Right just want to check opinions of people before I spend some money.

Currnetly I have 4 pc's in the house (wired network), some set up running raid 1 to provide a degree of protection and some set up as single hdd.

I am planning to buy a Netgear readynas duo and put in 2 normal 1TB hard drive on raid 1. This box has selected online backup so photos and other items acn be set to backup automatically.

I then want to use this box as single file storage so nothing is stored on the pc's.

Does this all sound sensible or are there better options plus one of the pc's is a media centre, so will the data speed over the network be sufficent for this to work?

You got GigE?

Should be ok, Netgear kit is good. I'll be watching this

I have a Netgear Readynas Duo. I'm very happy with it, it replaced an aged Linksys NSLU2. It has some great features and there are some addons you can download from www.readynas.com, I've installed an NZB client for starters, and there is also a built in torrent client.

The power saving features sealed it for me, you can set it to turn off at (say) midnight and power on again at (say) 8am, also there are disk spindown features that I use.

I have a Samsung 1.5TB ecogreen in mine and plan to add another to give RAID1.

Noise levels are low (to my ear), though it could be intrusive if you installed it in your bedroom (some do!). Gigabit ethernet gives good read/write performance, I can usuall exchange files at around 250mbps, way short of the theoretical maximum of 1000mbps, but not bad for consumer grade kit.

2 of my work colleagues bought Readynas Duo's after I got mine and I would buy another if I needed another NAS.

Edited 1 May, 201016 yr by Dodgy

You got GigE?

Should be ok, Netgear kit is good. I'll be watching this

No, but I need a new switch anyway and the cabling should be okay??? Just have to but a 1000 pci card in the media pc, luckily is thas a spare slot.

putting a gigE card in a 32bit PCI (not express) slot is a waste of money. As soon as any other PCI device (there are loads in there) try and use the PCI bus, you won't get decent throughput so might as well have not bothered.

putting a gigE card in a 32bit PCI (not express) slot is a waste of money. As soon as any other PCI device (there are loads in there) try and use the PCI bus, you won't get decent throughput so might as well have not bothered.

But you wouldnt get anywhere near gigE speeds from a home nas setup anyway!

Plus any reasonable spec PC in the last 5 years usually has onboard GigE built into the northbridge.

Id be interested to see the performance of these nas devices these days.. coming from a NLSU2 and also a xtreamer.. they struggle to keep up with 100meg, let alone gig.

But you wouldnt get anywhere near gigE speeds from a home nas setup anyway!

Plus any reasonable spec PC in the last 5 years usually has onboard GigE built into the northbridge.

Id be interested to see the performance of these nas devices these days.. coming from a NLSU2 and also a xtreamer.. they struggle to keep up with 100meg, let alone gig.

If the box has a few HDD's you could get circa 100MB/s from the discs, so if it has a half decent processor in it would be pumping out 800Mbits, plus the etherrnet overhead and you're talking 1Gbit/s

My point was, there is little point adding a card if your PC doesn't already have one, as you'll just be wasting money.

If your box also has a PCIex1 then you would be able to put a card in there and make much more use of it.

Edited 3 May, 201016 yr by cheezemonkhai

Good points, having checked the PC does have gigabit ethernet built in. Reading cat 5 network cable is good for 1 gigabit??

So back to the original question will the speed of the network to the NAS and the NAS be sufficent to allow the media centre to store remotely?

I then want to use this box as single file storage so nothing is stored on the pc's.

Dont expect to use it to store iPhoto / Picasa / PSE / PSP libraries you may ever want to edit. NAS protocols are just too slow for this type of use.

Dont expect to use it to store iPhoto / Picasa / PSE / PSP libraries you may ever want to edit. NAS protocols are just too slow for this type of use.

Not quite true as it's not really the protocol that's an issue, more that there is a latency involved moving around which means real time editing is a bit slow.

In terms of doing what the OP want's you can get around this by mapping the NAS as a drive, then having a folder in that drive mapped as synchronised.

This way it will be stored on your PC, but when you shut down it will be synchronised with the mapped NAS drive.

Well that would work, caching and all.

Would not work too well in a multi user (or device) env though. File locking is still going to hurt assuming it is something that can be done.

I remember trying to do NFS over iSCSI (over IP duh) over Infiniband, and that ran like a lame hedgehog.

