Anybody use a NAS box ?

Fr0dders

Fr0dders

Fr0dders

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i've got a 250gb S-ATA drive sat here doing nothing

i was looking at the Synology Disk Station DS-106e NAS Enclosure that supports SATA 1/2

anybody ever used one ?

or can recommend any other NAS box that supports SATA ?
 
I looked into them recently - if you want upgradability etc get the extra few quid together and build yourself a low spec PC, run FreeNAS if you want an easy solution or if you want more control whack a linux distro on there and run samba /ftp etc. WAY better vfm than any off-the-shelf solution.

For £100 excluding the drives I had a 2.53GHz Celeron machine with 512Mb of RAM and a gigabit network card.

Installed 800Gb of storage and its perfect and far cheaper/more customisable than any equivalent solution :)
 
no thanks

one of the key attractions of the NAS box is its tiny size. I want something i can just plonk on the desk beside my monitor. I've already got 3 PCs and a laptop, dont need another :)
 
Why not just use USB or firewire? Unless you have the router in your room and wish to share it with others...
 
God knows how many linux NAS distro's exist for exactly this and they are by and large a lot more expandable and don't use custom file systems like some of the off the shelf NAS' like the SC101. If you have 3 PC'swhy not just put the drive in one of them as a network share and map it ?
 
Stretch said:
I was considering getting one of these. Care to elaborate?
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It's not real NAS. It requires drivers to be installed on each computer that is to have access to it. It is basically a fake NAS as NAS does not require anything other than you double clicking on the network drive icon in My computer for access. It also isn't very good for cooling drives. I don't know much about its RAID implementation so I won't comment on that.
 
To add to smids comments, the RAID implementation was poor. I can't remember eaxctly why as the SC101 I bought for eval is stuffed at the back of the cupboard. The Zeeta (sp?) client software was annoying - you couldn't use UNC paths.

We tried one running a pair of 80GB HDs in a RAID1 mirror, with two XP clients working from it. Both PCs suffered from endless problems with corrupt Word and Excel files when they stored files directly on the SC101.

The NetGear forum had a few threads with people suffering the same problem but the last time I looked, there was no fix.
 
Slackworth said:
The Synology does not require drivers. :)
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The Synology is very good, but pricey and only takes one drive. I built a P3 server for the same price which can handle as many drives as the PSU - all in a nice mATX case but then again the OP said space was a concern...
 
Yeah, looks like it is available in Europe and the states at the moment. About £300 in Europe. Can't wait to see these hit our shelves. TBH, it is almost as cheap as my P3 NAS box which I've built but still works out about £100 more than mine costs - however, surely just that RAID card on it's own makes up for the price...
 
Seems like very good value to me, I would like to see a review first but it looks very promising, I've been waiting for a good solid NAS and this could be it without having to run an OS (e.g. a proper hardware NAS).

HEADRAT
 
Yup - and with a proper onboard RAID5 controller with 256MB RAM, this thing must fly - then again you are still limited by the 100MB/s transfer rate of Gigabit Ethernet - kind kills some of that hardware RAID5 goodness but certainly doesn't put me off :D.

*Whistles - waiting patiently for some company to implement dual gigabit ethernet with line bonding*
 
smids said:
Yup - and with a proper onboard RAID5 controller with 256MB RAM,
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Upgradable to 512MB DDR SDRAM :)

All seems to be built around Intel kit so this is going to be a good box, unbelievable for the money !

HEADRAT
 
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Yep - though I doubt much gain would be seen from 512MB (think of the cost of a 512MB stick of SDRAM!) as you are going to be limited by the external transfer rate as I say, and 256MB can usually deal with even the most demanding environments - I've been looking at RAID5 cards for the last few weeks and I can safely say, the provided amount will be enough.
 
I really like the look of this box, think it could be a winner, a good RAID 5 card is going to cost £200+ right?

HEADRAT
 
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