Home NAS Recommendations

[Christopher Browne]

On Sun, Jun 27, 2010 at 9:09 PM, William O'Higgins Witteman
<william.ohiggins-H217xnMUJC0sA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> I am looking at these two devices - a Linksys Media Hub or a WD MyBook:
>
> http://www.canadacomputers.com/product_info.php?cPath=27_357&item_id=023031
> http://www.canadacomputers.com/product_info.php?cPath=15_213_603&item_id=031508
>
> I would welcome any other suggestions or caveats.  Thanks!

I've been using a WD MyBook "World Edition" reasonably happily for a
couple of years now for this purpose.

I had to "root" it in order to get it to speak NFS, but that wasn't
troublesome at all.

http://mybookworld.wikidot.com/hacks-and-howto
http://martin.hinner.info/mybook/sshaccess.php

I installed more stuff on it, but the only service I added in that I
actually run is an NTP server.  While one could, in principle, run
databases, web servers, and SCM repositories on it, that seems a tad
excessive for a rather light-weight ARM chip with not too much memory.

I was notably amused to see a compiler for Go! as one of the options.

Definitely not high-powered, in any sense, but it has certainly
successfully "just worked" for me.

I have periodically debated getting new hardware; the only thing I've
gotten, of late, was a refurb T43 laptop.  I have thought about the
idea of putting together a "NAS box," but resisted temptation thus
far.  I very much like the fact that my WD "MyBook" is a mighty simple
appliance that *doesn't* have wild amounts of additional functionality
that I need to worry about configuring or further backing up.

1.  The Cool Alternative would be to spend a fair bit of money on a
perhaps-little, perhaps-towering box with a bunch of disk drives that
would be a *way* lot more powerful.  (Hey, I haven't bought new
hardware in a while, so this would be certain to be considerable
multiples more powerful than ANY other machine I have :-)!)

But I've been holding off, on the speculation that perhaps the
preferable answer is to...

2.  grab another 2TB/4TB little NAS box

There's another option, but one that Hugh's comments suggest to me may
be one to deprecate, namely...

3.  grab a 2TB drive and connect it via USB to the existing MyBook unit.

I'm suspicious that performance will be pretty terrible, and I think I
might actually care about that.  It seems to me that it would be
better to spring the extra $100 or so for #2.

Some of my thinking is a bit Plan 9-influenced (hence making the Go!
availability on MyBook a shade more ironic...); one of the ideas there
was that you'd have 3 kinds of machines around:
a) Compute servers
b) File servers
c) Display servers

Oddly enough, hardware has gotten sufficiently powerful that, at least
at the home level, there doesn't seem to be a need for an especially
powerful "compute server."  Perhaps the heaviest computational loads
fall out of processing music and video, which pretty much *has* to
take place at the "display server" layer.

Anyways, I've been reasonably happy with my WD MyBook.
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