cheap raid 5 nas.

[computoman]

Most inexpensive nas boxes do not support raid 5
freenas or linux (www.howtoforge.com for instructions to set up perfect linux raid server) FREE
Pentium 4 used barebones computer free or at most $50 (a lot faster than most nases)
FREE with a little scrounging.
KINGWIN 3.5" SERIAL ATA HOT SWAP DOCK - KF-1000-BK (fry's) $25 x 3 to start
Three drives (depends what you can get for 50 dollars (newegg or fry's) $50 x 3 (to start
$150 + $75 + 50 = 275 dollars.

Advantages!
Faster than most nas boxes.
Can be used as a real computer and clustered with additional computers for super power.
3 removable hotswappable drives for convenience. (less if you do not want at least raid 5 support)
Easily Upgradeable and expandable to additional drives internally and externally (depending on space).
Easily replaceable internal parts. No vendor lock in.
Multipurpose: web/cloud server, multimedia server, file server, virtual machine server (you may need extra memory) or anything you want server.
Not locked into vendor only support issues.
Easily networked with both (wired and wireless) with appropriate cards.

Disadvantages
none more than anything else.

[davmoo]

You hit on a reason here why I have not gone with any of the proprietary NAS boxes, even though they are slick little devices.

My number one concern is that they usually use proprietary disk formats. If the controller dies x number of years from now, will the company still be around to sell me another one that is compatible so that I can get to my data?

[freakazoid12]

Another advantage: you don't have to use RAID-5 if you want to, there's better options out there. When I built my file server I opted for ZFS and a RAID-Z setup with zfs-fuse and linux. (didn't really want to or feel like dealing with Opensolaris)
It's sorta like RAID-5 but it does parity checking whenever it reads data off. Thus, it's not kind on the little x2 4050e i've got in there but the box doesn't do much of anything else.

[haku]

I've been wanting to setup a NAS box for a year or two, now the HD prices are really good it's probably time I set something up. Really like the idea of using freenas, especially since I've been given a bundle of old 64mb IDE flash drives of which one I could use for the freenas OS, and also I've been given a D-Link DSM-520 Wireless HD Media Player that can play media from upnp storage devices.

My main concern is power usage, ideally want a computer that uses as little power as possible - and maybe opting to use 2.5" drives instead of 3.5". Does anyone have any suggestions or should I just try my mains wattmeter on some old PCs to see which uses less power?

[fishtoprecords]

should I just try my mains wattmeter on some old PCs to see which uses less power?

Most older PCs are not very energy efficient, especially the high end P3 and P4 systems. You may find that buying a new PC with space for more drives is a better plan, as modern systems have better power supplies, CPUs use much less power, etc.

Of course, to be hard core, use a laptop oriented CPU, or a VIA.
A file server (lets slip the silly marketoid phrase) doesn't need much processor power, nearly anything will work.

If you are serous about RAID, you want hardware support.

And remember, RAID is not backup.

[computoman]

You want everything to fit in one nice little box mentally. That is tunnel vision for me. We will always disagree as to terminology. Moving on.. When I see new machines that need 800 watt power supplies. I tend to differ about power consumption and how efficient new systems are. There are lower power motherboards, and they are not that cheap yet. If I can use an existing board than one new motherboard then all the electricity used to make a new one will be saved. The drives are the big power suckers and not always the mb. Generally low power machines do not always save you money power wise especially over a long period of time. Experience shows they may wear out quicker and later use more electricity. You have to look at the whole picture. Existing nas boxes are future disposables or throwaway's that are at this point not recyclable. As I said the system I suggest can be upgraded easily, so if some new low power mb (and there will be) would come out, you can always swap it out. It gives you choice by being able to recycle parts!!! You can not do that with a regular nas. Most traditional nas boxes do use lower brain power cpu's and you get less than what you pay for. They do not do much. I do not want to have tunnel vision in my nas. I want it to be adaptable, expandable, upgradeable and a real multitasker. Because I can have several systems in one. I may actually save more electricity than to have several single purpose systems with single drives attached. If you want to talk about real power savings. I have run a mini nas/web/media/cloud server on an cisco linksys nslu2 with a laptop drive. that still would do more than most off the shelf overpriced nas boxes.

