NAS recommendations?

[cgwahl]

I want to get a NAS. I originally was going to get a Belkin router with a NAS port, but the more I'm thinking about it, I think I want to get an enclosure with RAID capabilities. Be it RAID 1 (although I'm seen some with RAID 5).


Because of hard drive issues I've been having lately and just me wanting to get more organized (not to mention getting more and more paranoid because of stupid Seagate drives), I am prepared to spend some money on this. So while I won't say price is no concern, I am also open to things on the more expensive side. So I guess when you include 1 TB drives (preferably) at maybe $100 a pop, I'd prefer to stay in the $500 to $1000 range...but again, am open to more if its worth it. Hopefully something that's good, easy and reliable.


While looking on Amazon, I saw a couple nice ones from Western Digital and Netgear, but seeing what ideas or preferences you guys might have.

[srhoades]

Every time I'm at Fry's I can't believe the prices they have on NAS'. A 1 terabyte NAS their is $500-$850 depending on the brand and features. What I would do is go and see which one you like, then look up reviews online.

[alba666]

http://www.drobo.com/

[MavsX]

get a nas with 4 drives. So you could continually upgrade your storage in the long term. For now, yeah 4 1 TB drives would yield 2.7 TBs in Raid 5. not bad.

netgear makes decent nas's We got one at work. its the net gear ready nas. 4 drive bays. All hot swappable. gigabit Ethernet too.

probably between 500 to 1000 for the enclosure and the drives. if you are willing to spend $1k, you could find a nice nas for that. good luck bro

[DragonRider]

I'm very happy with my ReadyNas NV+ for over 2 years. Just remember that RAID is not BACKUP. I have the ReadyNas and a duplicate of data on drives in live systems

[cgwahl]

Yeah, been looking at the Netgear one and leaning towards it since it sounds like more are happier than unhappy.

[Drjones]

I've got the ReadyNas DUO from Netgear.

Boy, if you're prepping to spend $1K, you won't believe what I paid for my Duo....







Fry's had the 500GB model (1 disk only) for $300 with a $150 mail in rebate.

So, I got the thing for $150, bought a 1TB drive from amazon for $89, and I'm good to go. :supergrin::wavey:

I'm really happy with the Netgear - it hasn't given me any issues & they have a great online support forum.

I'll speak from experience here: make sure all your data is backed up BEFORE migrating stuff over to the new system and then have a separate drive to back stuff up to. As noted already, RAID is NOT BACKUP. It simply guards you against the failure of one drive.

[HKUSP45Css]

Do you have an old PC laying around? Check out the FreeNAS project.

Often you can get 6 or 7 times the performance out of a lowend PC built with FreeNas (or a similar OS) than you could ever hope to get from an of the shelf product. Many times it can be cheaper (if you already have some hardware about) and vastly more fault tolerant and manageable.

Just saying. Drobo is a nice unit for off the shelf.

ETA: for 1000 dolars you could build a double digit Terabyte NAS if you roll your own.

[area727]

Iv'e heard (although never used) that buffalo terastations arent bad.

I have a Qnap Nas device at work. its been great so far, problem free. It's a 2U rack mounted unit (4TB), so not ideal for home use without a dedicated server closet:supergrin: I believe they make some some smaller units for under $1k.

[Drjones]

Iv'e heard (although never used) that buffalo terastations arent bad.



I dunno, I think there are a lot of guys on the Netgear NAS forums who are former Buffalo customers - former.

[Isaiah1412]

Iv'e heard (although never used) that buffalo terastations arent bad.
Have you ever heard this from someone who was an actual buffalo user? I've dealt with a number of them and seen everything from wonky permissions issues (ACLs just vanishing for no reason, etc.), authentication and sharing dying even though the device was "visible", to drives going up and the OS not reporting on it.

Taking a consumer grade device designed for storing MP3s and Porn collections and wraping a web-gui around it does not make it an enterprise class NAS. I'd steer clear of Buffalo.

Drobo looks interesting, haven't used one personally though. My main "storage" system at home is an older PC running Win2k8 core. I have 2 250GB internal drives and a 500GB firewire drive served to my network. I'd like to get a NAS device at some point to mess with moving some of the storage onto iSCSI but that's for another day.

[srhoades]

Have you ever heard this from someone who was an actual buffalo user? I've dealt with a number of them and seen everything from wonky permissions issues (ACLs just vanishing for no reason, etc.), authentication and sharing dying even though the device was "visible", to drives going up and the OS not reporting on it.

Taking a consumer grade device designed for storing MP3s and Porn collections and wraping a web-gui around it does not make it an enterprise class NAS. I'd steer clear of Buffalo.

Drobo looks interesting, haven't used one personally though. My main "storage" system at home is an older PC running Win2k8 core. I have 2 250GB internal drives and a 500GB firewire drive served to my network. I'd like to get a NAS device at some point to mess with moving some of the storage onto iSCSI but that's for another day.


Agreed. For home use of storing music and whatnot I'm sure they are fine. However we setup one for a business and it was a mistake. Permissions constantly going wacky on folders, and since this model does not have a serial port telnet or SSH access there is no way to correct it.

[area727]

Have you ever heard this from someone who was an actual buffalo user? I've dealt with a number of them and seen everything from wonky permissions issues (ACLs just vanishing for no reason, etc.), authentication and sharing dying even though the device was "visible", to drives going up and the OS not reporting on it.

Taking a consumer grade device designed for storing MP3s and Porn collections and wraping a web-gui around it does not make it an enterprise class NAS. I'd steer clear of Buffalo.