Sorry to jump in & hijack, but what is the technically minded view of the DROBO FS Here ?

Looks very good, almost too good to be true.

Having done some more reading I am having doubts.

I see no issue with the network throughput and I think the NAS should be faster enough, however, from what I can tell it is a pig to get media centre to record to a NAS, persumably to avoid netwok issues.

Most people seem to set up a script to auto move data across. My main reason for trying to do this is provide backup and media for all pcs at a low power useage.

I have always liked the look of Drobo, but they are expensive.

So they call it BeyondRAID....

If they are doing all of that without using RAID and without infringing anyone's patents then I'm Welsh.

Bore da!

Bore da!

What boyo :p

I umm-ed and aah-ed for ages over NAS -I wanted something to replace my old Ubuntu box, sharing disk via Samba. It worked, but it was noisy having it running all the time. I had a look at the Netgear range, but it also seemed noisy. A friend of mine has an LG NAS box, which seemed to do what I wanted, so I went with one of those. It's very quiet, pretty fast, and I have 2X1Tb drives in RAID1 configuration, plus a Blu-ray drive for backup. the software takes a bit of understanding, and the manual is rubbish, but I'd recommende it otherwise.

Phil

I am using a Netgear / Infrant ReadyNAS NV+, with 4 x 750GB sata disks in a raid-x (raid 5, but self expanding when you add larger disks, can be one at a time). It sits in my loft, so does not seem too bad for noise levels.

ftp, samba, https, torrent client, ssh access, etc. 3 USB ports, connected to my UPS so in the event of a powercut and UPS dropping to 10% of battery capacity it shutsdown in a controlled fashion. Email alerting for powercuts (it emails when I am at work - switch and routers on a UPS too)

Windows Home Server?

This seems like quite a good little unit based on Atom:

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2010/04/27/review_storage_acer_easystore_h340/

Or you could build your own like I did.

Shared folders for each user and a backup image of every PC should a hard disk fail in one of them, burn a recovery CD off and they are back up and running (allegedly, i've never had to use this feature)

I can be streaming media to my PS3 whilst also uploading media to the server without any stuttering.

You can try it free for 90 days if you have a spare PC:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/windowshomeserver/default.mspx

I've had a Netgear Duo for about 18 months now, with a couple of 1TB discs in it.

Use it for work and I cannot afford it to fail.

It's been rock solid and I'm over the moon with the thing.

I've heard that Drobos (even the newer ones with an actual network connection) are slow.

Good review site that, lots of NAS listed.

I am against a server on grounds of power consumption. The dedicated NAS boxes are around 35w vs maybe 85w minimum on a server.

My NAS, as I guess with others will power down the disks when not in use for say 30 mins (user defined), so when I go to sleep till the following evening, current demands are very slow.... Fan only spins at high speed when required.

I keep wondering a WHS, but I am waiting to see WHS2 will offer. There again I fancy something more like SBS2003 at home but that would draw even more power :-(

Good review site that, lots of NAS listed.

I am against a server on grounds of power consumption. The dedicated NAS boxes are around 35w vs maybe 85w minimum on a server.

I think you might be a bit optimistic there with 35W if you use more than 2 disks.

My reasons for saying this are:

- 10 to 15W spin up power per drive (you can get around this to a point with staggered spin up)

- 80% efficient PSU at a guess

- Circa 7W operating power for the drives

- CPU and cooling will all require power too.

so 4 drives = 28W just for the running drives + CPU + RAID hardware if not done in the CPU + any other bits on the system board + power losses + cooling

and you need 21W + 15W to allow for the last drive to spin up anyway.

I think something like a via eden or atom or even a low power mobile core2 would fit in the less than 100W bracket and do a lot more than just NAS.

I have a GF9300 motherboard (closest thing to a laptop board), with a C2Q 2.6, 8GB RAM and 4 x 1TB drives in it.

It runs at just under 100w. (admittedly ~130 when starting up)

In it's original spec with 2 x 500GB drives it was ~80w.

It concurrently runs 3 instances of Windows (each for a different purpose), FreeNAS, and a remote access server (like Citrix) all under virtualbox.

It is not noisy, hot or too hungry.

Nice though NAS boxes are, they are a point solution that do one thing well (NAS) and other things very badly (torrent for example).