Home NAS recommendations?

[Giles Orr]

On 3 February 2010 22:47, William Park <opengeometry-FFYn/CNdgSA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 01, 2010 at 11:41:12AM -0500, Giles Orr wrote:
>> 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.
>
> Whenever you want network, you end up dealing with OS issues, since it's
> the OS which provides the network layer.  Have you considered
> 2-component solution:
>    1. USB/eSATA harddisk -- like single/dual/quad units from
>        Thermaltake ($50 for dual dock), Vantec ($60 for dual dock),
>        MediaSonic ($150 for 4-bay enclosure, $250 for RAID enclosure).
>    2. nettop -- like Acer Revo ($250 Linux version from
>        canadacomputers.com).
>
> Network access would be provided by whatever OS is installed on
> "nettop".  This way, you chose OS and harddisk arrangement, and still
> not "build your own".

I gave a lot of thought to exactly that solution: a Revo and an
external SATA HD (the Revo internal HD is a bit small, thus the
external).  But it would have cost substantially more and been more
complex, neither of which I liked.  The level of control would be
higher, but that comes - again - with higher complexity, which I don't
want.  Simplicity is good.

I've bought (but not set up yet) the Synology unit.  Maybe in a year
or so I'll be buying a Revo, but I think this will be a satisfactory
solution.  My next purchase is probably going to have to be a gig-E
switch and several Cat-6 cables so I can actually get decent speed for
file transfers ...

-- 
Giles
http://www.gilesorr.com/
gilesorr-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
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