Drobo looks interesting, haven't used one personally though. My main "storage" system at home is an older PC running Win2k8 core. I have 2 250GB internal drives and a 500GB firewire drive served to my network. I'd like to get a NAS device at some point to mess with moving some of the storage onto iSCSI but that's for another day.

Someone I know who has worked with a couple Buffalo devices, and said they werent bad (not sure to what capacity they were using them for). They also never made a claim that they were great. I have never used them so I cant speak first hand, just letting you know what Ive heard.

The Qnap that I mentioned, I have used first hand, and its worked fine so far.

[Drjones]

Because of hard drive issues I've been having lately and just me wanting to get more organized (not to mention getting more and more paranoid because of stupid Seagate drives), I am prepared to spend some money on this. So while I won't say price is no concern, I am also open to things on the more expensive side. So I guess when you include 1 TB drives (preferably) at maybe $100 a pop, I'd prefer to stay in the $500 to $1000 range...but again, am open to more if its worth it. Hopefully something that's good, easy and reliable.


While looking on Amazon, I saw a couple nice ones from Western Digital and Netgear, but seeing what ideas or preferences you guys might have.


One more thing: I did a bit of research/reading on seagate vs. western digital & it seems that both have their share of problems.

That's why you have an NAS: to guard against disk failure. If the disk is within warranty, great. If not, oh well.

Also, a study by Google showed no significant difference between server class & desktop/consumer drives.

[cgwahl]

One more thing: I did a bit of research/reading on seagate vs. western digital & it seems that both have their share of problems.

That's why you have an NAS: to guard against disk failure. If the disk is within warranty, great. If not, oh well.

Also, a study by Google showed no significant difference between server class & desktop/consumer drives.


You're probably right, but I've had 3 Seagate drives go out on me in a row so far and even one of the replacements I got less than a month ago is starting to click. So right now I'm really gunshy when it comes to Seagate hard drives.


Those QNaps look sweet by the way.

[Drjones]

You're probably right, but I've had 3 Seagate drives go out on me in a row so far and even one of the replacements I got less than a month ago is starting to click. So right now I'm really gunshy when it comes to Seagate hard drives.


Those QNaps look sweet by the way.


I read a lot of the reviews on amazon, people seemed to have an equal number of issues with WD & the Seagates, but I can understand your situation. I'd probably feel the same way.

I think I bought a seagate because it was slightly cheaper than the comparable WD.

Make sure whatever HDs you buy are on the HCL for your NAS.

[HKUSP45Css]

You're probably right, but I've had 3 Seagate drives go out on me in a row so far and even one of the replacements I got less than a month ago is starting to click. So right now I'm really gunshy when it comes to Seagate hard drives.


Those QNaps look sweet by the way.

As an aside I have always found the brand loyalty (or aversion) to hard drives remarkable. Everyone on the internet either won't use one brand or won't use anything besides another brand.

Hard drive technology is not young, all of the major manufacturers are about on par for failure rates. In fact, except for the IBM Deskstar GXP series back in the early 2000's that had a design flaw that led to head slap and over travel, and eventually dead drives (rendering the entire design and hence the whole product line suspect and garnering the nomicar "DeathStar") I can't say I've ever been able to track a manufacturer with a statiscally significant higher failure rate in all of the time I was actually tracking that data at my last job. ~4000 PCs, turned over every 3 years with a pretty even mix of manufacturers and we tracked the data for about 9 years total .... no real difference between Seagate, WD, Samsung, IBM, ect.

Please, bear in mind that my anecdotal evidence is just as irrelevant as everyone else's.

I understand that a failed hard drive is a traumatic experience for most people but, they are mechanical parts, they ARE destined to fail.

I just think the whole "don't buy this drive 'cause I had 2 fail on me" or "always buy this drive 'cause I've never had one fail on me" is a little, well, interesting to watch.

BTW IBM redesigned their chassis to fix the GXPs in pretty quick order.

[MavsX]

As an aside I have always found the brand loyalty (or aversion) to hard drives remarkable. Everyone on the internet either won't use one brand or won't use anything besides another brand.

Hard drive technology is not young, all of the major manufacturers are about on par for failure rates. In fact, except for the IBM Deskstar GXP series back in the early 2000's that had a design flaw that led to head slap and over travel, and eventually dead drives (rendering the entire design and hence the whole product line suspect and garnering the nomicar "DeathStar") I can't say I've ever been able to track a manufacturer with a statiscally significant higher failure rate in all of the time I was actually tracking that data at my last job. ~4000 PCs, turned over every 3 years with a pretty even mix of manufacturers and we tracked the data for about 9 years total .... no real difference between Seagate, WD, Samsung, IBM, ect.

Please, bear in mind that my anecdotal evidence is just as irrelevant as everyone else's.

I understand that a failed hard drive is a traumatic experience for most people but, they are mechanical parts, they ARE destined to fail.

I just think the whole "don't buy this drive 'cause I had 2 fail on me" or "always buy this drive 'cause I've never had one fail on me" is a little, well, interesting to watch.

BTW IBM redesigned their chassis to fix the GXPs in pretty quick order.

makes sense. At my work we only use seagate barracuda drives for the desktops. We still average about 1 failed hard drive per month...(error code 7)

I still prefer seagate for my home drives...i used to buy WD..but then decided years ago..to go with seagate. I had some hitachi's on my last computer..they were awesome too.

interesting that you kept track of all of that. pretty sweet man.