To NAS or not to NAS?

[Skawn]

I've just moved into a new flat with a couple of mates and was looking at something for centralised media storage.

I've had my eye on this Buffalo TeraStation which seems to do everything I need although for about the same money I could build a new PC with a couple of 500Mb drives and that'd leave me with the possibility of adding additional drives at a later date.

Will the NAS be better performance wise? The components I was looking at for the self build option are below;

Western Digital Caviar 500GB S300 16mb 7200rpm - £155.00x2 = £310.00
AMD Athlon 64 3000+ Socket 939 512KB - £59.63
Asustek Socket 939 SiS 756 PCI-E ATX A V L R - £37.24
Crucial 2x512MB 184Pin DIMM PC3200 - £56.74
Sapphire X300SE 128MB PCI-E DVI-I VO - £29.62
Total - £493.23

 

[Stelly]

go for the NAS....

one thing your not accounting for is software, are you doing this wirelessly? Also there are some on overclockers...

Western Digital WDXE5000KSE NetCentre 500GB Ethernet External Hard Drive (HD-081-WD) £213.26

LaCie d2 10/100 Ethernet/USB 2.0 500GB External Hard Drive (HD-025-LC) £254.39

Lacie 1TB Gigabit Ethernet Disk (HD-039-LC) £533.39

All which look good

Stelly

 

[Imy]

EDIT: Decided to completely re-write this

If 500GB/750GB is more than plenty space for you then so long as you are happy with low-moderate performance, the single-drive NAS solutions are nicely priced.

If you need more, then the cost of the (sata-nas) enclosure will dramatically increase so I would recommend going the pc route as it will have much better performance and will be cheaper to scale-up.

Software isn't an issue really. If you go the linux route then there's tons of free software available and if you go windows route, sharing the folders on the network is often good enough for a lot of people.

 

[londonbairn]

i'd say go for the pc, had the same situation previously and I am glad i went for a PC, ended up using it as a printer server and web server too!

 

[Imy]

Can't believe I missed that out ^^

Of course going the pc route will allow you to do a lot more things. You could use it as a spare pc in case your main one fails. You could setup other services on there such as web hosting, print server, ftp server, etc + lots more.

 

[Hamish]

For software look at this: http://www.freenas.org/

 

[hp7909]

Anyone use/recommend the Netgear SC101 Storage Central (NW-081-NG)? Quite like the idea of getting/adding your own HD's

EDIT:

{snip}AMD Athlon 64 3000+ Socket 939 512KB - £59.63
Asustek Socket 939 SiS 756 PCI-E ATX A V L R - £37.24
Crucial 2x512MB 184Pin DIMM PC3200 - £56.74
Sapphire X300SE 128MB PCI-E DVI-I VO - £29.62
Total - £493.23

That's OTT for just a file server

 

[inactionman]

Did similar, built a PC with 4x 300Gb drives, now working on getting linux to use them as software raid-5 (fun, compiling your own kernel and everything!).

Freenas is great, but the version I tried to use didn't support software raid properly, although the new version seems to! As this is the case I may try it again.

Whatever you do, DON'T get the netgear, it's a POS. Requires device drivers to access it, which are extremely buggy. You can't just mount it like you would a normal NAS.

Thecus just announced a nice enclosure, the N5200, but it's a bit pricey.

 

[Skawn]

Thanks for the replies.

Software really isn't an issue - shared folders in windows will be sufficient for what I'll be using it for.

I could admittedly drop to 512 RAM without a problem but for the price I reckon going for a gig is worth it. The processor is the cheapest available without going the Sempron/Celeron route and the mobo is about bottom of the range too.

If I'll get better performace from SATA drives running in RAID than from the ATA NAS solutions it seems like the logical choice - I'd kinda guessed that would be the case but I'm just not familiar with NAS technology so thought it best to check.

Whats the advantage of going NAS? I cant see why you'd bother other than a pretty GUI...

 

[inactionman]

Generally it will be smaller, quieter, easier to use and more power efficent than a self build. While the self build will be more flexible, both in terms of hardware and software.

The bonus with using RAID is either performance, or resilience, and resilience is much more important for me when you are talking about nearly a terabyte of data, imagine backing that up to DVD's!

I would reccomend that you look at using at least 3 drives in RAID 5, as some mobo's come with built in raid 5 (although not the greatest performance, but if you are just using it as a file server, who cares!), particularly the recent nvidia ones (the Nforce4x series for example, you'll also get onboard 61x0 video on those, so you may save money). You'll lose one drive to parity, so 3x 300Gb drives becomes one 600Gb drive for example, but if a drive goes you don't lose your data, just some performance until you replace it and rebuild the array.

 

[Imy]

Whats the advantage of going NAS? I cant see why you'd bother other than a pretty GUI...

Size, power consumption, portability and the simplicity.

Disadvantages: Price and performance (apart from the very expensive kit with built-in high-end controllers and fibre connections).

If you build a pc in a SFF case then at least you can claw back the portability advantage of consumer NAS but you'll have to give up a little on scalability and price.

 

[V For Vendetta]

I hear the best bang for buck nas enclosure right now is the synology 106