[kolbi]

I have tried freeNAS and found it to be a near complete solution except for the following, with freebsd you can't grow your software raid, it is difficult to add software packages, and it is hard to customize. Honestly peoples best bet is to use a popular linux distro; Redhat, Ubuntu, Suse, whatever. I think the easiest is Ubuntu because the large following it has - but everyone has their own pick. But with just about any of the big distro's you can easily add ftp, http, nfs, netatalk, samba, mediatomb, ssh, mt-daapd, handbrakecli, and to top it off webmin. With all this you can make an awesome home file server, after a couple hours of tinkering and some bash scripting I had 4TB of home storage, open to internet access from authorized users with a site web page for news and project updates, mt-daapd sharing all my music with all iTunes in the house, PS3 playing all my videos thanks to mediatomb, and fresh videos always being adding by some crafty bash scripting using HandbrakeCLI. Of course my wife's windows computer accesses files through samba, my mac using nfs or netatalk (although I think nfs is better), and my hacked appletv uses nfs for accessing all content as well. You can really do allot with stuff you got laying around and of course buying some more stuff (like hdds). I had to pay about an extra 450 bucks for hdd and that's about it.

[davmoo]

If you are serous about RAID, you want hardware support.

So long as you don't mind that data format proprietary lock-in. I'd rather give up a tiny bit of performance and have a format that will work on any Linux box around, and not have to worry about things like my hardware provider going out of business right as I have a card failure.

[computoman]

Freenas has new supporters and they plan to add the abilityto expand in terms of software and what freenas can do.

For home server I use Ubuntu and or Debian. For commerical biz servers, we use Centos and Bsd. We only use ssh for every platform. Ssh is easy to set up on Windoze and the Mac. We do not have Appletalk or Samba running on the my file servers to keep them lean, but samba and netatalk(appletalk) can started very easily.

[fishtoprecords]

I'd rather give up a tiny bit of performance and have a format that will work on any Linux box around, and not have to worry about things like my hardware provider going out of business right as I have a card failure.

its more than just performance, the hardware controllers are more robust. Since RAID is not backup, you have backups, and hardware goes obsolete over time, whether or not the vendor/marketing front goes away.

Since terabyte drives are about $100, that you may need new drives, and new controllers every few years is really not a serious issue.

There are far more "brands" of controllers than there are controllers. Adaptec and Promise seem to make all of the silicon that I run into.

Its like video cards, there are lots of brands out there, but they are just ATI or NVidea chips, and many of the "brands" just put paint on an ATI or NVidea reference design.

[davmoo]

RAID is not backup

While I personally would agree with you, and always have backups of important data here at my house and three off-site locations (a hard drive and a set of DVDs in a box at my bank, a set of DVDs at my mom's house in another state, and a backup on Amazon's cloud), there are quite a number of people who would disagree with us on that. So for them, the ability to plug the drive in to any old controller and reach their data is going to be an important consideration.

[computoman]

What would be really interesting would be to back up all the client systems data to the server. pull all the harddrives from the clients and make a second raid box. Then set the fat clients to load the os or a vmware client into ram from the server (pxe, tftp, dhcp etc). Client machiens run quieter and cooler, You could choose at boot what os to use. mame, windows, os/x, linux, bsd, and etc.

[fishtoprecords]

there are quite a number of people who would disagree with us on that.

I believe is a duty of folks who understand this stuff to at least say that RAID is not backup, and try to set realistic expectations.

That we are cursed with 90% of folks ignoring us makes me sad, but it doesn't mean that I'll panic when their RAID fails and they are screwed.

I also point out that disk recovery services charge thousands of dollars to do a clean room recovery of a disk. Or you can make a backup onto a $100 disk. Pay now, or pay later.

[kolbi]

What would be really interesting would be to back up all the client systems data to the server. pull all the harddrives from the clients and make a second raid box. Then set the fat clients to load the os or a vmware client into ram from the server (pxe, tftp, dhcp etc). Client machiens run quieter and cooler, You could choose at boot what os to use. mame, windows, os/x, linux, bsd, and etc.

That's exactly what we do with some of our networks. Utilizing Windows XP virtual images at 8GB each and 1gb lan it all runs smoothly - but that's with only 10-15 users. The server runs Windows server 2000 with Exchange and pxe boot software. The real useful part is that all the data remains in one location - it's very easy to prevent/ minimize data spillage.
For an easy spin with pxe you can check out the latest Slax distro that already has PXE boot built into it - add/make some modules for whatever software you need and 'plague' it out, even over the existing network if need be.

[fishtoprecords]

The real useful part is that all the data remains in one location - it's very easy to prevent/ minimize data spillage.

Isn't that exactly what Larry Ellison's vision of thin clients was last century?

[computoman]

That's exactly what we do with some of our networks. Utilizing Windows XP virtual images at 8GB each and 1gb lan it all runs smoothly - but that's with only 10-15 users. The server runs Windows server 2000 with Exchange and pxe boot software. The real useful part is that all the data remains in one location - it's very easy to prevent/ minimize data spillage.
For an easy spin with pxe you can check out the latest Slax distro that already has PXE boot built into it - add/make some modules for whatever software you need and 'plague' it out, even over the existing network if need be.

