How reliable are these NAS boxes?

[dealy663]

I'm about to pull the trigger on a ReadyNAS 2000. I'd get two 1TB drives and use that in Raid 1 for backing up what is currently 300GB of photos.

A few years ago when I first started looking at NAS solutions I was worried about the proprietary power supplies and whatever else non-standard things these may be doing to the disk drives. So I just rolled my own out of a spare case, board and Ubuntu. This has worked well, but I need another one now. It was a bit of work to roll my own, and I don't think I can do it for much cheaper than the $250 of the ReadyNAS given the work involved.

So how do these prebuilt things hold up? What happens if the PS croaks? Are the disks easy and standard enough to drop into another machine and get the data? Or would they have to go into another ReadyNAS?

Any thoughts or suggestions?

Thanks, Derek

 

[claykin]

So how do these prebuilt things hold up? What happens if the PS croaks? Are the disks easy and standard enough to drop into another machine and get the data? Or would they have to go into another ReadyNAS?

Any thoughts or suggestions?

Thanks, Derek

The Readynas Duo uses an external power supply brick. Easy to replace and if you are really worried about it, you can get a spare to have on hand. My recommendation would be to get an APC UPS (500VA ES series is fine) and connect the USB cable to the NAS for monitoring. This will protect it from power surges and abrupt outages that can mess with the file system.

The Readynas disks cannot be easily removed and read on a PC due to the 16KB block size of the EXT3 filesystem. This includes most commonly used Linux distributions. There is an Open source utility in development that will allow users to read 16KB blocks on a PC, but its early and difficult for the average user to get working in Linux. If you are Linux savvy you may get it running, but its far from plug and play at this point.

The good news is that the Readynas includes an excellent built-in share backup utility. You can backup NAS shares to external USB disk (these can be read on a PC) or RSYNC or FTP to a remote server. Netgear even offers a cloud backup option called Vault as part of the Readynas package (storage fees apply).

FYI, Synology and QNAP 2 bay NAS products use 4KB block size and can be read on a PC in a recovery situation. I prefer the Readynas product (OS design, support, warranty), but your mileage may vary. Both Synology and QNAP make quality products as well.

Finally, RAID is not backup, never rely on it as your single repository for important data. Always backup.

 

[zooman]

Agree, RAID will fail... so backup too!

Just wanted to reference a post I made about the unreliability of consumer disks and raid. You may want to look at:
http://forums.smallnetbuilder.com/showthread.php?t=2421
Thanks and good luck!
zoo