[Simon F]

I'm considering adding some sort of (cheap) NAS to my home network. Have any B3Der's had any experience/recomendations on models to look at or to avoid?

Preferably it'd be a model obtainable in the UK. A colleague has suggested models from QNAP, but I'm open to suggestions.

[Gerry]

QNAP and Synology are generally regarded as a couple of the better makes. I've got the cheap-as-chips Synology and it works fine for me.

[Simon F]

Thanks - hadn't seen Synology.

[Captain Chickenpants]

I had a QNAP but wasn't that impressed with it, one of it's selling points was the DLNA server, but I never got it to behave satisfactorily. I now have a Drobo and just use samba shares and instead have the intelligence on the client machine running XBMC.

The Drobo is quite a bit more expensive, but the raid functionality does give me some piece of mind.

CC

[swaaye]

I have a Synology DS111. It was a bit expensive, but wow is it loaded with features and is it fast. It's also been rock solid in the past 6 months that I've had it. I've also seen several OS updates with new features added over this time. The community is great and there are many packages available via Optware and community feeds. It's fan-cooled but I can't hear it even in a quiet room. There's nothing negative to say.

[Sxotty]

I have one of those Netgear ReadyNAS ones. It does what I need and was not too expensive. It is only a 2drive model though and in RAID the 3TB can fill up pretty fast. I recorded the entire olympics to watch at my leisure and it basically filled the whole thing. Not sure what you want to use it for though.

[Onkl Bjorni]

If you have experience building pc's, and want a server that can be upgraded(adding more harddrives) when you need more space and have support for RAID5 I would recommend you to take a look at www.NAS4free.org.

I have been running 2 media boxes on freeNAS (old version of NAS4free) for 3-4 years now and they have been running nonstop since.

[Simon F]

To be honest, I'd like it to be small, quiet, and preferably low power when not active. If there are PC systems that I could buy that meet that, I'd consider the www.NAS4free.org route, but at present, I'd rather not have the hassle of hunting down all the components.

[Davros]

does anyone have a game installed on a nas ?
any chance of doing a quick benchmark game installed on nas vs game installed on hdd

[RudeCurve]

If you don't need RAID functionality just get a router that has built-in USB ports and buy an external USB HDD. That's how I setup my first NAS device...cheap and painless. That said I also have what Sxotty mentioned Netgear ReadyNAS, but mine is configured for RAID 0 because I don't need redundancy. The driveless version is not that expensive so you could shop around for the drives with the capacity and price that you need. The ReadyNAS boxes are pretty small with built-in fan, powersave/sleep mode as well as Wake on LAN.

[Blazkowicz]

The HP microserver is pretty nice if you want a cheap PC without spending time searching cases, PSU, best Atom motherboard. but if it's using custom motherboard and case you won't be able to fix it when the mobo fails (well same deal with a consumer NAS actually)

I went for a VIA motherboard (cheap and two card slots), and a cube micro-ATX case. I wish I went with a very old micro-ATX tower instead. Getting to the drives is at least trivial even without fancy racks.
Then I decided to use debian squeeze command-line (because I wished to learn servers, with a widespread and close to ubuntu distro). I was dumbfounded by the kilometer long samba configuration file (littered with comments and options and commented out options) and ended up using workarounds instead (other protocols but I didn't need to serve to windows)
Then the hard drive failed and I realized I should have spent money on backup instead (had other expenses), and leave my low end enough main computer always on.

So, it did not end up well but served me well sometimes, it was the seed box, ssh server (obligatory), dhcp with PXE booting (I like having this), trying iscsi, backup desktop if I have to fiddle with the main one or if it melts down.

Synologys look solid from what is said of them, and you seem to be able to add fancy server roles by clicking in an interface. Have it take over the whole lan with DHCP, local DNS, time server etc. if you feel like it. The software can be extended too. So in the end it looks like a great solution that matches a custom PC build for features (unless you want a box that can take 8 drives for cheap).

If you want to reach your NAS from outside your house, you are probably better getting such a good NAS (or go the PC route which should not be that painful if you make the right choices)
If all this stuff is irrelevant and/or reading my long post was annoying you can go for a cheaper and simpler NAS.

[Blazkowicz]

Originally Posted by Davros

does anyone have a game installed on a nas ?
any chance of doing a quick benchmark game installed on nas vs game installed on hdd

A long time ago I would play Age of Empires 2 from a windows share, over 10mbits hub networking. More recently I ran doom 3 from the NAS.
It was very reasonable, depending on your peace of mind.
I had a fair share of lan gaming, under linux with warcraft III and wine. four computers loading simultaneously from a central location, through 100Mbit/s. The loading times were big enough that we could joke about them, "what are you doing, guys?", "we're again waiting for you, laggard" etc. but we could still have fun.

One single game ran from gigabit should be reasonable, you can always keep some games as local if needed.

It's also nice to see how many games don't care being ran multiple times from the same copy, but it may depend on your, em, copy protection (and maybe you can run into silly things such as needing a fixed drive letter, but that can be dealt with)

[Dave Baumann]

All of my media is served off a system based on this little ASUS Brazos board. Passive cooling, cheap to run, 5 SATA's, onboard WiFi and Bluetooth if you need/want that. Actually decided to run with Win 7 sharing and user permissions so most devices in the house connect via Samba network share, though the system is running Samsungs Allshare content server to playback on the Samsung SmartTV.