Slackware was my first distro. I will have to check slax out and the pxe boot abilities. I first did that with Knoppix. I used to work at college. So I could play around a bit with labs when I was upgrading them. We once blew the MSadmins minds crazy to see a whole lab running without any hard drives. The lab was that way on purpose, because the students brought in their own removable drives. Anyway the MSadmins looked all around to see how I faked it. People who knew linux knew better. I wished I had a camera.
We use the Linux (k12ltsp) Terminal Server with 4 to 5 thin clients. Minimal os is loaded into the clients via pxe. Network is 10/100. I have used old p1/2's with etherboot floppies as clients till we acquired some used compaq t20's and t30's. The fun part is using mac via apple vnc server and Ms terminal windows server via rdp running on a p1 screen while running linux apps. People take a double take with their jaw eventually open just standing their gawking. For a mail server, it is basically a simple postfix/dovecot/squirrelmail imap setup on our separate internal web server. .

[kolbi]

Isn't that exactly what Larry Ellison's vision of thin clients was last century?

True, but for our hardware and software requirements this setup offered us the best solution.

[computoman]

believe is a duty of folks who understand this stuff to at least say that RAID is not backup,

People stiil generically call a soft drink a coke even if it is a pepsi. Raid in an of itself is not backup, but nine times out of ten that is what it is used for. Where I used to work, we had two servers with each having it's own separate raid disk storage completely mirroring each other, that is about as close as you can come without offline/offsite storage.

[fishtoprecords]

Raid in an of itself is not backup, but nine times out of ten that is what it is used for. Where I used to work, we had two servers with each having it's own separate raid disk storage completely mirroring each other, that is about as close as you can come without offline/offsite storage.

Expecting RAID to be backup is begging for tears.

Your site example had RAID on two systems, essentially live and slave on RAID. That's good, not close to believing that a single RAID is sufficient

[davmoo]

I saw an article referenced on Slashdot a few months ago that postulated that as hard drive capacity gets larger, it will reach a point where drive recovery times for the first failed drive in a RAID box will become so long that the odds of a second or third drive failing before the first failed drive has been recovered increase dramatically. I'm not going to go hunt down the article now, but it seems like they estimated that the point where this would become a serious issue would be the introduction of 4TB drives.

[computoman]

It is amazing when not controlled how much multimedia people download to their business computer and or their employer's server space. I am a firm advocate of quotas except in special situations. People should take that into account on their home network. The trick is to economize data, so that so that less disk space is needed. I have seen so many databases that were badly mismanaged and or programmed ineffectively. In addition to that if data is not needed asap, it needs to go offline to multi disk rom players or even to old fashion tape. At home, how hard is it to throw a backup dvd into the disk player rather than load it from a server. I was at the local fry's the other day and one of the loss prevention people who is a friend told me that they had 1tb drives on sale. I said I had drives I still have not even installed yet. I indicated i did not need that much space. Of course he was perplexed and we went on to discuss other issues.

[davmoo]

People who download a lot of multimedia can go along way toward not needing a new hard drive if they simply scan for dupes every once in a while.

As for sloppy database maintenance, I have to plead guilty to at least one case of that.

A couple of years ago one of my clients (a commercial metal fabrication company) had a problem with a database being maxed out. So I went over to look at the problem. And it turned out the problem was that when I wrote their original software I failed to put in a mechanism to remove database entries. Hence when a job was closed, it was never offloaded or removed from the database. They still had every completed job (hundreds, and sometimes thousands, a year) going back to about 1982 in the database. :o

[fishtoprecords]

drive recovery times for the first failed drive in a RAID box will become so long that the odds of a second or third drive failing before the first failed drive has been recovered increase dramatically..... 4TB drives.

I read that as well, I think it was a bit hyped, but there is truth in the heart of it.

The time to simply copy one 1TB drive to another, on the same system, is amazingly long. While drives are faster, they are getting bigger much more quickly than the iO rates are increasing.

Just as NTFS was worlds more reliable than FAT was back when a 500MB drive was huge, we are pushing to need fundamental disk structures that are designed with reliability and huge sizes in mind.

[freakazoid12]

I read that as well, I think it was a bit hyped, but there is truth in the heart of it.

The time to simply copy one 1TB drive to another, on the same system, is amazingly long. While drives are faster, they are getting bigger much more quickly than the iO rates are increasing.

Just as NTFS was worlds more reliable than FAT was back when a 500MB drive was huge, we are pushing to need fundamental disk structures that are designed with reliability and huge sizes in mind.

Not to mention there's the smart raid/filesystems, ZFS in a RAID-Z configuration for one only goes through the data that's there, not the entire disk like your bog standard linux (and likely freebsd) raid solution. I *think* drobo with whatever proprietary filesystem it uses does something similar.

edit: correction: I don't think the drobo does that but I have heard of at least one other raid-designed filesystem that does the only recover data thing like ZFS.