Help with NAS info

Namistai

Namistai

Namistai

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Hey guys,

I could do with gathering some opinions on the various NAS options and what might be best for me. I've read through the info on here already and have gotten a few ideas together, but there is quite a lot of choice and some confusing info out there!

Essentially, my requirement is to have network storage for the two desktops and two laptops in the house. Features we require/desire:

- Media storage for all PCs;
- Print server (desirable);
- Web server (php, mysql desirable);
- Online file access with custom sharing rights (e.g. photo sharing but only to selected people who are given access rights);
- Ability to take 1TB density HDD; and
- Must be reasonably fast!

I'd rather buy a NAS 'caddy' and separate HDDs so that I can select the HDDs that I like the most (most likely Samsung F1's - but all suggestions will be taken onboard!). I've looked at various options and can't decide what is best for me!

I like the look of the Synology and QNAP offerings. Is it just me or do these look like the same hardware but in a different case and with a different brand?

My alternative option is to build up a home server, but funds are tight so it would have to built with low spec second hand parts to allow enough cash for the storage capacity. Any comments welcomed on the pros and cons of server vs NAS.

Lastly, is it likely that I would need a gigabit network to transfer data at the best possible rate? I'm not sure which is the slowest link here. I'm currently on 100mbit but could fairly easily and cheaply upgrade to 1gbit with a switch added on.

Any help greatly appreciated! :)
 
Check out smallnetbuilder for reviews & benchmarks on various nas. If you get a cheap one you probably wont need a gb card as they run pretty slow.
It depends on how may bays you require really. If its just a basic 2 disk one I guess these are fairly cheap, If its more than 2 then to get good performance will cost money, so it may be more cost effective to make your own.
Personally I went with a thecus 5200pro 5 bay unit. Does 30-40% utilization over gb ethernet & can happily run 10+ esx images over iscsi.
Yes it would have been cheaper to build my own, but I didnt want another pc in my study, I just wanted something I could plug in & turn on.
 
I went for a Qnap TS-209 II which seems to do what I want. It's not quite the fastest but was close enough without spending even sillier money. From what I read, Qnap are more responsive to problems than Thecus and its staff participate in the user forums.

Whichever one you do go for, it's probably worth adding a dedicated gigabit NIC to your PCs. The on-board NIC is partially software-driven and can really cripple the apparent performance of the NAS.
 
Thanks for your comments guys.

That's an interesting comment regarding onboard NICs - is that something specific to my rig that you've picked up, or is it a generic problem amongst onboard NICs? My DFI mobo has two gigabit NICs: one Marvell, one nVidia. I use the Marvell one atm. Is it feasible that a PCI NIC will really improve the performance of a fast NAS system then? Presumably, 100mbps network is going to be a very noticeable bottleneck on a decent NAS system?
 
It's a generic problem. It's possible that one of your on-board NICs is better than the other but you'd have to do some tests to find out.

IMHO a NAS on a 100Mb LAN is waste of time. 1Gb switches are cheap enough now that there's no need to stay with 100Mb when your PCs are 1Gb. I have a 5-port 1Gb switch hung off my router. PCs and NAS are on the switch, printer and laptop (when wired) are on the router.
 
I would build a small PC in a large case for this - wait I just did (using only parts I have lying around 800GB raid 5) - I know you mention cost, but you could do it for less or the same price as a nas box.

HDs- OK you need to buy these either way. 750GB drives are £50 these days, 1 TB can't be much more. Remember on a budget you should be looking at price per GB.


Mobo + proc - £50
Memory, 1GB is less than £20
you should have a CD drive / floppy drive lying about, if not another £12.
Fans and cables if required (sata, molex 'Y', 120mm fans) < £10
PSU - ideally want the best quality, but you can get what seem like OK PSUs for less tan £20, ideally 300-450W

so, £100 will get you the bits (+ hard drives ) and the case.

Now the case - I have been lucky to get 2 full towers, one on freecycle, and the other for £50 a good few years ago when it should have been £150.

You will need to scour around for a bargain. definately check out freecycle.

Depending on the board, you may or may not need to get a second SATA card which is less than a tenner.

Plug in your drives - say 6 drives + a system disk, and install a debian net install and configure your drives using the easy to use part man. I'd also suggest perhaps 2 system drives in a raid 1 configuration for redundancy. They only have to be small disks. Then you have a fully working file server.

If you are looking at a bit more money, you could go for the compact flash -> ide as the system disk as an alternative.

Oh yeah, plus a NIC. depends on jus thow tight the budet is etc. a Gig NIC is always something that can be added later.
<edit> just thought I'd point out regarding the mention above of only 2 disk systems, you could gor for a RAID 10 setup giving speed and redundancy (at the expense of disk space, but if youa ar considering only 2 disks..) RAID 5 may be slow without heavy hardware behind it, but it's a compromise between space and resiliance.
 
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Thanks guys. Useful to know about the gigabit issue (I guess its the same with most onboard components, they usually have a negative impact on performance somewhere along the line, e.g. onboard sound), and lets face it, not an expensive fix!

Cheers whitecrook for the info on the server solution. I could do this as I have a few old bits at home, altho some of them are very old now and perhaps may struggle for performance. I have a Barton 2500XP and MSI mobo somewhere, so we are talking low performance by todays standards! I'm guessing that it wouldn't need to be a high spec machine for a server.

