Looking for NAS suggestions

[BrownPaw]

Hey folks,

I'm really interested in a consumer-grade NAS to back up all of my photos and music, but also to act as a DLNA server for my other networked audio/video peripherals. I'm interested in a two-bay in a RAID1 configuration with 2x2TB drives on my gigabit network. However, I'm having a hard time dissecting the information on some of the various options. Can anyone shed some light?

The one that looks the most feature-rich, is at a great price ($109.98 after rebate on Amazon currently), and has a fairly large community behind it is the D-Link DNS-323. However, most 2TB drives nowadays use 4k sectors, and while it is possible to align them correctly if running them in this box non-RAID, there doesn't seem to be a way out there to do it while running in RAID. Of course this leads to terrible performance as the drive begins to fill up.

Another option is the NETGEAR ReadyNAS Duo, which seems to have a smaller community but many of the same features as the D-Link above. It also has a recent firmware update that states that 4k support has been added, but that the "expected outcome is that your performance with 4K sector drives should be no worse than with 512-byte sector drives" which doesn't seem too confident to me. The box is also around $80 more expensive, and the network throughput on this model is supposed to be pretty atrocious anyway (14MB/sec even on gigabit).

A few others have come up as well, but they all seem to have 4k support issues. So I guess the question is... does anyone have an opinion on these two or any other consumer level (ideally sub-$200 for the box) NAS boxes or anything? Anyone have the DNS-323 and able to align 4k sectors in RAID1? Anything that anyone can add would be helpful.

Edit: Should note that this will be used in a Mac and PC environment. Evidently some people have problems with Macs and the DNS-323.

 

[nanaki333]

don't get any of those ~$120 NAS' with HDD included. they're garbage. i've gone through a lot of buffalo, lacie, etc and all have failed in less than a year. i eventually just bought a cheap barebone kit from newegg (case, cpu, mobo, psu) for $79, put some memory in it, bought drives, threw freeNAS on it, and been running without failure for almost a year and a half now.

i bought my father-in-law a thecus N4100PRO for x-mas, so we'll see how that stacks up.

 

[JimKiler]

If you did not need a dual hard drive setup I would suggest a My Book World Edition from WD which I have and like. I did not want RAID since I have another 1TB drive in my PC and sync between the two.

It works great as a drive on MAC and PC and supports DLNA which allows me to stream HD videos to my PS3. It does not allow upgrading the drive however. But the price is great at $200 for 1TB on the WD store so I am sure it is cheaper elsewhere.

 

[Lorne]

Agree, build your own, Even if you pay a few bux more you will thank yourself for it when it comes to upgrading in the future.

The bads.
All the pre made NAS I have come across all have some inharent weekness wether it be extremely low speeds across a Gbps NIC, Cannot upgrade to larger drives due to controller versions or OS versions or even connector.
Theres also the issue of not being able to directly figure what problems are wrong with it due to no VGA connector when it wont respond over the network.

Only reason to buy one is that you dont know how to install an OS and dont want to deal with a friend who can.

The goods to building your own.
Use the junk you acumulated around home and save money.
Start from scratch and build a cheap I3 or AMD X2 and low volt them and save just as much on the power bill and have 10x the CPU power at hand when and if needed.
Always dynamicly upgradable.

I suggest when you buy ether to get a small UPS.

 

[BrownPaw]

Thanks for the suggestions. I definitely don't have a problem installing an OS or putting together a system... been building computers for decades now. However, I am ashamed to admit that I have very little experience with Linux or Unix... Except that when someone says something will be easy that it never is, and you always have to resort to combing through 10 years of forum posts to find your issue, put in a bunch of obscure CLI commands, and then have to recompile something (which never actually recompiles correctly)... lol. And yes, I know that FreeNAS is based on FreeBSD which technically isn't Unix, but it's called "Unix-like" so I can only imagine.

I had run across it before but I guess I just wasn't sure if FreeNAS was that mature of a project to trust my data to. Is it pretty full featured, works pretty easily, etc?

I have two old boxes around (one with an Athlon XP3000+ and one with a P4 3.0ghz) but I don't think either of them have SATA. Would putting in a PCI RAID controller create too much of a bottleneck? I also imagine that these are pretty power inefficient processors... neither of these boxes have gigabit either, so I'd have to get a card for that too (the rest of my network is gigabit, yes).

I was looking at some Shuttle barebones kits and they're not too expensive. Some of them are even cheaper and use Atom processors -- does anyone have any experience with this? Would an Atom be good enough for a NAS? Honestly I don't think I'd be doing anything more processor intensive than streaming 720p over DLNA, and MAYBE the possibility of a second, non-HD stream. At least the Atom wouldn't use too much power.

Any thoughts on any of this?

Thanks!

 

[Cr0nJ0b]

Personally, I just went right to a simple linux build like ubuntu and did software raid with a few drives. It's fairly easy once you understand mdadm and some other tools and I thought it was more flexible than the freenas type solutions...faster too. I tested freeNAS and Ubuntu on an ESX4 setup and the freenas was like half as fast as the ubuntu. And I really had a hard time understanding the configurations and setup options for freenas....but that's me.

For an off the shelf option, I have ReadyNAS from Netgear, which I would HIGHLY recommend for someone that just wants to put 4 drives into a case and have it protected.