Sonia Hamilton <so...@snowfrog.net> writes:
> Can anyone recommend a NAS device for home? ie something for that
> takes more than 2 large disks, does RAID5, does NFS and CIFS. (I've
> seen a few devices for home, but they were limited to 2 disks).
The NETGEAR ReadyNAS[1] or Cisco (nee Linksys) NSS4000 and NSS6000 seem
to be the best options available, from my reviewing of the options
available.
The DLink 323 and 343 hardware also has a good reputation and is, in
some ways, nicer for home use than the Cisco kit, although it is even
lower end that the previous two.
> I'M wondering if buying such a NAS device would be more expensive than
> buying a barebones mobo/cpu + case and putting Linux on.
Generally, yes, but. The details of the but come in shortly.
> If so, any recommendations for a mobo that takes a large number of
> SATA drives (eg 6 or 8) and doesn't have some weird BIOS thing that
> requires Windoze to support said large number of drives?
It is pretty trivial to get a standard AHCI SATA controller for six
drives, although 8 are less common. A 4 port AHCI PCIe SATA controller
is fairly inexpensive though...
Now for the but:
The NAS devices are generally less power hungry, and sometimes less
noisy, than building your own NAS solution. They also (generally) come
with hot-swap disks rather than fixed.
Building a PC that has hot-swap will generally cost you more than buying
the NAS.
Finally, the NAS kit usually performs less well than the PC, which
matters for high IOPS or streaming workloads, but hardly at all for
normal use.
(Notably: you see somewhere between 1/4 and 1/10th the performance with
the NAS device compared to local SATA with RAID, depending on the sort
of testing being done.)
Personally, I ended up with a server with hot-swap SATA, and am happy
with that — but I a new server anyhow, and it cost less than buying a
new server /and/ NAS storage.
Once it fills up (6 SATA disks, possibly 8 if I get enthusiastic) my
plan is to start a collection of the NSS4000 units. They run nothing
but Linux, are *fully* source-available, and should be able to be
upgraded to a real distribution if I wanted...
They also do ATAoE, so I can mount their disks via a back-end gigabit
network and talk to them directly as high latency local disk in my
server, allowing me to manage them nicely without having to buy an
NSS6000 and live with their built-in limits...
(Plus, I prefer to have a sensible server doing access control, etc,
rather than trusting an appliance to do it — it reduces the number of
places I have to worry about problems cropping up.)
Does that help, or just confuse things more? Feel free to ask if you
have more questions about any particular part of my writeup.
Regards,
Daniel
Footnotes:
[1] Sorry for shouting; the vendor does. :/
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