Home NAS recommendations?

[Tyler Aviss]

On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 6:41 PM, Giles Orr <gilesorr-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On 1 February 2010 12:17, Stephen W. Clarke <stephenc-wtWqQT8woy8 at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>> I've used a Synology Disk Station at home for the last 4 years.
>> It's linux inside and supports NFS. Price point is pretty good too.
>>
>> These are the specs from Synology:
>> http://www.synology.com/us/products/DS110j/spec.php
>>
>> This is the link to the unit for sale through CC
>> http://canadacomputers.com/index.php?do=ShowProduct&cmd=pd&pid=027628&cid=NTW.791
>>
>> Stephen
>>
>>> I'm looking for a home NAS - essentially I want a glorified hard drive
>>> enclosure that has a RJ-45 port on it.  Unfortunately, I think that my
>>> ideal unit doesn't exist, but I thought I'd ask.  I'd like it to hold
>>> a single hard drive: dual HDs would mean higher reliability (assuming
>>> RAID 0) but also higher cost, higher power consumption, probably more
>>> noise ... and I don't need the extra reliability.  Here's where it
>>> gets interesting though: I'd like it to support NFS, preferably v4.
>>> Of course the vast majority of these units are based on Samba, and
>>> support only VFAT and Windows-style permissions.  I'll live with that
>>> if I have to.  I have no interest at the moment in building my own out
>>> of an old PC.
>>>
>>> I would have preferred to purchase a Vantec unit as they're
>>> recommended here and I've had good experiences with them, but their
>>> only NAS unit is IDE only, which strikes me as very odd.
>>> Recommendations would be much appreciated.
>
> I looked at this in Futureshop:
> http://www.futureshop.ca/catalog/proddetail.asp?sku_id=0665000FS10135506&logon=&langid=EN
>
> Interesting (although probably not very good) item.  The packaging
> reminded me of why I never want to use FAT32 again: "File size limit:
> 4GB."  No DVD images?!  I had forgotten about that.  No, I don't think
> I want to live with that limitation.  So right there I lost a huge
> swath of options.  In fact, with the limitations I imposed (one drive,
> no home-built) the Synology unit appears to be the only choice.  It's
> more than I wanted to pay, but it's the only way to get what I want.
>
> ext3, NFS, Gig-E.  Nice.
>
> Thanks to everyone who responded, it got me really thinking about it -
> but a special thanks to Steven for the Synology suggestion.
>
> --
> Giles
> http://www.gilesorr.com/
> gilesorr-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
> --
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Unfortunately FAT32 is one of those legacy areas of crud that seem to
just keep hanging on. More things are switching to NTFS (or an
internal 'nix filesystem like ext3 etc), but FAT isn't dead yet.

Now for something that does gig-E and supports larger
drives/partitions (up to 2TB) /w NFS, here's the cheaper model of what
we have at work (a TS-639):
  http://www.qnap.com/pro_detail_feature.asp?p_id=136
  http://www.qnap.com/pro_detail_software.asp?p_id=136

Still, the power/noise for multiple disks isn't that big... and it
sure sucks when you have a few hundred GB's or even a TB of data go
poof and need to be restored.


-- 
Tyler Aviss
Systems Support
LPIC/LPIC-2

“Even enemies will help each other if they are together on a boat that
is in trouble. ” – Sun Tzu
--
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