My current NAS (Infrant/Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ v1) is getting pretty full, so pretty much the only option is to pop some larger disks into it. It only supports up 2TB capacity units. so any recommendations?

At £72, this seems to be one of the cheaper units around: http://www.ebuyer.com/319641-seagate-2tb-barracuda-internal-hard-drive-st2000dm001

However as the disks are configured as raid-x (aka 5) I am not worried about outright performance of the disks, it seems that Seagate have dropped their warranty down to 1 year rather than 3?

Plus then what do I do with my 4 x 750GB units (plus a brand new spare)?

Thanks :-)

Sell the old drives to help finance the new drives ( after wiping of course )

or rebuilt the array inside a desktop if a suitable one kicking about

sunday afternoon window-shopping on ebuyer is dangerous - I NEED one of these: http://www.ebuyer.com/370704-ocz-800gb-z-drive-rm88-ssd-zd4rm88-fh-800g ...

Not sure how much I would get for 5 x 750GB disks? It is a shame I can't pick up a cheap spare NAS chassis.....

I've always been of the opinion that any hard drive WILL fail, so I buy whatever has the longest warranty so that at least when it does, I'm less likely to be out of pocket. That said, I also try and avoid buying more than 1 at the same time in case there's a bad batch, as one failure at a time I can deal with without incident, more than one maybe not. If it were me, and it weren't too expensive, I'd work out which ones have decent warranties and then buy 4 from different suppliers, but that may be overly cautious and not worth the extra charges

I've always been of the opinion that any hard drive WILL fail, so I buy whatever has the longest warranty so that at least when it does, I'm less likely to be out of pocket. That said, I also try and avoid buying more than 1 at the same time in case there's a bad batch, as one failure at a time I can deal with without incident, more than one maybe not. If it were me, and it weren't too expensive, I'd work out which ones have decent warranties and then buy 4 from different suppliers, but that may be overly cautious and not worth the extra charges

Its advisable to run all models in the raid with the same drive - firmware revision included, so Id be tempted to buy all of them from one supplier.

Advisable, but not required. Personally I've had more problems putting all my eggs in one basket than I have mixing firmware revisions on the same drives. Had a batch of 10 Western Digitals at work, all 10 failed within the 1 year warranty, within about 3 weeks of each other. Far from ideal, it's just something to think about

Not sure how much I would get for 5 x 750GB disks? It is a shame I can't pick up a cheap spare NAS chassis.....

SATA Disks? Get yourself an HP Microserver for £100 ish with the cash back and a copy of FreeNAS. It will take four disks and maybe a USB caddy to house the fifth?

Are HP Microservers that cheap? If so, I would be better flogging off the NAS with the disks as is and just replacing it with the microserver....

The NAS did come to the rescue the other day when reading a semi f**ked laptop disk, which locked up every windows machine I attached it to (via a USB dock), regardless of windows version (xp, vista & 7)

Arh yes, I spot one on ebuyer.....

http://www.ebuyer.co...back-658553-421

Now the key question is, my NAS supports DLNA streaming to my TV, I would need to replicate that feature, along samba and ftp access (http would be a bonus) - I guess I can get those from FreeNAS?

Edited 23 September, 201213 yr by mbames

Not sure how much I would get for 5 x 750GB disks? It is a shame I can't pick up a cheap spare NAS chassis.....

£125-ish (eg £25/disk - approx 1/2 new price) at rough guess

ReadyNAS v2 empty seen for circa £90

ps

This FreeNAS - anyone seen it released as a vmware appliance ?

empty chassis for £90.... mmmm, I could then flog my current NAS off as a complete unit

Few out there: google

I only ever used FreeNAS for a very short time before I installed Windows Home Server (V1 and 2011 since) it booted the server from a USB and seemed quite user friendly but not particularly pretty.

It used to have a DLNA UPNP server built in but in the latest release it's a separate snap in.

WHS2011 can be had for £40 if you wanted to automate backups for your client PC etc??

Been playing with FreeNAS all day ...

starts off looking very fancy, like the ZFS pretend raid-10 system

built myself a 8 disk array, all very easy

however, getting it to generating working windows shares, that tie into AD

The only downside is that I have work out so far is that my ReadyNAS does raid via hardware rather than s/w (FreeNAS).

Maybe I should have a play on a spare machine too...

The lines are very blurred, IMO. A lot of "hardware RAID" is actually done in software, a bit like the popular RAID motherboards around the turn of the century (things like my old KT7A-RAID, a legendary board but the RAID was actually all done in the drivers). Plus, hardware RAID is less portable, if I were to buy an x86 system like a Microserver rather than a dedicated NAS box, then I'd probably want software RAID so that if it ever died, I could just swap the disks into another x86 box and be up and running. Chances are the performance figures are going to be acceptable either way for a home environment anyway.

NAS4Free looks to be a better bet than FreeNAS

I gave up on FreeNAS

After hours trying of trying what should have been basic stuff, decided life was too short