Which NAS do you use?

[Brandon Teska]

Let me be the first to welcome everyone to these brand new forums! I figured I'd kick things off with a poll I've been interested in for a while now. What NAS software do you use for your custom NASes? (If I've forgot one, please post it below!)

 

[Bart]

You forgot an important one: Windows Home Server.

Microsoft might not like the comparison, but essentially it's also a NAS, expandable with add-ons.

I'm very curious about this poll also. If you read my post about my experiences with WHS you'll know why. I'm still looking for a good replacement OS for WHS. I've looked at all the options mentioned in this poll, but am still not sure which one I should choose. unRAID seemed like the best in terms of performance and expandability, but offered too little protocols. FreeNAS is exactly the opposite. Openfiler sounds real good, but from what I've read it's not easy to set up. Open-e sounds ideal, but the free version only offers 1 TB of storage, which is too little for my needs.

Decisions, decisions...

 

[Brandon]

FreeNAS is the only NAS OS I've used without replacing. My only complaint with it, it tends to be less snappy than a Windows Server file share (Which is fairly normal for most SAMBA shares).

 

[PacketRider]

Before getting into dedicated files servers such as NASes, I had always used Windows as my file servers. Then I had to build a file server for a mixed network of Macs and Windows machines. Files created by these Macs that were stored on a Windows server sometimes got corrupted. I was desperate for a file server that would takes these files with aplomb. This was when I discovered FreeNAS with its FreeBSD core and support for both SMB and AFP. It works great. The only two complaints I have is FreeNAS is slower than any other NASes and it at the current version 0.68, does not support user accounts. Basically, if you can log into the server, you have free reign over all the files. I could not believe that for a file server, this feature was not offered right off the bat. Other than these, FreeNAS has been a life saver. I firmly believe that a great NAS for a mixed network should be running some sort of UNIX. FreeNAS is the best that I can find. Incidentally version 0.7 will introduce user permission. I cannot wait until that day.

 

[matthi]

I used to have a DIY-built NAS, running on a mid-ranged mobo/cpu. I ran 2 ATA and 2 SATA disks in sofware RAID5 on Windows 2003. It was pretty stable for the time being, however two main things annoyed me this much I gave up the project: 1) software RAID is slow, really slow, and 2) the thing just needed too much power and made too much noise.

So I replaced this with a Netgear NV+, which I'm very happy about.

 

[Bart]

1) software RAID is slow, really slow,

It is? That's probably a Windows 2003 thing, because software RAID in Linux is sometimes even faster than a (cheap) hardware RAID adapter. Another plus is it's more future proof. Because if a hardware controller fails and you can't find an exact replacement, there's a good chance you're SOL'd.

 

[Bart]

Brandon, a question for you: will SNB review Open-e and Openfiler someday? There are not many online reviews to find on this NAS OS'es...

 

[vorgusa]

It is? That's probably a Windows 2003 thing, because software RAID in Linux is sometimes even faster than a (cheap) hardware RAID adapter.

Most cheap hardware RAID cards are still software based.

 

[Bart]

Most cheap hardware RAID cards are still software based.

Very true, no arguments here...

 

[Brandon]

I've spent the past few days playing with a /real/ NAS. I think I'll be looking into other options for my FreeNAS box over the weekend. The one thing I really dislike about my FreeNAS box has always been the Laggy load/transfer times which I thought was just normal.

I'm thinking about trying the newer OpenFiler over the weekend, compair it to a 2003 server with the exact same hardware (I have two rackmount PC's that are the exact same, aside from Hard Drives).

I'm wondering if using a USB drive could be part of my problem, currently my FreeNAS system runs off a very cheap USB drive, on a system that only supports USB 1(ish).

 

[W!reT@p]

Brandon I would love to see to see a Openfiler Review myself. I cant for the life of me to get it to work with server 2008 AD.

 

[Brandon]

When I first set up my NAS, I used an old OpenFiler. I use 2003 AD for my home network, which I was able to import, however I never made it any further than that. I really didn't mess with it for to long however, it seems a bit to complicated for what little it did.

 

[grayfox]

Running a Dual Xeon 2.8ghz with 2X500GB drives in raid 1 and 2GB of ram for my nas in a 4U rackmount case.

Its running linux debian, NFS and SAMBA.

 

[Brandon]

Running a Dual Xeon 2.8ghz with 2X500GB drives in raid 1 and 2GB of ram for my nas in a 4U rackmount case.

Its running linux debian, NFS and SAMBA.

That's a big box for two drives.. I have this trouble of putting to much into what I already have.. Currently I'm trying to find bigger power supplies for two PIII PC's in rackmount cases, so I can stuff more Hard Drives into them.

 

[rendrag]

Running a Dual Xeon 2.8ghz with 2X500GB drives in raid 1 and 2GB of ram for my nas in a 4U rackmount case.

Its running linux debian, NFS and SAMBA.

are you using the server to be anything but a file server? that seems like way overkill for 500GB of storage

 

[grayfox]

are you using the server to be anything but a file server? that seems like way overkill for 500GB of storage

Its very overkill, Right now its just a file server. (It also use to be my firewall & webserver)

I plan to replace it with a Intel BOXD945GCLF (One of the ATOM powered boards) along with a gigabit network card.

 

[Brandon]

Its very overkill, Right now its just a file server. (It also use to be my firewall & webserver)

I plan to replace it with a Intel BOXD945GCLF (One of the ATOM powered boards) along with a gigabit network card.

I haven't really looked at the Atom line as of yet, don't know much about it other than it's small. If I'm right I might have quite a few things to use them for (Gogo MythTV Frontend!).

 

[Bart]

Since this week, there's now also the Via Nano CPU, which uses a bit more power than the Atom (5 watts), but also packs a lot more punch. And today I've read about the Nvidia Tegra, which also looks very promising. (full 1080p decoding @ 2.5 to 4 watts!)

 

[zsole]

True, FreeNAS could be faster, although I get about 7-8 MBs transfer rate out of it both ways (on a 100 mbit network), although I'm usually on WIFI, which is about 2 MBs at max, so who cares? Good enough to play music on a few PCs simultaneously, plus a divx here or there...
Although 0.7 nighly builds are coming out now, I think settting up user authentication isn't too complicated, there are good info in the Knowledge Base or on Sourceforge. And no need to know much about BSD either, just enable SSH, start WinSCP, and that's it: create folders, set permissions in properties, good 'old' fashioned Windoze-way...

 

[jethro10]

I tried a few NAS's like Qnap and always found something missing, so even with my skill level I built one.

Jetway mini itx board with a Via 1.2Ghz processor,7 watts aparently is its usage.

Put it in a small case that is wife friendly (this looks similar http://www.itx-warehouse.co.uk/Product.aspx?ProductID=181)

Put Ubuntu on it and run it headless,
Only one 500Gb disk but I back it up to a USB external drive every so often, I reckoned that saved power compared to having multiple disks in it.
1Gb memory

ended up being a bit more expensive, but i'm so happy how easy it is to expand, both S/W and H/W
I can now easily get it to do anything I want and it draws about 20W, tested it with one of those little meters.

J