[wplug] NAS Appliance recommendations

Patrick Wagstrom patrick at wagstrom.net
Wed Aug 19 11:54:15 EDT 2009


So, there are lots of very nerdy solutions to the problem.  You can build
your own Linux box and install software raid on it -- it will give you
pretty good performance and reliability from this solution, at the expense
of your own time to keep it running.  I've done this in the past and it's
worked pretty well, but when a problem pops up, you'll have to sink some
time fixing it.  The same can be said of Sun and ZFS.  Short of a hardware
RAID card, this is going to be your best performance.  There are even many
situations when this will smoke a hardware RAID, particularly if your
machine is lightly loaded.

There are various other machines out there, NetApp has some nice little
boxes that work as an independent solution.  They typically cost a couple of
hundred bucks and provide true NAS functionality.  The software is generally
okay on these.  Performance will be limited by network speeds.

Another solution you may want to check out is Unraid.  It's an OS you put
onto a USB key that provides all the tools to manage a system as a NAS.  If
you're using a machine as just a file server, this is probably preferable to
the first option and is probably worth the $69 so you don't have to screw
around with stuff.

I've tried most of these solutions, and they all suck in one way or
another.  In fact, any solution you get is going to suck in some way, so
don't think there is a magic bullet here.  In my case I looked at how much
my time was worth vs problems with systems and chose to buy a drobo.  I
bought mine last year when they were rather expensive, about $450.  Right
now you can pick up a 2nd gen drobo from NewEgg for $300 after rebate.

Briefly, a drobo is a 4 drive USB/Firewire attached storage array that works
on Windows (NTFS), Mac (HFS+), or Linux.  It provides Raid-5 like
rendundancy (or Raid6 like if you splurge $1200 for the 8 drive DroboPro
that also features iSCSI).  Setup for a Drobo is trivial.  Unpack, pop in
two drives of any size, and format it.  From then on out, you're free to pop
in drives to expand as necessary.  The filesystem will automatically expand
(although unless you tell it otherwise it will be broken into 2TB volumes).
A set of blue lights at the bottom give you a gauge of how much space is
used on the device.  When you need to add a new drive a light will show
which drive bay to drop a new drive into or replace with a bigger drive.
When a drive dies, a red list pops up next to the drive that is dead.  Throw
that drive away, plug in a new drive, and you're in business. The best thing
is that the drives don't need to be the same size.  This is great when
you're replacing a drive that's a couple of years old and you can't
rationalize paying $60 for the same model 320GB drive when you can pick up a
1TB drive for $80.

The great thing is that the raid management operations are entirely
seamless.  Folks who have seen my drobo have probably seen me start
streaming an HDTV program off the drobo, then pull a hard drive and have it
never miss a beat.  Drop the hard drive back in, it replicates data and
you'll never notice it.  It's as close to 0 administration you can get, and
for me that was worth it.

Of course, Drobos ain't all bunnies and roses.  First, if you want to make
them a NAS, you need to spend $190 for the droboshare, or just plug them
into a linux machine.  Secondly, they can be rather slow.  On USB I get
about 25MB/s writes and 35MB/s reads.  On Firewire 800 I get about 45MB/s
writes and 50MB/s reads.  Not horrible, but it's nothing like an internal
drive.

Their hardware can sometimes be a little flaky, but their customer service
is AMAZING. Real people who speak English and don't work off a script.  Wow.
My first unit had a bad fan, so they cross shipped me a new one.  That unit
started to develop hiccups during writes (it would stop writing for a few
seconds every now and then).  A quick phone call and they cross shipped me a
new unit.  Wonderful support.

I can't recommend the Drobo enough to folks and if you're just using it for
a local backup it's a great solution.  However, remember that RAID !=
Backup.  You may want to look into an offsite solution for true backup.  For
example, I use JungleDisk for automatic backups of important stuff.  Of
course, I'm not backing up terrabytes of data, but it's only about $5/mo for
the 30GB of data I've got backed up remotely.

--Patrick

On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 11:19 AM, G.Pitman <gpitman at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
> I am shopping for a small NAS appliance and would like some
> recommendations.
> This is for a small business that does not want to spend much money but
> would be interested in something a little better than a two disk usb
> attached enclosure running raid 1.
> Ideally I would like to find something that would hold four 1 TB drives and
> not be software raid.
>
> This would be attached to a linux server and be used mostly for email svn
> repo backup.
>
> The more I read reviews about these devices the more they scare me. If
> anyone knows of a trustworthy device I would like to know.
>
> Thanks, in advance,
>
> _______________________________________________
> wplug mailing list
> wplug at wplug.org
> http://www.wplug.org/mailman/listinfo/wplug
>
>
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