The other thing that appeals to me about a simple NAS solution is that they appear to be really easy to configure for online access, permissions etc. How difficult is this to achieve with a file server? What software is recommended to obtain this?

Lastly, it might be useful for me to have a login system to allow internet/file server access, almost like a corporate system in an office. So no login, no internet! I'm assuming that this would be easy enough to achieve with a web server, but perhaps not so easy to achieve with a NAS solution?

Thanks again for all the help guys.
 
Namistai said:
Cheers whitecrook for the info on the server solution. I could do this as I have a few old bits at home, altho some of them are very old now and perhaps may struggle for performance. I have a Barton 2500XP and MSI mobo somewhere, so we are talking low performance by todays standards! I'm guessing that it wouldn't need to be a high spec machine for a server.
Click to expand...

A Barton XP2500 is wayyyy overpowered for fileserving a couple of users. Hell only last year did I retire my PII 233Mhz 480GB fileserver.... replaced with a Sempron 1.8Ghz. Even then it lay 99% idle.

You may want to whack a TV card in there or something and use it to record / encode TV or something to use up the power of the processor :/

The other thing that appeals to me about a simple NAS solution is that they appear to be really easy to configure for online access, permissions etc. How difficult is this to achieve with a file server? What software is recommended to obtain this?
Click to expand...
I would say it's pretty easy, but for a linux box, you'd want to install Samba for file sharing. There are volumes of docs on the net. But if you do debian this is all you have to do:

copied from my history:
75 apt-get install samba smbfs
76 ls -l /etc/samba/
77 cp /etc/samba/smb.conf smb.conf.back
78 vim /etc/samba/smb.conf
79 testparm
81 smbpasswd -a whitecrook
82 /etc/init.d/samba restart
83 mkdir /mnt/filestore/filestore
84 chown whitecrook:whitecrook /mnt/filestore/filestore/
86 chmod 755 /mnt/filestore/filestore/
Click to expand...
and in /etc/samba/smb.conf add this to the very bottom (the line beginning with vim is the editing of that file)
[filestore]
path = /mnt/filestore/filestore
browseable = yes
comment = General file storage area
writable = yes
public = yes
guest ok = no
Click to expand...
Then just mount a network drive in windows, and supply the password keyed in above, if you use the same as your windows password it won't ask.

Lastly, it might be useful for me to have a login system to allow internet/file server access, almost like a corporate system in an office. So no login, no internet! I'm assuming that this would be easy enough to achieve with a web server, but perhaps not so easy to achieve with a NAS solution?

Thanks again for all the help guys.
Click to expand...

MMM now you are getting more complicated. You are talking I think about Domain Logons? This is perfectly possible with a linux box and samba, but requires a little bit more thought and consideration to make it work properly IME. I did have it running once, with roaming profiles, and it worked really sweet. This was with my PII 233 box about 4~5 years ago
 
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Thanks again for the help, good to know that I can put some old parts to use again should I choose that route! I guess it's time for me to find some ebooks and read up on this stuff! :)
 
If you want a compact NAS solution I'd go for one of the Synology NAS enclosures... if you have the room for a larger case then build your on... I'm gonna be going for a Synology myself... because I want reduced noise and I don't want it taking up loads of room.
 
I too was in a similar bind a while ago , I checked out the reviews on various
types of small nas , the qnap ones win hands down for speed features , tho they are not the cheapest - but you get what you pay for.

Instead of running my 8800gtx power hungry media PC I wanted something to serve files and also act as a download station for torrent / news groups / http / ftp etc

I went for the qnap 409 and its amazing , up tp 4TB storage , very low power usage ( essential due to rising lecy costs)

Serves data to 2 PC and also allows me to share media files to my PS3

It can act as a ftp / web / php /mysql server , iam curently configing it to
act as a mail server ( uses linux so many packages are available )
 
Last time i used Samba, performance over the network to my windows boxen was pretty dire - 40% of a 100mb network iirc, which is only around 4.5 MB/s.

After SP1 and a quick reg tweak (TcpAckFrequency to 1) I get 90% utilisation over a 1000mb link both reading and writing 6GB DVD ISO's between my Vista box and my Windows Server 2003 box (running Hardware Raid 5 on 3 1tb F1's )
That's not even using Jumbo Frames either. It does however make me glad i've got a Quad Core as at 100MB/s all 4 cores are sitting at around 25%

My network cards are nothing special - an onboard Realtek on the vista box, and an onboard nVidia one on the server box.


As far as i know, most dedicated NAS boxes only manage around 40MB/S on gigabit.

If you are looking at building your own comp, the Dell Perc 5/i pops up quite frequently on <popular online auction site>, i picked mine up for a pittance, and can have up to 8 SATA drives attached in safe and speedy RAID5.
 
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You might also want to consider the HP Mediasmart Server EX470 or Tranquil PC T2-WHS-A3i which use Windows Home Server, their specs are a bit more powerful that the NAS offerings from QNAP and Synology...

I looked at all the above, but in the end, I bought myself a 2nd hand Dell Optiplex GX270 (Small Desktop Computer), which has a SATA port, initially added a 500GB HDD, if more storage is required I can add an Adaptec PCI SATA card (which I bough cheap off an auction site), installed a copy of XP Pro I already had, and this is what I use as a media server.
 
Thanks for all the info guys, I think I'm going to build a home server using some old parts - it'll work out cheaper to buy and tbh I fancy the challenge of setting up and fettling with a server :)
 
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