How to Buy a NAS short version

[samg]

That was a really really helpful article. I've reading your stuff for almost a year, paralyzed by the all the various things to consider, and this really boiled things down for me. The one thing that would make this even more helpful would be for you to categorize the products you've reviewed into which you consider to be compromise, which are kitchen sink, etc. Then someone (like me) could get to the end of the article, realize that I'm looking for a compromise model, and see a price vs performance chart of the compromise models and choose one.

Thanks so much for al the great work you do on this site, it's really really helpful.

Sam

 

[thiggins]

Glad you find the site helpful, Sam.

Don't you feel that you can ID the product types yourself from the descriptions in the article?

 

[samg]

Once I've read an article, yes, I think I have a sense of a product and which category it's in. But here's the research process then: Read the short how to article, decide which category of product you're looking for, and then scan all the articles looking for those types of products. I'm guessing what you want to do with all the research you're doing is help people narrow things down and compare the best products for them. If the products were already categorized, then they could read the short how to article, and then just look at the reviews of those types of products. That would probably be 10 reviews versus 100, right? It would be a lot of time saved for people, and I think only increase the value your site provides.

 

[wathman]

I really enjoyed the article, and your previous one on how to build a really fast NAS. I've used your findings to build 2 NASes that are more like servers now with all the added functionality I've been able to include.

As I was reading your latest article, I kept wondering how my NASes I built myself stack up to the commercial offerings out there. Things like how they compare on capacity, performance, power consumption, physical size, and of course, total cost would provide a great deal of useful data. Your NAS charts do this very well for the commercial offerings, though there's no recent comparison data for typical builds DIYers could put together for the current average cost of a commercial NAS.

I recently upgraded the hard drive on my first NAS so I haven't finished testing it, but it was a simple platform based on an older MSI Wind barebones atom N270. 2GB RAM, reused 300GB SATA I HD, Ubuntu Server running with samba. When the load on the system wasn't very high, I could get around 40 MB/s transfers across my gigabit network, speeds will be better now with the new 1TB WD Green drive, but no data on it yet. Total amount of money I spent on this NAS was about $180, and thanks to the features of Ubuntu server, it's a very capable little box.

My second NAS/Server is a rebuild of my old desktop based on a core 2 duo E6850 @ 3.0 Ghz, 4GB DDR3 RAM, 2x Samsung 1TB F2 EcoGreen drives in RAID 0, running Vista Ultimate 64-bit. Pricing out current value for this older system is a bit tricky, but I'd value the build at $500. Again, thanks to the tweaks I found in your article, I'm able to get sustained transfers of 107 MB/s on any of my client computers that can keep up with it.

Other than raw performance, it's difficult to gauge how current prices for DIY NASes stack up to the competition. Do you foresee a future article to revisit DIY NASes, and hopefully get some more metrics to compare with commercial competition?

 

[thiggins]

Other than raw performance, it's difficult to gauge how current prices for DIY NASes stack up to the competition. Do you foresee a future article to revisit DIY NASes, and hopefully get some more metrics to compare with commercial competition?

I probably won't revisit this anytime soon. The basic lessons have been learned and others over in the NAS > DIY forum have been doing a good job discussing DIY NAS performance.

 

[Unregistered]

Great article

Thanks for the quality article, I found it useful.

A question: you recommend no RAID if total storage needs are under 2TB. If your data is critical (SOHO) and you want both availability and protection, what is the recommendation then?

I am considering a 2-4 bay QNAP product (will probably go for 4-bay in terms of future-proofing for potential capacity needs), and if my current needs are easily met by a size of 500-750GB, you recommend doing what in my NAS device? No RAID level and just backups across disks?

 

[thiggins]

RAID lets you keep running when a disk dies. But it is not a substitute for backup.

Yes, I recommend a single-drive NAS with either automatic backup to an attached drive or, preferably another NAS not physically co-located with the other NAS.

 

[brucew268]

RAID and backups

In general, I found your article very helpful... was getting the eyes glazed over until I ran across this site.

But let me ask a naive question, as I was considering RAID redundancy for backup. FWIW: 2 Synology DS110j's cost 33% more than one DS210j.

Perhaps I'm a little slow on this subject...

If the main concern over using RAID for NAS backup is failure of power supply or motherboard... then could I not just drop the good drive into an external HDD case (USB/ESata) and restore from backup that way?

