chances of not having any data corruption, as well as not having to worry about any drives failing on you. Yes, RAID does give you redundancy, but if you don't have a card with a built in cache module, you could get screwed. Worst case scenario, you're writing data to some drives, either the card fails or your PC/server cuts off. Now all that data is lost and you have to start all over. With a built in cache module, the RAID card will remember where it left off and begin writing the data back to the drives. Check out Newegg for some pre-built NAS boxes, or go to HP's website and look around at what their storage boxes have in them to give you an idea of what to build. Windows server or any flavor of Linux should work fine for you. NAS - Newegg Hewlett Packard - storage
Motherboards with gigabit NICs are practically for nothing these days, you can slap in a cheap CPU like an E1400 or E2180, 1GB of value DDR2 would probably suffice, 2 if you can get it cheap - it needn't cost a lot.
Yea, but the main thing you want to be concerned about is a really good RAID controller card. That E2180 would be nice as well.
I have the netgear sc101 nas, I paid 39.95 for the enclosure, and I just stuck some spare ide drives I had lying around. You can stick up to 2 IDE drives. It has a built-in cooling fan. The hard drives have to be formatted in a non-standard file system but didn't find any problems in using that file system, every computer accessing the NAS has to have the netgear software installed. It's always plugged in 24/7 for the past 9 months with no problems and works everytime. It's fast enough to record mpeg2 video streamed to it from my media center computer. For the price it's an excellent deal and has been rock solid for me. It's also has a very small footprint. http://www.netgear.com/Products/Storage/NetworkStorage/SC101.aspx
Not bad for that price, but I'd go with something that supports SATA, RAID, and a faster transfer rate.
Exactly. And if you have multiple users on the box, I want some form of redundancy. If I have a lot of important files on there, I don't want anyone tearing up my drives - damn porn addicts!
500GB of files at 10Mbit (10.5MB/s typical max transfer rate) - 13.5 hours 500GB of files at Gigabit (72MB/s typical max transfer rate) - 2 hours.
The NAS is going to be slow no matter what you do. For me it's just a central loacation where I can backup files and retrieve files at my leisure from any of my computers connected to the LAN. Incidently the sc101 can mirror the 2 hard drives, in case you lose one the other one will still have the data. The speed of the sc101 is the same you get from transfering data from 2 LAN connected computers, I doubt the $400.00 dollar NAS box will be worth the extra money for the small increase in speed. In a business setting it might be worth it, if all the other hardware was also rated at 1gb. For heavy duty fast file transfer nothing beats a usb2 external drive.
jony - it isn't small, it's six times... We transfer a lot of data by network in our student house, and the vast majority of it goes over 100Mbit network. The difference between it taking 20 minutes to transfer over a network versus 3 minutes if the drive was plugged in locally makes it substantially quicker to shut down both PCs, take the hard disk out, plug it in, copy the files, then reverse the procedure, than just to do it over network.
Ugh, yea. Because you have an old NIC. Your setup is for a family to use, maybe not even that. I would never buy what you got. Waste of money IMO. Also, it's not going to be slow unless you know what you are doing and obviously you don't know what you are doing because that NAS box is shotty. I'd take it out back and shoot it with a 12 gauge - that's about all it's worth. Oh yea, lmfao! Netgear?? Terrible choice. Build a real box my friend and save yourself all the trouble. If you need help, come talk to me.