[3dcgi]

I've had 3 NAS drives from Seagate and Western Digital and all failed after a couple years yet my PC hard drives never died. I don't know if the drive died or the NAS circuitry, but I'd look for a good warranty if you buy a consumer level NAS.

[entity279]

I also am interested in buying one.

Would choose the motherboard Dave suggested, Lian-Li Q08 as case, and a fanless PSU. And two Noctua fans. But since I've decided not to spend more money on hardware this year, might as well wait for Jaguar offers (though i really, really need some more storage capacity).

I would like to build my own because i think I'll learn some more about Linux servers and I can really make it silent. And it will be more powerful than off the shelf products

[Blazkowicz]

dropping a SATA controller in a old pentium 3 may work, the kind of PC that just never dies. it's not too hungry, even when there's an ati rage pro sticked in (good sign, it has a 440BX then, not a i810)

the CPU, around 700Mhz, is very decent, it murders bad ARMs. BIOS liimitations are even irrelevant, once your linux or BSD is booted it doesn't care so 3TB drives work flawlessly (err, I think!)
forgetting it's USB1 makes for great fun. I once remember a copy from a usb hard drive to another on such a machine. feels like a floppy drive.

NAS distros were originally about building a NAS with an old spare computer. this was good, as early consumer NAS were terribly slow. even a low grade pentium 2 was much faster.

[Dave Baumann]

Originally Posted by entity279

Would choose the motherboard Dave suggested, Lian-Li Q08 as case...

Yes, that's the case that I'm using for this server. Nice and flexible on the number of HD bays and a good quiet case fan.

[Malo]

Originally Posted by Dave Baumann

All of my media is served off a system based on this little ASUS Brazos board. Passive cooling, cheap to run, 5 SATA's, onboard WiFi and Bluetooth if you need/want that. Actually decided to run with Win 7 sharing and user permissions so most devices in the house connect via Samba network share, though the system is running Samsungs Allshare content server to playback on the Samsung SmartTV.

Why would you use Win 7 sharing when WHS is both cheaper and far more functional for a home network?

[Blazkowicz]

Microsoft has given up on WHS I believe, the current version will be the last one.

Running vanilla windows is the dirty secret maybe. at worst you get limited to ten concurrent connections. You get right-click folder sharing out of the box and it's even easier to manage users and shares from the management console (you might need a pro version if it's crippled out of the home versions) /edit : it's called compmgmt.msc and can be called from the run box

The amount of software is staggering, if you want an apache-mysql-php stack, choice between ten ftp servers, dhcp and all (look up tftpd32), and damn near everything you can install it by double-clicking setup.exe

[Dave Baumann]

Originally Posted by Malo

Why would you use Win 7 sharing when WHS is both cheaper and far more functional for a home network?

Well, thanks to a form submission snafu with a "notebook Windows Vista to Windows 7 free upgrade" WHS was not necessarily cheaper to start with for me

I had investigated it, but when I started looking around at the user permissions and controls through Windows and I found that this had sufficient controls for my needs, though I did find myself digging through some default parameters of Windows 7 to improve the "serving" performance. Being a home network I've not had issues with the number of connections and most of the clients are either other Win 7 devices or using Samba network sharing.

One of the things that put me off WHS was the fact that it was described as not being able to run standard Windows apps - although it looked circumventable given that it seemed like Win 7 can control the permissions suitably for my needs this was a negative for me. With Win 7 I can just install any app that I want permanently running (in a low power manner on this server) without any fuss and I can also easily install the Samsung content serving software for the SmartTV. Control of the server is easily achieved through Remote Desktop and remote control is easy enough via LogMeIn.

Someone I know using WHS believes that the primary benefit of WHS is the disk volume management, although it went beyond my needs, it seems that all these capabilities (and more) are being added to Win 8.

[Simon F]

Originally Posted by Dave Baumann

Yes, that's the case that I'm using for this server. Nice and flexible on the number of HD bays and a good quiet case fan.

So about

• £44 for the case,
• £20(?) for a power supply,
• £113 for the MoBo
• Memory?

It kind of adds up

[cjo]

Originally Posted by Simon F

So about

• £44 for the case,
• £20(?) for a power supply,
• £113 for the MoBo
• Memory?

It kind of adds up

That is a mini-ITX case, so it won't fit a mATX mobo. Not sure why you'd want to spend that much on a mobo for a NAS server though. Can get a system containing everything but the drives for under £200, like this

[Colourless]

If you're running on gigabit or faster, i could understand that it might be tempting to run games over a network. You're looking at roughly 100MB/s over the network which is similar to what you'd get from a hard drive. Your seek times would be a bit worse though for obvious reasons.

[Simon F]

(responding to cjo) Blame that on my tired eyes.... saw "06B" as an '08'

[swaaye]

I had a USB 2.0 HDD attached to my router for over a year but the transfer rate from that was only about 13MB/s due to the CPU maxing out (400 MHz MIPS 24kc). The Synology box will saturate gigabit ethernet. A mini x86 PC of some sort is interesting but I doubt it can come close to matching the power usage of the ARM board in these NAS products.

I have tried gaming across gigabit shares and it does work pretty well but there is as said some extra latency to network accesses. It's a lot less efficient than SATA. Some games might stutter.