NAS advice.

BoomAM

BoomAM

BoomAM

Soldato
Joined
5 Jul 2003
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Location
Atlanta, USA
Hi.
After months of faffing around, im gonna buy myself a NAS unit.

At the moment, i have my eye on the IcyBox NAS enclosure + 1x Samsung F1 1Tb. Leaving me one bay free for future expansion.
Im a little concerned by the reported slow speed though.


Anyone got any advice? Would it be worth buying a pre-made NAS?

Thanks in advance all. :).
 
Most NAS (until you get to the expensive ones) are relatively slow in comparison to say usb/fw etc. My synology ds106j (admittedly using a pata drive) averages around 12megs a second on a decent download from it with vista :(, not exactly flying but for my use its enough (it stores my mp3's).

I very much doubt you will see the true performance of the f1 drive in a nas and would suggest looking at a more server orientated drive from ibm/seagate/western digital etc.

All the premade nas seem to be slower speeds than the 'branded' boxes too, I'd also consider the icybox no better than a premade option, you just get to add your choice of drive.
 
NAS's are group for non local, LAN accesable files. About 700MB-1GB/minute transfer rate, fine for streaming high def video. Just not suitable for games.
 
Strange.

Ive got it all setup, and regardless of wether i have it going through the megabit switch in my router, or a bridged connection at gigabit strait into my PC, i fail to get more than 5.5Mb/s, spending most of the time at between 4.5 & 5Mb/s.

Is that normal?
 
I've got a Linksys NAS 200, its pretty good. compact little box, simple enough to set up. Was gonna get the ICYbox one but went for the cheaper option.

I find transfer a little slow, probably around 10-15Mb/sec I think, havent uploaded anything large in a while.
 
BoomAM said:
Strange.

Ive got it all setup, and regardless of wether i have it going through the megabit switch in my router, or a bridged connection at gigabit strait into my PC, i fail to get more than 5.5Mb/s, spending most of the time at between 4.5 & 5Mb/s.

Is that normal?
Click to expand...

it can be normal, even my synology has been that slow although that was before vista sp1
 
Well ive updated the firmware, and i appear to get between 6.5 & 7.5Mb/s now.
Oddly, 7.5Mb/s until i accessed the device from another computer, then it dropped to 6.5, then only raised to 6.89 and stayed that way.

Read speed, in the limited tests ive done, is 9-11Mb/s. Which is quite good.

Just need to reorganise my data, chuck it over to the NAS, then i can remove 3/4 of the HDDs out of my main system. :p.

Got a lot of data to transfer though. :(. Over 700Gb of it, its gonna take days to do this. :(.
 
I bought a Dlink DNS-323 and am very happy with it.

I use it to store my ripped DVD collection (no more need to insert the DVD into the DVD player in the living room), Store apps / patches for easy install to either of my two home PC's rather than having lots of DVD's / cd's lying around, storing music, storing pictures.

The DNS-323 comes with some nice applications (bit torrent client, FTP server, uPNP AV server etc) but to big win for me is the fact it runs Linux, is easy to setup so you can telnet to it and it can accept new Linux packages compiled for it and even be used to compile from source. There are a growing number of packages around for it including Transmission (very good Bit torrent client), Clutch (Web page front end for Transmission), uShare (Stream video / audio / pictures to any uPnP AV device like XBox 360 or PS3) and a PHP enabled webserver. I now don't leave my P.C. on overnight as the NAS downloads any torrents and my movie collection is being ripped to avi files so I dont need to keep the DVD's in the living room but can put them in storage. I will probabily get round to archiving my cd's on it at some point too.

The unit accepts 2 HDD's, has gigabit lan and a USB port for a printer although people have been hooking up external drives / flash readers / and even UPS control cables to enable a clean shutdown negotiation between a UPS and the NAS on power failure.

There is also a 4 disk version just released which should be just as hackable - DNS-343.

Modifications available here.
Of note is ffp 0.5 (Fonz fun plug) which allows telnet / ssh access and access to a number of already compiled other packaged.

I am currently working on compiling uShare for ffp 0.5 and the 1.5 firmware. With XBox 360 streaming support is done but PS3 DLNA support is a bit more tricky...... FFMpeg is a git to get to compile.......

RB
 
Odd...again...
Im just leaving it transfering my music collection over while i go work: 4.34Mb/s!?

As long as the read speed is north of 7Mb/s then i'll be happy, but 4.34MB/s!? Come on, i was getting 6-7MB/s yesterday!:(.
 
send it back mate

cheap ones are crap

much better off getting a low spec quiet pc, with a gigabit network card
 
If the device is broken, i'd send it back.
Im trying to establish if it is, because if its not, im not sending it back.
Plus, it'd be too much of a ball ache to do so.

If the read speeds are constantly 8Mb/s+ then i'll be happy with that, as i wont have to write to it often. Its just a case of transfering all my data to it at the moment, removing all the HDDs from my system, and then seeing how it performs.
Its mainly there because i have 4 HDDs in my main system and i want to remove them all but 1 to quieten it down. Fortunatelly, bar my music and video, most of those HDDs are full with stuff i dont really need to access all that often. So anything above a few hundred Kb/s will be fine for music playback, its just the speed for video playback thats potentially a problem...

IIRC, when i left home this morning, the transfer speed had crept up to 6Mb/s from the 4.34Mb/s it was at when i started it.
 
Try Windows XP, like I said I had really slow LAN access to my other computer and NAS with Vista. Boot up in Linux or XP and copied 10 times faster. Just looked for that DNS 343, damn annoying it has dual tiddy fans, my DNS-323 fan makes more noise than my HTPC. If I change the DNS-323 to a 4 bay unit I'd want one with a 8cm or 12cm fan.
 
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it's not broken, they're just pap

sell it on and get a cheap low power pc for the job

much more versatile and faster
 
Agree. I have an old 1.4 given to me, put 4 disks in, a GBit NIC and installed solaris on it. Gives me 50-60mb/s. Far more flexible too
 
bledd. said:
it's not broken, they're just pap

sell it on and get a cheap low power pc for the job

much more versatile and faster
Click to expand...
I payed £200 yesterday for it+ a 1Tb HDD & some cat cable.
A cheap PC without that amount of storage would cost almost £300!

If it works fine then i'll keep it how it is.
 
a piii system would do

besides, dell basic servers are about £117, and they're damn good

the 1tb drives are £88 if that
 
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