(I guess I am assuming that the failures above did not fry both HDDs in the process.)

Thanks, Bruce

 

[thiggins]

In general, I found your article very helpful... was getting the eyes glazed over until I ran across this site.

But let me ask a naive question, as I was considering RAID redundancy for backup. FWIW: 2 Synology DS110j's cost 33% more than one DS210j.

Perhaps I'm a little slow on this subject...

If the main concern over using RAID for NAS backup is failure of power supply or motherboard... then could I not just drop the good drive into an external HDD case (USB/ESata) and restore from backup that way?

(I guess I am assuming that the failures above did not fry both HDDs in the process.)

Thanks, Bruce

If, the power supply / controller failure didn't corrupt both drives, the machine you connect the drive to would need to read the drive format, which is usually a filesystem like EXT2/3/4, HFS+, ZFS, etc. You'll need a Linux system for that.

And even if the drive can be read, recovery may not be easy.

It's much safer to back up to another NAS or an external USB drive. And periodically check the backups.

Never trust data you can't afford to lose to any single device.

 

[Marshall]

Good Article.

I see your point with RAID. When we had a server before we had our NAS the IT company that use to service it always had us to believe that it was necessary to have RAID for redundancy. I understand that RAID is not backup and I agree it is better to have good backup.
We are looking for a new NAS at the moment to upgrade from our old Maxtor Shared Storage. Do you recommend purchasing a 4 bay NAS so the storage can be upgraded by installing another drive when needed, since a 1TB dive is only about $55 compared to buying another single or double bay NAS.

 

[thiggins]

We are looking for a new NAS at the moment to upgrade from our old Maxtor Shared Storage. Do you recommend purchasing a 4 bay NAS so the storage can be upgraded by installing another drive when needed, since a 1TB dive is only about $55 compared to buying another single or double bay NAS.

On the other hand, if you won't need the additional storage for awhile, you could always buy an older-generation NAS later for less money. Plus you'll have the added benefit of a physically separate unit with newer power supply and fan.

If you're not going to run RAID be sure you get a NAS that supports drive per volume configuration (sometimes called "basic" mode). Synology and QNAP NASes support this mode.

 

[Unregistered]

Diskful or B.Y.O.D.

You wrote:

"Diskful NASes are generally cheaper than BYOD."

Actually, in some countries (France...), NASes and external HDDs are taxed a lot more (20 euros/1 TB) than internal HDDs. Which makes diskful NASes a lot more expensive than BYOD.

 

[me3]

The missing feature I see (in the units I know of), NAS and Windows Home Server - is good backup of the data on the NAS itself.

I work in enterprise IT and am familiar with a wide range of solutions.

I don't run RAID, but like to backup to another internal disk nightly. I then do an offsite copy every 3-6 mths to a USB drive and leave it at a mates house.
The offsite can be a replica, as it's only to protect against catastrophic failure.
The onsite however should have a history associated, this way, data accidentally damaged or deleted can be recovered after some time.

The features I value for my home are:
a) Simple nightly backup to a second internal disk

b) A rotation that keeps a history of changes over time - NTFS hard links can help here for single instance storage. This gives me the last 3 months or so without chewing heaps of space.

c) Auto reclamation of space - set a limit, oldest backups deleted first.

My new QNAP doesn't do this.
Windows Home server (latest version) isn't much better. V1 did all except (c).

I would be interested if any other product had good "backup" functions for the data on the NAS, not simply "replication".

Thanks
Paul

 

[TD99]

Seeking clarification regarding using RAID

Tim, you wrote:

"My strong advice [is] to not use RAID if your storage needs are below 3 TB; stay with single-drive products."

Why do you say this? I ask because I'm in the market for a NAS and my storage needs are probably 1.5 to 2TB max.

 

[thiggins]

Tim, you wrote:

"My strong advice [is] to not use RAID if your storage needs are below 3 TB; stay with single-drive products."

Why do you say this? I ask because I'm in the market for a NAS and my storage needs are probably 1.5 to 2TB max.

More drives = more power, noise, heat and people do lose RAID arrays.

KISS is always best.

 

[TD99]

More drives = more power, noise, heat and people do lose RAID arrays.

KISS is always best.

OK, but I am leaning towards a dual-drive RAID1 solution for redundancy's sake. But again, I have maybe 1TB at most to store. Was hoping to store my Acronis backups to the NAS thereby safely storing all my previous digital photos.